A MUCH smaller subset actually wanted the old start menu back. I know I don't. There are elements of the old start menu that I liked, but most of it was a bad idea. Start -> All Programs was a complete disaster -- lets put a hierarchy of everything installed on your computer in a small non-resizable popup menu.
Most users don't use the heirarchal menu very often. They usually either type the first few characters to search, or use one of the recent programs listed. But if you're in one of the instances where you're trying to access a program that you don't use very often, and don't remember the exact name of it, the hierarchical menu is light years beyond the start screen.
For example, take a look at what my Windows 8 start screen looks like. It's an absolute mess, and nearly unusable in my opinion. The Start8 menu that I installed is much easier, quicker, and far more intuitive to use. I suspect that many users feel the same way as I do.
Except that they totally missed the point of what everyone wanted.
Yes, there is a start button there now. But all it does is bring up the start screen, the same as pressing the Windows key. The start menu, which is what most people really want back, is still missing from the OS.
I've got a client that's a non-profit group home for abused kids. Because of what they do, and their funding sources, they have to send daily activity reports for each of the kids, including medical, psychological, behavior, school notes, etc...
Every day, the reports are hand written on to forms, which are then typed into a computer, which are then printed, which are then faxed to the county (Typically 75-100 pages of fax each day), which is then entered into the county's computers, which is then printed out and filed.
Between the original handwritten report, printed copy of the entered report, received fax, and county copy, multiplied by around 100 pages per day amounts to almost 150,000 pages created every year for something that could very easily be done almost entirely electronically.
If WinDOS weren't king of legacy apps, you would see a mass exodus. Even despite, you might see a lot of people cling to the previous version as long as they can (like they did with Vista).
It's anecdotal, but I'm seeing a lot of small businesses beginning to look at Macs. Most wind up buying Windows 7 systems for now, but people are starting to look at other options. Microsoft's removal of Exchange from their SBS suite, and the availability of Google Apps for business seems to be encouraging this trend.
That sheet brings back memories. That scheme was less annoying than the Monkey Island wheel, or games that wouldn't let you start it without having to type in the third word of the sixth paragraph of page 43. I always liked the Leisure Suit Larry questions though, they were at least amusing.
I had Cyanogen Mod on my old phone, then bought one of the Thunderbolts mentioned in the summary. Cyanogen offers NO support for this device. There was a dev who was releasing a really nice port of Cyanogen for the Thunderbolt, but he stopped several months ago.
It's my understanding that the main thing keeping Cyanogen from officially supporting the Thunderbolt is a lack of drivers for the phone's radio coming from HTC. HTC keeps promising us an ICS update, which wouldn't be as good as full Cyanogen support, but would be better than outdated OS on a not very old phone, which was sold as one of their premium phones not that long ago.
As a consumer, I feel like HTC really dropped the ball on this, and in the future will be considering a Samsung to replace my HTC. Previously, I've had a few other HTC phones and loved them. But this whole thing has left a bad taste in my mouth with them.
I don't have a question, but a comment on the Museum of the Rockies. This is an excellent little museum, and well worth the visit. Anyone who goes to Yellowstone, the 1.5 hour trek to Bozeman is well worth the drive. The drive will take you past many geological formations, such as the Devil's Slide, and often takes you past quite a bit of wildlife like elk, bighorn sheep, bears and bald eagles.
The museum is very enjoyable and educational for both children and adults.
My parents have U-verse at their house, and had a similar experience. It took almost 6 months before the service could even be considered near reliable. Even still, they only get about half of their advertised speed, but it's still the best option where they live. And they don't live out in the boonies, they live on the LA/Orange county border, in a city of over 100k people. I however, DO live out in the boonies (Comparitavely speaking), and have Verizon FIOS with a 150/75Mbit connection, that is consistently the speed that was advertised, and costs less than their U-verse.
My parents recently had an interesting problem with their service. They kept finding little pools of water near the switch that the U-verse technician installed in their bedroom, with the switch fried. After technicians had replaced their second or third switch, they finally decided to look into what was causing the problem. When the technician ran the original wire (Which went outside of their house), he didn't use outdoor rated cable. After about a year in the sun, it had developed little cracks in the cable jacket, and capillary action was running water from the cracks all the way to the switch.
I've got a samba server with a share containing all of our media that's for my wife & I to watch. I've got a second, read-only share set up for the kids. The kid's directory has a bunch of symlinks to content that's suitable for them. It allows them to freely browse the media on their own, and I know exactly what they're accessing.
I've been around slashdot for probably at least a decade, and seen some pretty stupid crap here. But seriously, this takes the cake. No one else is reporting anything like this. The picture in the "article" is clearly a bad photoshop of mardi gras beads, and the front page of the linked site has a picture of Chewbacca superimposed on a Martian hill.
I can maybe see samzenpus thinking that he had a real scoop on a big story, but he should have at least ran it by some of the other people there. Someone there must have at least a semi-functioning brain. Or maybe he could have looked into the domain registration, and seen that the domain was registered a few days ago to the leader of the New Orleans Bigfoot Society.
Crap like this is a lot of why decent discussion on nerdy things is dying on this site.
I think the Windows AppStore is a POS (can't search, WTF)
Actually, you can search the store. It's just that it's as completely unintuitive as every other design choice they made for the Metro UI. From the start screen, start typing. In the search bar that shows up, click on "Store". Whoever decided to not put a search box in the actual store app should be fired.
I have Windows 8 on my laptop, and overall I like it. It feels much snappier than 7 did (Not sure if it's simply because it's a fresh install, or lack of Aero?), and boot times are really good.
However, the entire Metro UI feels half baked and like a last minute addition. Opening, and then closing a Metro app does not take you back to where you were, it forces you back to the start screen. You then have to alt-tab back to the window that you were at. I had to Google where the Shut Down option was (Yes, I know that I can just press the power button, but I very rarely shut it completely down. I usually either restart, or put it in sleep or hibernate depending on what I'm planning). For the record, the shut down button is now in the Settings panel for some unknown reason.
As far as the start button, there was NO reason for that to be eliminated. They could have kept the metro UI, and start screen, and still had the start button. Removing that and forcing the start screen is just forcing a poorly designed UI on everyone. The really frustrating part is that in Vista & Win7, they had made a ton of improvements to the start menu. It was really, really useful and intuitive. Much more so than the crap they have now.
There's also quite a bit of half baked system settings screens that use the metro UI. For example, in the Devices & Printers screen, you can add and delete printers, but I haven't found any way to do anything else, like adjust settings, view the print queue, etc. Right clicking does nothing. You can still go to the Win7 style control panel, but that's somewhat hidden, and not nearly as easy to access as it was in Win7 (Unless I'm missing something).
Don't even get me started on Minesweeper and Solitaire now. Both used to be games that you could open in a window, and quickly play while you were waiting for a task to finish. Minesweeper is now an over 130MB additional download, which wants you to log in to xbox live to play, forces full screen, and takes several seconds to load. I know that the games aren't a major part of the OS, but it really epitomizes how much usability has been lost in Windows 8, and how they're trying their hardest to force metro UI on everyone.
I bet there's quite a few people who would spend close to their entire net worth to get to space. I probably would. What's the point of having so much money if you can't do something really cool with it?
If I'm running for the most powerful office in the world, and giving a prepared speech the day after an event like that happened then yes, I would fully expect to give a coherent and cogent response. It's not like they interviewed him on the runway, standing next to a still smoking plane while his wife was gasping for fresh air.
“I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. And I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were,” Romney said. “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.”
Years ago I was pulled over on that stretch of I-15, near Baker. I had been going in excess of 140, but was able to slow down to 106 before the CHP could get me with his radar. The cop never threatened or implied that he'd take me to jail, he just wrote the ticket and let me go.
In California, exceeding 100mph is a mandatory court appearance. When I went, the courtroom was full of people, probably over 40 of them, all charged with going over 100mph, all pulled over on the same stretch of road that I was pulled over on. The judge went down the line hitting every one of us with a $500 fine. That court was pulling in an incredible amount of money every day from people exceeding 100mph.
"Fuck" is an English word that is almost universally considered vulgar by its speakers. In its most literal meaning, it refers to the act of sexual intercourse. By extension it may be used to negatively characterize anything that can be dismissed, disdained, defiled, or destroyed and may also be used as an intensive.
"Fuck" can often be used as a verb, adverb, adjective, imperative, interjection, and noun. It has various metaphorical meanings. To be "fucked" can mean to be cheated (e.g., "I got fucked by a scam artist"), or to be broken or ruined (e.g., "my computer is fucked") as well as to be sexually penetrated. As a noun, "a fuck" or "a fucker" may describe a contemptible person. "A fuck" may mean an act of copulation. The word can be used as an interjection, and its participle is sometimes used as a strong (not necessarily negative) emphatic. The verb to fuck may be used transitively or intransitively, and it appears in compounds, including fuck off, fuck you, fuck up, and fuck with. In less explicit usages (but still regarded as vulgar), fuck or fuck with can mean to mess around, or to deal with unfairly or harshly. In a phrase such as "don't give a fuck", the word is the equivalent of "damn", in the sense of something having little value. In "what the fuck?!", it serves merely as an intensive. If something is very abnormal or annoying, "this is fucked up!" may be used.
Lots of heads will explode, but I bet there are ready answers for/from the "faithful".
Of course apologists are already planning for this, it won't be the first (Or last) time that they have to come up with something. They did the same when it was proven that the Earth isn't flat, when it was proven that the Earth isn't the center of the universe, the discovery of dinosaur bones, the discovery of radiocarbon dating, the discovery of the age of the Earth, the discovery of the age of the universe, the ability to see galaxies billions of light years away, the discovery of global warming, the theory of evolution, and countless other discoveries. It will probably be something as simple as "God put those bacteria there to test us!" I'd be willing to bet that Ken Ham already has some new ridiculous exhibit planned for his "museum" to cover this situation too.
Because none of the applications that I use daily run on Linux? No Adobe Lightroom, no Photoshop, no QuickBooks, no MS Office. And no, F-Stop, Gimp, gnuCash and OpenOffice are not viable alternatives.
You keep using your free OS. I'll keep making shit loads of money using my relatively inexpensive one.
Slashdot Mirror
A MUCH smaller subset actually wanted the old start menu back. I know I don't. There are elements of the old start menu that I liked, but most of it was a bad idea. Start -> All Programs was a complete disaster -- lets put a hierarchy of everything installed on your computer in a small non-resizable popup menu.
Most users don't use the heirarchal menu very often. They usually either type the first few characters to search, or use one of the recent programs listed. But if you're in one of the instances where you're trying to access a program that you don't use very often, and don't remember the exact name of it, the hierarchical menu is light years beyond the start screen.
For example, take a look at what my Windows 8 start screen looks like. It's an absolute mess, and nearly unusable in my opinion. The Start8 menu that I installed is much easier, quicker, and far more intuitive to use. I suspect that many users feel the same way as I do.
Except that they totally missed the point of what everyone wanted.
Yes, there is a start button there now. But all it does is bring up the start screen, the same as pressing the Windows key. The start menu, which is what most people really want back, is still missing from the OS.
I've got a client that's a non-profit group home for abused kids. Because of what they do, and their funding sources, they have to send daily activity reports for each of the kids, including medical, psychological, behavior, school notes, etc...
Every day, the reports are hand written on to forms, which are then typed into a computer, which are then printed, which are then faxed to the county (Typically 75-100 pages of fax each day), which is then entered into the county's computers, which is then printed out and filed.
Between the original handwritten report, printed copy of the entered report, received fax, and county copy, multiplied by around 100 pages per day amounts to almost 150,000 pages created every year for something that could very easily be done almost entirely electronically.
The word that you're looking for is hovering. As in "hovercraft".
That's just bad design. At the lowest setting it should be off.
Why on earth would you want the back light totally off? That's unusable in every situation. At that point, just turn it off.
Yes it does; it's just disabled by default (?!?!?!)
Link?
If WinDOS weren't king of legacy apps, you would see a mass exodus. Even despite, you might see a lot of people cling to the previous version as long as they can (like they did with Vista).
It's anecdotal, but I'm seeing a lot of small businesses beginning to look at Macs. Most wind up buying Windows 7 systems for now, but people are starting to look at other options. Microsoft's removal of Exchange from their SBS suite, and the availability of Google Apps for business seems to be encouraging this trend.
That sheet brings back memories. That scheme was less annoying than the Monkey Island wheel, or games that wouldn't let you start it without having to type in the third word of the sixth paragraph of page 43. I always liked the Leisure Suit Larry questions though, they were at least amusing.
I had Cyanogen Mod on my old phone, then bought one of the Thunderbolts mentioned in the summary. Cyanogen offers NO support for this device. There was a dev who was releasing a really nice port of Cyanogen for the Thunderbolt, but he stopped several months ago.
It's my understanding that the main thing keeping Cyanogen from officially supporting the Thunderbolt is a lack of drivers for the phone's radio coming from HTC. HTC keeps promising us an ICS update, which wouldn't be as good as full Cyanogen support, but would be better than outdated OS on a not very old phone, which was sold as one of their premium phones not that long ago.
As a consumer, I feel like HTC really dropped the ball on this, and in the future will be considering a Samsung to replace my HTC. Previously, I've had a few other HTC phones and loved them. But this whole thing has left a bad taste in my mouth with them.
I don't have a question, but a comment on the Museum of the Rockies. This is an excellent little museum, and well worth the visit. Anyone who goes to Yellowstone, the 1.5 hour trek to Bozeman is well worth the drive. The drive will take you past many geological formations, such as the Devil's Slide, and often takes you past quite a bit of wildlife like elk, bighorn sheep, bears and bald eagles.
The museum is very enjoyable and educational for both children and adults.
My parents have U-verse at their house, and had a similar experience. It took almost 6 months before the service could even be considered near reliable. Even still, they only get about half of their advertised speed, but it's still the best option where they live. And they don't live out in the boonies, they live on the LA/Orange county border, in a city of over 100k people. I however, DO live out in the boonies (Comparitavely speaking), and have Verizon FIOS with a 150/75Mbit connection, that is consistently the speed that was advertised, and costs less than their U-verse.
My parents recently had an interesting problem with their service. They kept finding little pools of water near the switch that the U-verse technician installed in their bedroom, with the switch fried. After technicians had replaced their second or third switch, they finally decided to look into what was causing the problem. When the technician ran the original wire (Which went outside of their house), he didn't use outdoor rated cable. After about a year in the sun, it had developed little cracks in the cable jacket, and capillary action was running water from the cracks all the way to the switch.
I've got a samba server with a share containing all of our media that's for my wife & I to watch. I've got a second, read-only share set up for the kids. The kid's directory has a bunch of symlinks to content that's suitable for them. It allows them to freely browse the media on their own, and I know exactly what they're accessing.
I've been around slashdot for probably at least a decade, and seen some pretty stupid crap here. But seriously, this takes the cake. No one else is reporting anything like this. The picture in the "article" is clearly a bad photoshop of mardi gras beads, and the front page of the linked site has a picture of Chewbacca superimposed on a Martian hill.
I can maybe see samzenpus thinking that he had a real scoop on a big story, but he should have at least ran it by some of the other people there. Someone there must have at least a semi-functioning brain. Or maybe he could have looked into the domain registration, and seen that the domain was registered a few days ago to the leader of the New Orleans Bigfoot Society.
Crap like this is a lot of why decent discussion on nerdy things is dying on this site.
I think the Windows AppStore is a POS (can't search, WTF)
Actually, you can search the store. It's just that it's as completely unintuitive as every other design choice they made for the Metro UI. From the start screen, start typing. In the search bar that shows up, click on "Store". Whoever decided to not put a search box in the actual store app should be fired.
I have Windows 8 on my laptop, and overall I like it. It feels much snappier than 7 did (Not sure if it's simply because it's a fresh install, or lack of Aero?), and boot times are really good.
However, the entire Metro UI feels half baked and like a last minute addition. Opening, and then closing a Metro app does not take you back to where you were, it forces you back to the start screen. You then have to alt-tab back to the window that you were at. I had to Google where the Shut Down option was (Yes, I know that I can just press the power button, but I very rarely shut it completely down. I usually either restart, or put it in sleep or hibernate depending on what I'm planning). For the record, the shut down button is now in the Settings panel for some unknown reason.
As far as the start button, there was NO reason for that to be eliminated. They could have kept the metro UI, and start screen, and still had the start button. Removing that and forcing the start screen is just forcing a poorly designed UI on everyone. The really frustrating part is that in Vista & Win7, they had made a ton of improvements to the start menu. It was really, really useful and intuitive. Much more so than the crap they have now.
There's also quite a bit of half baked system settings screens that use the metro UI. For example, in the Devices & Printers screen, you can add and delete printers, but I haven't found any way to do anything else, like adjust settings, view the print queue, etc. Right clicking does nothing. You can still go to the Win7 style control panel, but that's somewhat hidden, and not nearly as easy to access as it was in Win7 (Unless I'm missing something).
Don't even get me started on Minesweeper and Solitaire now. Both used to be games that you could open in a window, and quickly play while you were waiting for a task to finish. Minesweeper is now an over 130MB additional download, which wants you to log in to xbox live to play, forces full screen, and takes several seconds to load. I know that the games aren't a major part of the OS, but it really epitomizes how much usability has been lost in Windows 8, and how they're trying their hardest to force metro UI on everyone.
But this patent is for e-reader devices. That's obviously COMPLETELY different from what you posted.
I bet there's quite a few people who would spend close to their entire net worth to get to space. I probably would. What's the point of having so much money if you can't do something really cool with it?
If I'm running for the most powerful office in the world, and giving a prepared speech the day after an event like that happened then yes, I would fully expect to give a coherent and cogent response. It's not like they interviewed him on the runway, standing next to a still smoking plane while his wife was gasping for fresh air.
This is what AC is referencing. 7th paragraph down.
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-romney-beverly-hills-fundraiser-20120922,0,2317962.story
“I appreciate the fact that she is on the ground, safe and sound. And I don’t think she knows just how worried some of us were,” Romney said. “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound.”
Sadly, this isn't an Onion article.
Years ago I was pulled over on that stretch of I-15, near Baker. I had been going in excess of 140, but was able to slow down to 106 before the CHP could get me with his radar. The cop never threatened or implied that he'd take me to jail, he just wrote the ticket and let me go.
In California, exceeding 100mph is a mandatory court appearance. When I went, the courtroom was full of people, probably over 40 of them, all charged with going over 100mph, all pulled over on the same stretch of road that I was pulled over on. The judge went down the line hitting every one of us with a $500 fine. That court was pulling in an incredible amount of money every day from people exceeding 100mph.
"Fuck" is an English word that is almost universally considered vulgar by its speakers. In its most literal meaning, it refers to the act of sexual intercourse. By extension it may be used to negatively characterize anything that can be dismissed, disdained, defiled, or destroyed and may also be used as an intensive.
"Fuck" can often be used as a verb, adverb, adjective, imperative, interjection, and noun. It has various metaphorical meanings. To be "fucked" can mean to be cheated (e.g., "I got fucked by a scam artist"), or to be broken or ruined (e.g., "my computer is fucked") as well as to be sexually penetrated. As a noun, "a fuck" or "a fucker" may describe a contemptible person. "A fuck" may mean an act of copulation. The word can be used as an interjection, and its participle is sometimes used as a strong (not necessarily negative) emphatic. The verb to fuck may be used transitively or intransitively, and it appears in compounds, including fuck off, fuck you, fuck up, and fuck with. In less explicit usages (but still regarded as vulgar), fuck or fuck with can mean to mess around, or to deal with unfairly or harshly. In a phrase such as "don't give a fuck", the word is the equivalent of "damn", in the sense of something having little value. In "what the fuck?!", it serves merely as an intensive. If something is very abnormal or annoying, "this is fucked up!" may be used.
-Wikipedia
Lots of heads will explode, but I bet there are ready answers for/from the "faithful".
Of course apologists are already planning for this, it won't be the first (Or last) time that they have to come up with something. They did the same when it was proven that the Earth isn't flat, when it was proven that the Earth isn't the center of the universe, the discovery of dinosaur bones, the discovery of radiocarbon dating, the discovery of the age of the Earth, the discovery of the age of the universe, the ability to see galaxies billions of light years away, the discovery of global warming, the theory of evolution, and countless other discoveries. It will probably be something as simple as "God put those bacteria there to test us!" I'd be willing to bet that Ken Ham already has some new ridiculous exhibit planned for his "museum" to cover this situation too.
Because none of the applications that I use daily run on Linux? No Adobe Lightroom, no Photoshop, no QuickBooks, no MS Office. And no, F-Stop, Gimp, gnuCash and OpenOffice are not viable alternatives.
You keep using your free OS. I'll keep making shit loads of money using my relatively inexpensive one.
Usenet died? No one told my media/Sick Beard server. I just upgraded to a 3TB drive, too.
He must care some. After all, he clicked on the story to read it.