I mean, unless you want exactly what's in the can it comes in. Then its great.
But usually people ordering desktop workstations want a higher degree of control over what is inside it, and above all they don't want to be ripped off.
I expect the Mac Pro will be plausible value for what is in it the day its released, but it won't be refreshed anywhere nearly fast enough, while the price will be held the same, until like the last mac pro you end up shaking your head that they would even try to charge that cutting edge price for technology that was 1 to 2 generations behind what you could get from anyone else.
Anytime someone is improperly on a terrorist watch list, or no-fly list, or was denied a passport, or denied security clearance, or denied entry into the country as a result of this apparatus.
Definitely it happens in the murky future. Its probably already happened several times over the last several years.
For example, we don't know how those no-fly lists get made up, or how people get on them. I can't prove this apparatus is responsible, but you can't prove it isn't.
The people in a position to prove it one way or the other are still trying to come to terms with the fact that we even now know the apparatus exists.
We're miles away from them coming clean on what they've actually done with it so far. I doubt we'll ever know.
Chrome has the ad / tracking crap built in. Its open source, but so what?
Yes, there's chromium which is chrome without the crap, but why bother with a version of chrome than has been cleaned up when I can just run something that isn't built to try and harvest data from me over in the first place?
and there are many "Freedom" alternatives?
Yes, and Firefox is one of them. So he uses that. What is your question exactly?
First generation Motoblur-based phones require a new user to create a Motoblur account, denying access to the main screen until the account is established. User account information is stored on Motorola's servers for access from web browsers and future phones. Newer devices allowed users to defer Blur services until a later registration
Presumably, once you got around to making a motoblur account it would like to the "temporary one".
Apparently it didn't occur to motorola that some poeple were opting out of registering because they didn't want the service at all, as opposed to merely not wanting to register.
Idiotic for sure, but probably not full on malicious.
If your local search had a button to "also search online" after local results were found and that online search returned ads, that'd be one thing -- its just another interface to an internet search engine and we pretty much expect ads.
But to automaticlly push local search online is bad enough, to return ads with that is just demented.
With regard to metrics, I don't know who supplied those.
The 10s of millions of people who use windows via the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program which is enabled by default in Windows 7.
look it up. (CEIP Windows 7)
You get a thousand rectangles, all alike, spread across twenty pages with no rhyme or reason.
Right click on the start screen, select "all apps", and its organized exactly the same as the classic start menu, in groups according to what start menu folder they are in. Amongst other things 8.1 adds the ability to make this the default view if you prefer it.
The default "start screen" is like the old start menu "frequent / pinned" apps area when it first comes up. The all apps view is like selecting "all programs"; me personally, I removed almost everything from the main start screen. I don't have 20 pages of random crap. I've got maybe a dozen or so tiles on my start screen, neatly organized.
If I need to go hunt for something, I use all apps view, or i search via the keyboard.
There is a reason why most of the items in the Start menu are hidden from view until you select the top folder - to protect you from looking at too much data and not seeing anything.
Yeah, the windows 8 defaults for the start screen are not good. The discoverability of features is not good. But if you take a few minutes to clean it up and learn how to use it then its very good. 8.1 takes some steps to improving it, there is still more room for improvement. But just cleaning it up, and learning to use it make a huge difference.
No, that isn't how it's suppose to be used. Typing in a GUI just to launch applications is so freaking retarded.
Typing is a feature for powerusers.
I expect most regular people will be using the menu; and in that case the start screen being larger, and flattening out the hierarchy, and having mutiple ways to sort etc is much easier.
I am not advocating hotkeys and typing as anything but a method for power users.
That's how the command line is supposed to be used. Windows is allegedly a GUI.
OSX has launchpad and spotlight... both let you get things by typing it in. My android has a search that can be used to launch apps. What was your point again?
You cannot say "that's how its supposed to be used."
Can and did. Because i was refering to the start screen, which was designed based on the metrics collected from Vista/7 that showed that's how users were using it. So they designed 8 around that.
You can't expect them to remember names of applications.
So presenting them in a small non-resizable popup organized into folders named after a variation of the application name, or the company that produced it is better? (Because if you can't even remember the application name, what are the odds you know who published it?)
If you don't know the name of the app you are looking for the start screen is better. You've got more space, more ways to sort and search, and better search.
For those applications that I do remember about, "quick" does not return Quicken, but "quicken" does - how would MS explain that? BTW, QuickTime is not returned either - except the "About QuickTime." This is garbage.
Tried 8 yet?
Typing is only a tool for some power users, and it has limited value as you cannot know what applications are installed on a given PC that you just connected to.
Agreed. But that's the only feature of the start menu that was truly lost with the start screen.
You use the hierarchical menu to find out.
And with 8+ you use the start screen. Which is a much better tool for that particular job.
ME to XP had a lot of similarties to XP to Vista. New driver model, higher system requirements (RAM in particular), lots of 95/98/ME stuff wasn't supported on XP, etc.
There's still things that are more logical and better in XP than any version since.
Running 'root' as default for example? Face it, for all the good that is XP, it was a security disaster and it needs to go away.
In what world does it make sense to have to remember the name of an application you don't use regularly?
Ah, so in the event you don't know the name of the application, you will need to scan for it in a list, where you will attempt to recognize its name and or icon, right?
So then you feel it would be better if that list should in be a non-resizable small popup window in the corner of the screen organized in a hierarchical structure usually headed by either the name of the company that produced it or some variation of the name of the application? Where half the icons are the generic folder icon unless you expand it? Where for example, if I can't remember the name of "Virtual Clone Drive" because i dont' use it often that I'm supposed to recognize that it is in the "Elaborate Bytes" folder?
How exactly is that better than the windows 8 start screen how? Scanning the Win7 start menu for a program you don't know the name of is the WORST possible function I can imagine.
Windows 8's start screen is better for that purpose by far. Its bigger for starters, with bigger icons, and its searchable, sortable in different ways, and it flattens the heirarchy so you don't have to expand nested folders.
Actually, I have noticed that many resort to just typing the application name they want to use into the search bar as the GUI is so clunky to use.
That's how people were using the old start menu too. That's how its supposed to be used.
You pin apps you use the most either directly to the taskbar or in a taskbar toolbar. For stuff you don't use much you use the start screen, and the type-search is how it was intended to be used.
The minimal performance improvements, improved file transfer dialog, improved task manager, ISO mounting and DirectX 11.2, are not big enough features to justify an upgrade.
Very few releases of windows have ever justified an "upgrade". Between the price of the upgrade itself, and the liklihood you would ram or other hardware upgrades it was rarely worth it. It comes with your new computer, when you get around to needing to buy one. There's really no point in evaluating it as a "compelling upgrade" because few people do that anyway, ever, for anything.
Windows 7 is lightyears ahead of XP -- that's probably the most compelling upgrade I've seen. Yet most people who bought a computer with XP are still using XP on it.
No, the "I want the start button" was all about normal users confronted with the desktop, and no idea what to do with it. Have you seen all those youtube videos of putting someone in front of Windows 8, and watching them have no idea what to do? This is for them.
The return of the start 'button', to get them to the start screen restores the discover-ability of functionality.
No, its not quite the same interface, but the functionality is there.
Its an open question whether or not the functionality is better or worse. The 8.1 start screen has a lot of advantages over the old start menu in a lot of situations.
And the only peice of the win7 start menu that I think is a loss is the integrated search when used by power users to quick launch apps by name.
Everything else is handled fine by creating a toolbar, and using the start screen. IMO.
If by enterprise grade, you mean "good enough for an ISP to use", then open source does just fine with a bit of tweaking and fine tuning.
I think by enterprise grade he means that it has the FEATURES the modern enterprise user expects.
What is typical ISP mail? POP+IMAP with a couple hundred megabyte limits. No calendar/contact sync to my phone or desktop client. No remote wipe of my phone. No Calender sharing, no global address book, no encryption, no certificate authentication,...
The email i get from an ISP is anything but enterprise grade.
That would be like saying to Mark Zuckerberg (after he retires from Facebook), "Why don't you go work for my friend Joe, he needs someone who knows PHP to fix his Magento ecommerce website".
No, that's probably all Zuckerberg is actually good for. Lightning struck for him and he made the most of it, but he's no genius programmer or anything.
I guess at this point his social network (groan) by which i mean the people he has access to now is worth more than any innate skills he has or ever will have.
BTW, how do you make the center area of the Start screen visible?
I'm not sure I follow. Your comment about the desktop background refers to the desktop. You can't see your family photo when you pull up the start menu in windows 7, and you can't see it on the start screen. I don't see the issue you are referring too?
If you were to Win-D to see the desktop and activate a carefully placed short on the desktop in win7 and look at your family photo... well then that still works in win8.
I never use the "All Programs" menu. That *is* clunky.
And fundamentally. That *is* the start menu. It draws on the users and public "start menu" folders. Its been the basis of the start menu since Windows 95 and yes, its terrible. It had to go.
But I frequently use the Search box, which I have configured to search only programs and control menu items, not documents. It's basically a Run dialog that uses program names instead of executable filenames.
Yes, its truly the only thing really missing from windows 8. This is a truly useful powerusers tool. The start screen still does it, but its overkill as a quick launch utility. You have my agreement here.
I also pin programs to the start menu, *distinctly* from pinning to the taskbar.
I understand that. That is a unction of toolbars introduced in windows 95? 98 for sure. In XP they crammed that functionality into the start menu, but toolbars are still around in windows 8.
Create a toolbar, stick whatever you want in it, you've got a popup menu of your favorite apps on your taskbar. You can even add folders and make it heirarachical for lesser used apps, or by task or whatever to your hearts content. And yes, the "frequently used items" or "jump lists" are supported on them too as i recall.
The reason I don't like the start screen is that it's inefficient. It takes up the whole screen, but provides relatively little functionality over a start menu that takes up 5% of the screen.
The start screen is better than start-all programs. And if you don't know the name of the program and are reduced to searching for it via scan and recognize. Its not perfect, but Win 8.1 is improving it further, and we'll hopefully see it get better with time.
Windows Media Player works better than the Music or Video apps. Preview works better than the Photos app.
See, for the most part i agree. And on my main desktop I have changed all the defaults to the desktop apps. Microsoft goofed when they tried having us switch to to Photos from the desktop.
However, I also have an HTPC, and honestly metro is great there. We use the metro app for netflix. We use the metro photoviewer to show people pictures, etc. Because full screen apps with large friendly text makes a lot of sense there. Its also good on windows phone and tablets.
But yah, its a goof to make them the default on a desktop.
What the heck was that app called, again? Maybe something like "transcoder"? (types)... Hmmm..... Nope. Doesn't look right.[...] *clicks around in menu*.... Oh, yeah. Handbrake. Typing transcode did work, but I couldn't tell.
Ah, so you have no idea what the name of the program is, and you are reduced to "scanning a list of everything installed on your computer hoping to recognize it or its icon."
So, what's better? a large full screen interface that lists everything installed on your computer, with large icons, for easy scanning and recognizing.
Or... you can peer at a small non-resizable popup window in the corner of your screen with tiny icons, and as you expand things, it starts to pan around horizontally too although there are no controls to actually control the horizontal panning.
If you are reduced to actually searching by scanning everything on your computer, then the start menu is the worst solution going.
Nothing. Its reference to the common english language idiom. As in "they threw in everything and the kitchen sink".
I do not like being told how to work.
You don't like being told to CHANGE how you work. There are all sorts of limitations to the win 7 start menu. Its position is limited. Its size is fixed. What was in it and where it was positioned within it was limited. You knew how to work within its limitations.
Your suggestion that the Smart menu kitchen sink is "obsolete" tells me that you are assuming what is best for me.
That is the nature of design. Whoever designed original start menu made all kinds of assumptions about what is best for you. Whoever augmented it over the years did the same.
In fact, when they added the search widget there was MUCH gnashing of teeth and wailing because now when you start typing it automatically goes into the search and starts searching, whereas before it would select various items on the menu that started with those letters and there were all kinds of people who didn't want to change how they worked who had gotten used to that old behaviour and were livid at the new one.
But now, a few years later, that search widget is considered indispensible by most. It was worth making the change.
With win8... meh... there's a lot to like about the start screen; and the 8.1 updates are welcome set of fixes. Search on the start screen really is better when you actually need to "search" - the extra real estate is good. But yeah for quicklaunch of stuff you already know about its not as good, and I miss the win7 widget for that function. But that's really about it. Win8 really just needs a good text entry quick-launcher, a la OSX spotlight.
For a lot of the other "complaints" most are addressed with a toolbar. Hell, if you REALLY like the heirarchical part of the startmenu and want it back, just create a taskbar toolbar pointing at the startmenu folder under c:\users - voila. But personally I can't imagine wanting that; but its there nonetheless for those who must have it.
That's just legal weaseling. The state is not endangered. Period. Its at best mildly irritated.
If an RC plane with explosives can
"impair and capable of impairing the existence or security of a state or of an international organisation, or to abolish, rob of legal effect or undermine constitutional principles of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Then so can a common mugger with a knife. (He could mug someone important and stab them... oh noes endangering the state! The Fatherland itself is under attack. Round up and execute anyone found with a knife, or an interest in knives, or a suspicious amount of cutlery, or shopping online for cutlery...
Ah, well, if your not offended by it, why make a fuss about the start screen then? The people I'm addressing are largely treating the start screen like the coming of the anti-christ.
Thanks to the little box at the bottom that says, "Search programs and files", yes.
Exempt that I was talking about the hierarchical start menu.
The little search widget, if you read my original post is the ONLY functionality of the old start menu worth keeping. And more to the point, should just get its own widget rather than being the one useful piece jammed into the obsolete kitchen sink that is the old start menu.
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the new Mac Pro design is anything but boring
It's anything but good too.
I mean, unless you want exactly what's in the can it comes in. Then its great.
But usually people ordering desktop workstations want a higher degree of control over what is inside it, and above all they don't want to be ripped off.
I expect the Mac Pro will be plausible value for what is in it the day its released, but it won't be refreshed anywhere nearly fast enough, while the price will be held the same, until like the last mac pro you end up shaking your head that they would even try to charge that cutting edge price for technology that was 1 to 2 generations behind what you could get from anyone else.
When? The murky always-future?
Anytime someone is improperly on a terrorist watch list, or no-fly list, or was denied a passport, or denied security clearance, or denied entry into the country as a result of this apparatus.
Definitely it happens in the murky future. Its probably already happened several times over the last several years.
For example, we don't know how those no-fly lists get made up, or how people get on them. I can't prove this apparatus is responsible, but you can't prove it isn't.
The people in a position to prove it one way or the other are still trying to come to terms with the fact that we even now know the apparatus exists.
We're miles away from them coming clean on what they've actually done with it so far. I doubt we'll ever know.
In any of the cases, we don't actually have anything to worry about.
Quite the opposite really; it means the ONLY thing this apparatus is effective at is selectively abusing people.
In other words it won't stop any crimes, but will be used to perpetrate them.
Chrome has the ad / tracking crap built in. Its open source, but so what?
Yes, there's chromium which is chrome without the crap, but why bother with a version of chrome than has been cleaned up when I can just run something that isn't built to try and harvest data from me over in the first place?
and there are many "Freedom" alternatives?
Yes, and Firefox is one of them. So he uses that. What is your question exactly?
Its a "feature"
From wikipedia:
First generation Motoblur-based phones require a new user to create a Motoblur account, denying access to the main screen until the account is established. User account information is stored on Motorola's servers for access from web browsers and future phones. Newer devices allowed users to defer Blur services until a later registration
Presumably, once you got around to making a motoblur account it would like to the "temporary one".
Apparently it didn't occur to motorola that some poeple were opting out of registering because they didn't want the service at all, as opposed to merely not wanting to register.
Idiotic for sure, but probably not full on malicious.
Agreed.
If your local search had a button to "also search online" after local results were found and that online search returned ads, that'd be one thing -- its just another interface to an internet search engine and we pretty much expect ads.
But to automaticlly push local search online is bad enough, to return ads with that is just demented.
Nobody wants this. Absolutely Nobody.
With regard to metrics, I don't know who supplied those.
The 10s of millions of people who use windows via the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program which is enabled by default in Windows 7.
look it up. (CEIP Windows 7)
You get a thousand rectangles, all alike, spread across twenty pages with no rhyme or reason.
Right click on the start screen, select "all apps", and its organized exactly the same as the classic start menu, in groups according to what start menu folder they are in. Amongst other things 8.1 adds the ability to make this the default view if you prefer it.
The default "start screen" is like the old start menu "frequent / pinned" apps area when it first comes up. The all apps view is like selecting "all programs"; me personally, I removed almost everything from the main start screen. I don't have 20 pages of random crap. I've got maybe a dozen or so tiles on my start screen, neatly organized.
If I need to go hunt for something, I use all apps view, or i search via the keyboard.
There is a reason why most of the items in the Start menu are hidden from view until you select the top folder - to protect you from looking at too much data and not seeing anything.
Yeah, the windows 8 defaults for the start screen are not good. The discoverability of features is not good. But if you take a few minutes to clean it up and learn how to use it then its very good. 8.1 takes some steps to improving it, there is still more room for improvement. But just cleaning it up, and learning to use it make a huge difference.
No, that isn't how it's suppose to be used. Typing in a GUI just to launch applications is so freaking retarded.
Typing is a feature for powerusers.
I expect most regular people will be using the menu; and in that case the start screen being larger, and flattening out the hierarchy, and having mutiple ways to sort etc is much easier.
I am not advocating hotkeys and typing as anything but a method for power users.
That's how the command line is supposed to be used. Windows is allegedly a GUI.
OSX has launchpad and spotlight... both let you get things by typing it in. My android has a search that can be used to launch apps. What was your point again?
You cannot say "that's how its supposed to be used."
Can and did. Because i was refering to the start screen, which was designed based on the metrics collected from Vista/7 that showed that's how users were using it. So they designed 8 around that.
You can't expect them to remember names of applications.
So presenting them in a small non-resizable popup organized into folders named after a variation of the application name, or the company that produced it is better? (Because if you can't even remember the application name, what are the odds you know who published it?)
If you don't know the name of the app you are looking for the start screen is better. You've got more space, more ways to sort and search, and better search.
For those applications that I do remember about, "quick" does not return Quicken, but "quicken" does - how would MS explain that? BTW, QuickTime is not returned either - except the "About QuickTime." This is garbage.
Tried 8 yet?
Typing is only a tool for some power users, and it has limited value as you cannot know what applications are installed on a given PC that you just connected to.
Agreed. But that's the only feature of the start menu that was truly lost with the start screen.
You use the hierarchical menu to find out.
And with 8+ you use the start screen. Which is a much better tool for that particular job.
ME to XP had a lot of similarties to XP to Vista. New driver model, higher system requirements (RAM in particular), lots of 95/98/ME stuff wasn't supported on XP, etc.
There's still things that are more logical and better in XP than any version since.
Running 'root' as default for example? Face it, for all the good that is XP, it was a security disaster and it needs to go away.
In what world does it make sense to have to remember the name of an application you don't use regularly?
Ah, so in the event you don't know the name of the application, you will need to scan for it in a list, where you will attempt to recognize its name and or icon, right?
So then you feel it would be better if that list should in be a non-resizable small popup window in the corner of the screen organized in a hierarchical structure usually headed by either the name of the company that produced it or some variation of the name of the application? Where half the icons are the generic folder icon unless you expand it? Where for example, if I can't remember the name of "Virtual Clone Drive" because i dont' use it often that I'm supposed to recognize that it is in the "Elaborate Bytes" folder?
How exactly is that better than the windows 8 start screen how? Scanning the Win7 start menu for a program you don't know the name of is the WORST possible function I can imagine.
Windows 8's start screen is better for that purpose by far. Its bigger for starters, with bigger icons, and its searchable, sortable in different ways, and it flattens the heirarchy so you don't have to expand nested folders.
So...
Actually, I have noticed that many resort to just typing the application name they want to use into the search bar as the GUI is so clunky to use.
That's how people were using the old start menu too. That's how its supposed to be used.
You pin apps you use the most either directly to the taskbar or in a taskbar toolbar. For stuff you don't use much you use the start screen, and the type-search is how it was intended to be used.
The minimal performance improvements, improved file transfer dialog, improved task manager, ISO mounting and DirectX 11.2, are not big enough features to justify an upgrade.
Very few releases of windows have ever justified an "upgrade". Between the price of the upgrade itself, and the liklihood you would ram or other hardware upgrades it was rarely worth it. It comes with your new computer, when you get around to needing to buy one. There's really no point in evaluating it as a "compelling upgrade" because few people do that anyway, ever, for anything.
Windows 7 is lightyears ahead of XP -- that's probably the most compelling upgrade I've seen. Yet most people who bought a computer with XP are still using XP on it.
No, the "I want the start button" was all about normal users confronted with the desktop, and no idea what to do with it. Have you seen all those youtube videos of putting someone in front of Windows 8, and watching them have no idea what to do? This is for them.
The return of the start 'button', to get them to the start screen restores the discover-ability of functionality.
No, its not quite the same interface, but the functionality is there.
Its an open question whether or not the functionality is better or worse. The 8.1 start screen has a lot of advantages over the old start menu in a lot of situations.
And the only peice of the win7 start menu that I think is a loss is the integrated search when used by power users to quick launch apps by name.
Everything else is handled fine by creating a toolbar, and using the start screen. IMO.
If by enterprise grade, you mean "good enough for an ISP to use", then open source does just fine with a bit of tweaking and fine tuning.
I think by enterprise grade he means that it has the FEATURES the modern enterprise user expects.
What is typical ISP mail? POP+IMAP with a couple hundred megabyte limits. No calendar/contact sync to my phone or desktop client. No remote wipe of my phone. No Calender sharing, no global address book, no encryption, no certificate authentication,...
The email i get from an ISP is anything but enterprise grade.
While "WA Post" is rather ... odd, its frequently abbreviated to WAPO.
In fact, google for wapo and the first result is the washing post site. Wikipedia redirects wapo to the article about the washington post.
Etc.
Who said it was?
You did read your own post right? All the way to the end? See if you can spot the word 'endanger'.
That would be like saying to Mark Zuckerberg (after he retires from Facebook), "Why don't you go work for my friend Joe, he needs someone who knows PHP to fix his Magento ecommerce website".
No, that's probably all Zuckerberg is actually good for. Lightning struck for him and he made the most of it, but he's no genius programmer or anything.
I guess at this point his social network (groan) by which i mean the people he has access to now is worth more than any innate skills he has or ever will have.
BTW, how do you make the center area of the Start screen visible?
I'm not sure I follow. Your comment about the desktop background refers to the desktop. You can't see your family photo when you pull up the start menu in windows 7, and you can't see it on the start screen. I don't see the issue you are referring too?
If you were to Win-D to see the desktop and activate a carefully placed short on the desktop in win7 and look at your family photo... well then that still works in win8.
I never use the "All Programs" menu. That *is* clunky.
And fundamentally. That *is* the start menu. It draws on the users and public "start menu" folders. Its been the basis of the start menu since Windows 95 and yes, its terrible. It had to go.
But I frequently use the Search box, which I have configured to search only programs and control menu items, not documents. It's basically a Run dialog that uses program names instead of executable filenames.
Yes, its truly the only thing really missing from windows 8. This is a truly useful powerusers tool. The start screen still does it, but its overkill as a quick launch utility. You have my agreement here.
I also pin programs to the start menu, *distinctly* from pinning to the taskbar.
I understand that. That is a unction of toolbars introduced in windows 95? 98 for sure. In XP they crammed that functionality into the start menu, but toolbars are still around in windows 8.
Create a toolbar, stick whatever you want in it, you've got a popup menu of your favorite apps on your taskbar. You can even add folders and make it heirarachical for lesser used apps, or by task or whatever to your hearts content. And yes, the "frequently used items" or "jump lists" are supported on them too as i recall.
The reason I don't like the start screen is that it's inefficient. It takes up the whole screen, but provides relatively little functionality over a start menu that takes up 5% of the screen.
The start screen is better than start-all programs. And if you don't know the name of the program and are reduced to searching for it via scan and recognize. Its not perfect, but Win 8.1 is improving it further, and we'll hopefully see it get better with time.
Windows Media Player works better than the Music or Video apps. Preview works better than the Photos app.
See, for the most part i agree. And on my main desktop I have changed all the defaults to the desktop apps. Microsoft goofed when they tried having us switch to to Photos from the desktop.
However, I also have an HTPC, and honestly metro is great there. We use the metro app for netflix. We use the metro photoviewer to show people pictures, etc. Because full screen apps with large friendly text makes a lot of sense there. Its also good on windows phone and tablets.
But yah, its a goof to make them the default on a desktop.
What the heck was that app called, again? Maybe something like "transcoder"? (types) ... Hmmm..... Nope. Doesn't look right.[...] *clicks around in menu* .... Oh, yeah. Handbrake. Typing transcode did work, but I couldn't tell.
Ah, so you have no idea what the name of the program is, and you are reduced to "scanning a list of everything installed on your computer hoping to recognize it or its icon."
So, what's better? a large full screen interface that lists everything installed on your computer, with large icons, for easy scanning and recognizing.
Or... you can peer at a small non-resizable popup window in the corner of your screen with tiny icons, and as you expand things, it starts to pan around horizontally too although there are no controls to actually control the horizontal panning.
If you are reduced to actually searching by scanning everything on your computer, then the start menu is the worst solution going.
And what do you have against kitchen sinks?
Nothing. Its reference to the common english language idiom. As in "they threw in everything and the kitchen sink".
I do not like being told how to work.
You don't like being told to CHANGE how you work. There are all sorts of limitations to the win 7 start menu. Its position is limited. Its size is fixed. What was in it and where it was positioned within it was limited. You knew how to work within its limitations.
Your suggestion that the Smart menu kitchen sink is "obsolete" tells me that you are assuming what is best for me.
That is the nature of design. Whoever designed original start menu made all kinds of assumptions about what is best for you. Whoever augmented it over the years did the same.
In fact, when they added the search widget there was MUCH gnashing of teeth and wailing because now when you start typing it automatically goes into the search and starts searching, whereas before it would select various items on the menu that started with those letters and there were all kinds of people who didn't want to change how they worked who had gotten used to that old behaviour and were livid at the new one.
But now, a few years later, that search widget is considered indispensible by most. It was worth making the change.
With win8... meh... there's a lot to like about the start screen; and the 8.1 updates are welcome set of fixes. Search on the start screen really is better when you actually need to "search" - the extra real estate is good. But yeah for quicklaunch of stuff you already know about its not as good, and I miss the win7 widget for that function. But that's really about it. Win8 really just needs a good text entry quick-launcher, a la OSX spotlight.
For a lot of the other "complaints" most are addressed with a toolbar. Hell, if you REALLY like the heirarchical part of the startmenu and want it back, just create a taskbar toolbar pointing at the startmenu folder under c:\users - voila. But personally I can't imagine wanting that; but its there nonetheless for those who must have it.
That's just legal weaseling. The state is not endangered. Period. Its at best mildly irritated.
If an RC plane with explosives can
"impair and capable of impairing the existence or security of a state or of an international organisation, or to abolish, rob of legal effect or undermine constitutional principles of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Then so can a common mugger with a knife. (He could mug someone important and stab them... oh noes endangering the state! The Fatherland itself is under attack. Round up and execute anyone found with a knife, or an interest in knives, or a suspicious amount of cutlery, or shopping online for cutlery...
Because, if you read TFA, these guys had been under observation for a year already. Basically, one of two things happened:
To be fair, that loses some meaning when the NSA has us all under surveillance all the time now.
"Offended?" I just said I liked the Start menu.
Ah, well, if your not offended by it, why make a fuss about the start screen then? The people I'm addressing are largely treating the start screen like the coming of the anti-christ.
Thanks to the little box at the bottom that says, "Search programs and files", yes.
Exempt that I was talking about the hierarchical start menu.
The little search widget, if you read my original post is the ONLY functionality of the old start menu worth keeping. And more to the point, should just get its own widget rather than being the one useful piece jammed into the obsolete kitchen sink that is the old start menu.