They don't need to backtrack very much. Add a button during initial user setup that lets you enable boot to desktop if you want it. When that's on, boot to desktop and show a start button. At a bare minimum that button could just bring up the Metro Start Screen, which as long as it had a clear way to close it (like an X at the top right when on a PC) would mollify a lot of the complaining.
Bringing back the full start menu would solve more of it, but I'm not convinced that's entirely necessary. In my experience most users actually start programs by clicking icons on the desktop and don't use the start menu much at all anyway. What they really need is just a more familiar way to do what they need to do.
For the more serious people that really want a full start menu back, there's stuff like Start8.
If that's really how they're thinking, they're dead and don't realize it yet.
Windows on the PC is known by just about everybody. Microsoft's tablet offerings are not. If people hate what Microsoft is offering them in Windows 8, why would they ever seriously consider buying Microsoft in the tablet market?
People don't have a lot of choice in the PC market, but MIcrosoft is a nobody in tablets. If your experience with the last MIcrosoft thing you used sucked, why would you go with them in a market where they're nobody when you could just get a known commodity in either Apple or Android tablets?
Microsoft needs to leverage their PC users to grow their tablet base, not beat them and hope they come back for more. That is not going to fly.
If this is part of its own ad network or a smaller network, it'd explain the problem. These apps can drive a lot of traffic, but it's not in a place the market particularly has interest from advertisers yet.
It'll probably clear itself up as time goes on. Either that or we'll see ad supported apps disappear from the Windows platform... and I wouldn't shed any tears over that.
If you have a normal account, people you friend can do so, yes.
Public figures that want to friend everyone in sight shouldn't have normal accounts. They have another account type for that purpose, where you can't do it. I can't for example add Burger King to the "Beef is Murder" group.
Besides which, the politician in question is now saying she won't leave until she "reviews its purpose", which doesn't sound like someone terribly upset about being added.
Speaking as a Canadian... yawn. This is not getting much attention in Canada. It's just a couple of parties in a provincial legislature finding something new to bicker about. The same sort of thing happened last week in New Brunswick over who called someone a "witch" first, so they could determine who had to retract it (they had to go back to video of the session to answer that one). This one just happens to involve Facebook, and so it's sexy to some media.
What happened is entirely routine. Someone was involved in something that goes against the decorum of the legislature, someone else complained. They wouldn't apologize, so they were tossed out of the building for the day. They leave the FB group and the whole thing goes away. Almost nobody outside the legislature gives a damn, except to point out that it's not a terribly professional or productive environment if this is taking up significant time.
If the same thing had happened only not involving Facebook, the story would not be posted here. Politics is absurd on either side of the border, only people outside Canada don't see the local variety of "absurd" very often. Today you get to.
That's probably hibernate doing its thing. Hibernate writes out the state to disk and then shuts off. It's not exactly awesome for the lifespan of SSDs.
What "argument"? It's true. And in the case of what I was talking about (not needing to upgrade to play games), it's actually been a good thing.
Re:Win 8 a contributing factor, not the main culpr
on
Why PC Sales Are Declining
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· Score: 5, Informative
If you're buying professional versions of Windows, you should have downgrade rights. It might come with 8 on it, but you can just remove it and put 7 on provided driver support is there (and considering almost no enterprise is going to 8, there are business class laptops with full driver support in 7).
Phones also are advancing quite a lot. There's a lot more difference between an iPhone 3G and a high end phone today than there is between a 4 year old PC and a new PC.
Windows 8 is a factor. It's not the largest one, but it is a factor. People don't like it, and people also feel that they don't *need* a PC like they used to. That means when faced with a Windows version you don't want vs the iPad (or whatever other tablet) that you do, the tablet is going to win an awful lot. That wasn't the case in the past, because the technology simply wasn't up to par. Today it is - a typical consumption only web user can get by just fine on a tablet and only occasionally needs a PC. Fundamentally, Metro on the desktop sucks. Microsoft could have avoided the whole problem if they'd just put a button in Control Panel labelled "make this OS work like Windows 7", in which case you'd have a faster version of Windows 7 that can also run Metro apps. That would be more popular. (You can do that yourself with start menu replacements and neat tools like ModernMix, but telling users they can download third party tools to fix it just points out that Microsoft botched the release.)
That makes the implications obvious: households that used to have 2 or 3 PCs now only need one. Many households won't need a PC at all.
For people who do still need or want one, existing PCs last a lot longer than they used to. XP machines are still kicking, and do what people want. 3 year old PCs aren't significantly worse than brand new ones if they're properly maintained. Fundamentally, the product used to improve by leaps and bounds. It now improves in tiny increments, and tiny increments aren't enough to promote replacement. It's now like a stereo: you replace it when it dies.
Multicore is part of the problem here, as well. Intel and AMD can cram as many cores in as they want, most of the stuff I run only uses one of them. It's hugely frustrating to have a CPU sitting at 25% usage while I'm waiting on calculations because most of the software out there still doesn't use multiple cores very well. Unless they're trying to sell me something with significant single thread performance boosts, why would I care how many more cores they can shove in?
The PC market had a great run, but it's over. The market is going to contract to a new normal: systems being used years longer than in the past, and fewer people needing them. It won't go away for a very long time, simply because phones and tablets aren't nearly as good a replacement for many tasks that we're doing... yet. But stagnation and decline are the new norm.
You don't even need a new PC to play games. My going on 3 year old PC was bought to play games, and it plays everything coming out at max or near max settings. Clearly no need to upgrade there.
My six year old *Vista* PC is now what my wife uses when she wants to play a game. Although it can't play at max settings anymore, we still haven't found a game that it can't actually play reasonably well. Again, no particular need to upgrade there.
Games being cross platform has meant they need to deal with the pathetically low specs on the current consoles, which combined with games being stuck being compiled for x86 and DX9 to work in XP means you just don't need new hardware like you used to.
When he started saying stuff like "why would anyone want to live there?" in response to comments about not having quality broadband available everywhere in the US, he stepped across the line into general jackass territory.
"Windows" is not a brand name that excites the market. People don't see a Windows tablet and get all warm and fuzzy inside. They think of their crashing old XP machine, or even worse they think of Windows 8, which confused the everloving hell out of them (Windows 8 sales are also well below expectations and never going to recover).
Based on that, what makes them want to buy a Windows tablet over the far cheaper Android alternatives or the iPad, which has a much better market reputation?
Microsoft has never been able to answer that question for the Surface RT, because the answer is "nothing". There is no particular reason to recommend the RT over anything else on the market. So long as that remains true and it's saddled with the poor market reception of Windows 8, marketing is going to have an uphill slog to sell the thing. Of course, marketing focusing on the keyboard clicking noise instead of what the thing can actually do isn't helping a whole lot either...
The presidential limo is much heavier than a standard limo due to the extra protection it offers. There isn't enough room on the thing to get enough solar power to move it anywhere, let alone a detail like wanting to move it at night. Adding enough batteries to provide reasonable drive time would mean making it even bigger.
There are some problems that solar can't solve. You'd think an editor here would know that.
This article follows a fairly standard template: Make up some criteria for success that the event organizers don't use, then claim it's a failure because it doesn't do those things.
Earth Hour was never intended to save power. So yes, it doesn't save power. The point is simply awareness, and it's been pretty successful at doing that.
Now, that awareness hasn't translated into *results*, so you could claim it doesn't work on that regard. But this article doesn't do that.
And as a result, I'll continue to not buy the game.
Sooner or later EA is going to piss off too many people with shoddy service, and they'll be in real trouble. It'd actually be nice if the game tanked due to nonsense like this: it'd be a warning to the rest of the industry.
Those designers sure are trendy people. They've all hopped aboard the same bandwagon and all follow the same trend, even in cases where it doesn't actually work that well (see: the Metro version of IE 10 where for certain errors the commands to actually diagnose what's wrong are just plain missing and the errors unfixable without switching to the desktop version).
It's almost like the fashion industry at this point. I can't wait to see what they decide the new trend is in 5 years. Maybe everything will need to be orange.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't need to backtrack very much. Add a button during initial user setup that lets you enable boot to desktop if you want it. When that's on, boot to desktop and show a start button. At a bare minimum that button could just bring up the Metro Start Screen, which as long as it had a clear way to close it (like an X at the top right when on a PC) would mollify a lot of the complaining.
Bringing back the full start menu would solve more of it, but I'm not convinced that's entirely necessary. In my experience most users actually start programs by clicking icons on the desktop and don't use the start menu much at all anyway. What they really need is just a more familiar way to do what they need to do.
For the more serious people that really want a full start menu back, there's stuff like Start8.
If that's really how they're thinking, they're dead and don't realize it yet.
Windows on the PC is known by just about everybody. Microsoft's tablet offerings are not. If people hate what Microsoft is offering them in Windows 8, why would they ever seriously consider buying Microsoft in the tablet market?
People don't have a lot of choice in the PC market, but MIcrosoft is a nobody in tablets. If your experience with the last MIcrosoft thing you used sucked, why would you go with them in a market where they're nobody when you could just get a known commodity in either Apple or Android tablets?
Microsoft needs to leverage their PC users to grow their tablet base, not beat them and hope they come back for more. That is not going to fly.
Probably nobody does in that cave you're hiding in, but out here in the world? Yeah, there's a couple people still using it, give or take millions.
If this is part of its own ad network or a smaller network, it'd explain the problem. These apps can drive a lot of traffic, but it's not in a place the market particularly has interest from advertisers yet.
It'll probably clear itself up as time goes on. Either that or we'll see ad supported apps disappear from the Windows platform... and I wouldn't shed any tears over that.
Oh, and for not leaving the group. She's still a member, she wants to "review its purpose" before leaving.
Someone actually added against their will would probably just leave.
If you have a normal account, people you friend can do so, yes.
Public figures that want to friend everyone in sight shouldn't have normal accounts. They have another account type for that purpose, where you can't do it. I can't for example add Burger King to the "Beef is Murder" group.
Besides which, the politician in question is now saying she won't leave until she "reviews its purpose", which doesn't sound like someone terribly upset about being added.
Gripe about it? Most of the entertainment industry dreams about it. You don't make it big being an entertainer in Canada.
Speaking as a Canadian... yawn. This is not getting much attention in Canada. It's just a couple of parties in a provincial legislature finding something new to bicker about. The same sort of thing happened last week in New Brunswick over who called someone a "witch" first, so they could determine who had to retract it (they had to go back to video of the session to answer that one). This one just happens to involve Facebook, and so it's sexy to some media.
What happened is entirely routine. Someone was involved in something that goes against the decorum of the legislature, someone else complained. They wouldn't apologize, so they were tossed out of the building for the day. They leave the FB group and the whole thing goes away. Almost nobody outside the legislature gives a damn, except to point out that it's not a terribly professional or productive environment if this is taking up significant time.
If the same thing had happened only not involving Facebook, the story would not be posted here. Politics is absurd on either side of the border, only people outside Canada don't see the local variety of "absurd" very often. Today you get to.
Building. It's a common form of enforcement of House rules.
That's probably hibernate doing its thing. Hibernate writes out the state to disk and then shuts off. It's not exactly awesome for the lifespan of SSDs.
"Different for the sake of different" is not a particularly geek thing.
What "argument"? It's true. And in the case of what I was talking about (not needing to upgrade to play games), it's actually been a good thing.
If you're buying professional versions of Windows, you should have downgrade rights. It might come with 8 on it, but you can just remove it and put 7 on provided driver support is there (and considering almost no enterprise is going to 8, there are business class laptops with full driver support in 7).
Phones also are advancing quite a lot. There's a lot more difference between an iPhone 3G and a high end phone today than there is between a 4 year old PC and a new PC.
Windows 8 is a factor. It's not the largest one, but it is a factor. People don't like it, and people also feel that they don't *need* a PC like they used to. That means when faced with a Windows version you don't want vs the iPad (or whatever other tablet) that you do, the tablet is going to win an awful lot. That wasn't the case in the past, because the technology simply wasn't up to par. Today it is - a typical consumption only web user can get by just fine on a tablet and only occasionally needs a PC. Fundamentally, Metro on the desktop sucks. Microsoft could have avoided the whole problem if they'd just put a button in Control Panel labelled "make this OS work like Windows 7", in which case you'd have a faster version of Windows 7 that can also run Metro apps. That would be more popular. (You can do that yourself with start menu replacements and neat tools like ModernMix, but telling users they can download third party tools to fix it just points out that Microsoft botched the release.)
That makes the implications obvious: households that used to have 2 or 3 PCs now only need one. Many households won't need a PC at all.
For people who do still need or want one, existing PCs last a lot longer than they used to. XP machines are still kicking, and do what people want. 3 year old PCs aren't significantly worse than brand new ones if they're properly maintained. Fundamentally, the product used to improve by leaps and bounds. It now improves in tiny increments, and tiny increments aren't enough to promote replacement. It's now like a stereo: you replace it when it dies.
Multicore is part of the problem here, as well. Intel and AMD can cram as many cores in as they want, most of the stuff I run only uses one of them. It's hugely frustrating to have a CPU sitting at 25% usage while I'm waiting on calculations because most of the software out there still doesn't use multiple cores very well. Unless they're trying to sell me something with significant single thread performance boosts, why would I care how many more cores they can shove in?
The PC market had a great run, but it's over. The market is going to contract to a new normal: systems being used years longer than in the past, and fewer people needing them. It won't go away for a very long time, simply because phones and tablets aren't nearly as good a replacement for many tasks that we're doing... yet. But stagnation and decline are the new norm.
You don't even need a new PC to play games. My going on 3 year old PC was bought to play games, and it plays everything coming out at max or near max settings. Clearly no need to upgrade there.
My six year old *Vista* PC is now what my wife uses when she wants to play a game. Although it can't play at max settings anymore, we still haven't found a game that it can't actually play reasonably well. Again, no particular need to upgrade there.
Games being cross platform has meant they need to deal with the pathetically low specs on the current consoles, which combined with games being stuck being compiled for x86 and DX9 to work in XP means you just don't need new hardware like you used to.
When he started saying stuff like "why would anyone want to live there?" in response to comments about not having quality broadband available everywhere in the US, he stepped across the line into general jackass territory.
Then it's DRM. Period. We can't be any clearer on this.
EA management's chronic inability to understand such basic things is truly remarkable.
"Windows" is not a brand name that excites the market. People don't see a Windows tablet and get all warm and fuzzy inside. They think of their crashing old XP machine, or even worse they think of Windows 8, which confused the everloving hell out of them (Windows 8 sales are also well below expectations and never going to recover).
Based on that, what makes them want to buy a Windows tablet over the far cheaper Android alternatives or the iPad, which has a much better market reputation?
Microsoft has never been able to answer that question for the Surface RT, because the answer is "nothing". There is no particular reason to recommend the RT over anything else on the market. So long as that remains true and it's saddled with the poor market reception of Windows 8, marketing is going to have an uphill slog to sell the thing. Of course, marketing focusing on the keyboard clicking noise instead of what the thing can actually do isn't helping a whole lot either...
The presidential limo is much heavier than a standard limo due to the extra protection it offers. There isn't enough room on the thing to get enough solar power to move it anywhere, let alone a detail like wanting to move it at night. Adding enough batteries to provide reasonable drive time would mean making it even bigger.
There are some problems that solar can't solve. You'd think an editor here would know that.
This article follows a fairly standard template: Make up some criteria for success that the event organizers don't use, then claim it's a failure because it doesn't do those things.
Earth Hour was never intended to save power. So yes, it doesn't save power. The point is simply awareness, and it's been pretty successful at doing that.
Now, that awareness hasn't translated into *results*, so you could claim it doesn't work on that regard. But this article doesn't do that.
Currencies are as real as your ability to spend them. By that standard, USD is very real and Bitcoin is not.
Sending a URL using a modem only with smartphones isn't innovative enough for you?
Man, people are so demanding.
And as a result, I'll continue to not buy the game.
Sooner or later EA is going to piss off too many people with shoddy service, and they'll be in real trouble. It'd actually be nice if the game tanked due to nonsense like this: it'd be a warning to the rest of the industry.
Those designers sure are trendy people. They've all hopped aboard the same bandwagon and all follow the same trend, even in cases where it doesn't actually work that well (see: the Metro version of IE 10 where for certain errors the commands to actually diagnose what's wrong are just plain missing and the errors unfixable without switching to the desktop version).
It's almost like the fashion industry at this point. I can't wait to see what they decide the new trend is in 5 years. Maybe everything will need to be orange.