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CoffeeFiend

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Posts posted by CoffeeFiend

  1. what message does it send to Ballmer and Sinofsky who are so busy watching the telemetry data from the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program?

    Everybody who has any common sense or knows how to use a computer turns that spyware off. Perhaps that's the very reason why they ended up creating Win8 too: they based everything on telemetry results from complete n00bs.

  2. Oh, I've mistaken which part you had tripped on.

    the end of Microsoft's WinNT programming model => the death of Windows apps as we know it (Windows stops to be a useful OS or "ecosystem")

    and the beginning of the WinRT (Windows Runtime) model => another set of programming APIs to use (for programmers to make Tablet apps, for a dead-on-arrival platform)

    not to be confused with Windows RT, otherwise known as WOA => ghetto Windows ARM tablets (yes, naming things isn't their forte)

  3. Meanwhile in other breaking news, Ford, Mercedes, Audi and Porsche have noted declining usage of the space-wasting included spare tire thanks to data collected from their Customer Experience Improvement Program. Spokesmen for the companies say that most users have never even touched the spare tire and many do not even know that it is there or could even find it if they wanted to. 'Our research indicates that we can vastly improve their fast and fluid experience by removing this useless legacy application'. No word if other auto manufacturers will follow suit. :D

    If MS designed a car with the same methodology as they did for this Metro garbage, here's what they'd say:

    "Most of our clients hardly ever use the horn, emergency brake or the trunk, so they will be removed (not optional). As the driver hardly ever looks through the rear side windows, we might remove those by RTM too. Secondary controls (those which you're not actively using for 90% of the ride) such as turn signals, headlights, door handles and windshield wipers will be relocated in a compartment inside the glove box. And the stale and outdated controls which you actually use, like the steering wheel will be replaced with new shiny controls. For example, just slide your finger across the dash to turn. We noticed you also play a lot with the radio and AC controls, so we added animated "live" icons for it all over your windshield.

    In other news, OEMs are getting pretty dissatisfied with MS' latest plans. Acer spoke against MS a few days ago and now seemingly HP just cancelled its plans for WinRT tablets due to Surface.

    They're making everyone (their customers and their business partners) angry with Win8, Metro and Surface (and damaging their reputation), for a product that'll essentially be Zune v2 (dead in the water vs the iPad). They just can't fire Ballmer soon enough.

    Great job Mr Ballmer, you just made this long time MS fanboy walk into an Apple store today. I now know for sure I'll be buying the kids an iPad this year (and our next mp3 players were practically guaranteed to be iPods too -- it's about the only decent player left). Now I'm just one step away from buying a MacBook... Your move!

  4. I use "my event viewer" from nirsoft (free)

    its instant fast

    windows one sucks too much :P

    I thought I was the only one with these issues :lol:

    The built-in one is so darn slow to initialize and there's just *so much* inane stuff to filter out (including what one could call "normal errors" which you'll never get rid of :realmad: ) that I wrote my own tool (using the EventLogReader class) to read our server logs... It only took mere minutes to write something better (using a basic EventLogQuery to remove most of the unwanted junk, then PLINQ to filter out the data using all CPU cores). Just reading all of the data (unfiltered) i.e. tens of thousands of entries using the EventLog only takes a handful of miliseconds... It's like 3 orders of magnitude faster than the MMC snapin takes to get to a usable state. That's kind of sad when you think about it really.

    Instead of fixing issues like this, they spend their energy on their awful tablet UI and then they force it onto desktop users...

  5. Ballmer and Sinofsky have charisma of a mummified bread

    That sums it up. Zero charisma. I found they both dressed pretty poorly as well for such a big event. Jeans that look to be 15 years old and an ugly blue sweater? It just comes across as a truly pathetic attempt by an out-of-touch old man to look "cool", kind of like Steve Jobs was to Apple fans (no, we're totally not copying anyone!) At least Bill Gates wore a good looking shirt.

    Simply look how Mark Russinovich presents things in videos. He has a great charisma and it always makes fun to watch them :yes:

    Yes, and Scott Hanselman's even better. He's one of the best speakers I've ever seen at such events.

    This guy says what I think about the presentation better than I can express it: Surface: Between a Rock and a Hardware Place

    TL;DR: Huge fail (no specs, nothing works), rushed presentation right before Google presenting their tablet so they won't look like they're just following everybody else.

  6. I'd buy that *way* before a Win8 tablet: it plays FAR more video files than Win7 or 8 does out of the box (not only XviD and H.264, but also support for MKV/FLV/MOV files and such), more audio files (including FLAC and APE files), it reads PDFs and EPUBs, it has an FM radio, shows photos and what not. For $77! You could buy like 8 of these for the price of a Win RT tablet. It's the perfect device for keeping your kids entertained on a long car ride, reading an ebook somwhere comfy and what not. And it's cheap enough that you won't mind that much if your kid drops it in the pool or destroys it otherwise.

    It does most of the common things a Win RT tablet will do for a tiny fraction of the price, and it's a better device for most of the things it does (you'll need 3rd party codecs, players and readers to match that on a Win 8 RT tablet). The only big advantage WinRT has is wifi support, but there's tons of other cheap tablets that offer this as well. Win RT tablets are no competition to the iPad -- they barely compete with these cheap tablets feature-wise and they're WAY overpriced comparatively.

  7. That's funny. Windows phones already don't sell (they're like 1% of the market), Nokia is just about the only company that still bothers making them, and Nokia's sales are quickly dropping: 24.4M smart phones sold in Q1/2011, to 19.6 in Q4/2011 to a mere 11.9 in Q1/2012. And only a small part of that are Windows phones too (2M -- yep, their old Symbian phones outsell them 5 to 1). Their sales dropped more than 50% in a year, in a market that's very healthy and with HUGE growth (50% in a single year). Nokia's doing so poorly (a €929 million net loss in Q1/2012) that they're currently cutting 10000 jobs and shutting plants down. And with this announcement, analysts (Nomura Holdings Inc) just slashed their sales predictions of Nokia devices by 41% which is understandable, because who wants to buy an obsolete phone that already wasn't selling? I don't see those Surface tablets selling much better either.

    Meanwhile, iDevices are selling like crazy (enough to have made Apple the most valuable company i.e. the one with the biggest market value worldwide), and Google's activating more than 900,000 Android devices per day. MS already lost the game and they're turning Windows into garbage in order to win a war that's already lost.

  8. "A tablet that's a great PC, a PC that's a great tablet," said Steve Sinofsky from the Windows team. "A new kind of computing."

    More like: a poor tablet that's a much worse PC, or arguably not one at all.

    So they announce vaporware, with still unknown specs and an unknown price. That's almost like announcing nothing: "We're going to bypass our OEMs altogether, to create a tablet with a third of the screen res of the iPad (basically the LCD you'd expect on a $200 Android tablet) and 1% of the apps (there's over a half million apps for iPads), battery life unknown, and most likely no cheaper than a much better iPad". It's also a first gen product (I wonder if they're going to "RROD") and it comes in nauseating garish pastel colors too (including Barbie pink -- just in case you're a 6 year old girl)! I also wonder if it's actually going to be available anywhere unlike the Zune (I wanted to buy one back then but nobody in Canada sold them)? Bypassing OEMs seems like a fairly hostile move by many but then again manufacturing MS hardware hasn't made Toshiba (Zune) or Nokia (WP) any money either. If anything it'll likely make them want not to bother with Win RT. Add to that the confusing (for the average consumer) selection of CPU choice (what do you mean this Windows computer can't run any of my software?) and the "viruses/BSODs/must reformat every 6 month/coming loaded with crapware" reputation (and from a manufacturer that's known to abandon their products frequently), all in a hybrid hardware format (laptop/tablet) that just doesn't work.

    I can totally see this being a HUGE success! :rolleyes:

  9. Linux advocates like to say that their favorite OS is much more secure than Windows. Is that true, or just propaganda?

    Windows has its fair share of problems, but most of them are due to carelessness (like running malware downloaded from P2P and such), not applying updates and so on. Sure, there are some infections due to zero day exploits and such, but that could happen on any platform.

    Apple users have been saying the same "only Windows gets viruses" thing for years, nevermind that 20% of Macs have malware on them. Also, Macs have typically always been the 1st thing to get hacked in the pwn2own contests. And Android which is Linux based also has its fair share of malware. That's what happens when your platform becomes popular enough to target.

    And if you look at Secunia's statistics, in the ~3 years Win7 has been out, it had 110 advisories & 215 Vulnerabilities. Ubuntu 12.04 hasn't been out for 2 months yet (53 mere days) and it already has 24 Secunia and 68 Vulnerabilities -- roughly 25% as much but in 5% of the time. Or if you look at a LTS version (one that's still supported), from 2010 (so more like 2 years old) like 10.04 then that had 362 advisories & 1799 Vulnerabilities. So over 3x as much advisories and 8x the vulnerabilities, despite being only 2 years old (vs Win7's 3 year time span).

    Either ways, I couldn't personally care less about Linux. I'd sooner go back to crappy old WinXP (yuck!) -- at least it can still run some useful software. Or even use Win8 which is atrocious to use, but it still runs more useful software than Linux probably ever will. Running the said useful software is a requirement (work has to get done), whereas Win8's Metro garbage is just a nuisance or annoyance (it sucks, but it's still possible to do some work on the desktop). Whereas with Linux you might be able to customize the interface to your liking more, but then there's very little you can do on it besides thinkering with the OS. OS X on the other hand is a somewhat worthy replacement, and the latest Macbook Pros look fantastic, even if you'd buy one just to run Win7.

    Security will be one reason people will keep buying iPads over Win8 RT tablets though. There's tons of people who associate Windows with viruses/malware/BSODs/problems/complicated registry voodoo and what not (no matter how right or wrong they might be about that). These people will steer clear of a Windows tablet for sure. Who wants a tablet that needs to be reformatted every 6 months, right? ;)

  10. I guess that they would prefer that you shell out another $500 for a new iPad instead of trying to keep the old one clean.

    Their screen has a coating against finger smudges, and they have a page that explains how to clean them. They are also right to say that cleaning an LCD too frequently will slowly wear it (and its coating) out.

    Either ways. Win8 won't make a dent in iPad sales. If anything, Win8 laptops (non-ARM) will only eat away at Win7 laptop sales. There's going to be some people who want to try it (just like those who bought XP, Vista and Win7 tablets, often with pens). They'll soon realize it's a pretty poor device at everything it does (we've got one at work with Win7, it's incredibly sucky). Win8 RT tablets will sell as good as Zunes and Windows Phones (not at all). Far inferior hardware yet expensive, much less apps, etc.

  11. Another nice read: Final thoughts on Windows 8: A design disaster

    Edit: also Microsoft's headache: Will Windows 8 be another Vista?

    Meanwhile, Apple started making Mac Pro laptops with a 2880x1800 displays, or 5.1 megapixels. That's 2.5 times the resolution of a 1080p HDTV or your typical 1920x1080 LCD screen. They're also getting some new cool stuff like Thunderbolt ports. They've also added GPS features to iPhones and iPads, including turn-by-turn navigation and with free map updates as well (Siri is coming to the iPad as well). Best of all: it's all Metro-free.

    While MS tries real hard to kill their cash cow (seemingly making Windows Phones isn't exactly helping Nokia either), Apple is busy making incredible hardware that's going to sell like crazy.

  12. They're effectively a Metro-only tablet and so far Metro has basically nothing to offer over the iPad or Android (unless "less apps" is your main criteria to buy one)

    LOL, I had to highlight that part!

    It's true though. Just what does Metro-only tablets have to offer over their competitors? iPads have better hardware than ~100% of Metro tablets will have, they have tons of high quality apps (a huge number of apps overall too), and it'll definitely be competitive price-wise (it'll likely be cheaper than many lesser tablets). And it's not just a poor choice vs an iPad, even Android tablets are better IMO. Especially if you want something inexpensive to read some ebooks, check facebook, play some videos or music and other similar tablet-ey tasks. There's loads of half-decent Android devices at $200 or less (from Dell, Lenovo, Archos, etc).

    For basically the price of the Win8 RT license, you can pick up a Archos Arnova 7 tablet for your kids which would handle basic tasks just fine (7" 800X480 screen, 1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 4GB of flash + MicroSD expansion slot and WiFi for $110). Or if you want to spend a little more, Lenovo has some tablets under $200 that have a 7" 1024x600 screen, 16GB of flash + a MicroSD slot -- most people would be perfectly happy with that. If you're willing to spend ~2/3 of what a win8 RT tablet will cost, there are some really nice Android devices (nice LCD, fast CPUs, lots of flash, etc) from lots of manufacturers. Win8 RT can't compete with any of it.

    I'm not even interrested anymore about what stupidities these goofs are adding to this travesty OS.

    Yet I couldn't help looking at the snapshots. ;)

    That's the only reason left for my presence in this thread.

  13. Windows RT needs to blow the iPad away at the $250 to $500 range. It needs to be stunningly fast and affordable.

    There is simply no compelling reason to buy this tablet (as a consumer) otherwise.

    That's what I've been saying all along: there is no logical reason to buy one vs an iPad or Android device. The x86 tablets are all big, bulky and overly expensive and that's not going to change (even Steve Jobs said such devices sucked). ARM tablets on the other hand run none of the useful software what-used-to-be-called-Windows runs (which is the entire point of running Windows). They're effectively a Metro-only tablet and so far Metro has basically nothing to offer over the iPad or Android (unless "less apps" is your main criteria to buy one) and most likely won't beat them on price either, unless the hardware sucks comparatively (specs and/or quality). Licensing costs will probably keep prices quite inflated too.

    Also, most of those ARM devices will likely be out later in the year, months after Win8 has already hit desktops. Win8 will quickly get itself a "Vista 2" reputation on desktops (it's already begun quite well I must say), and by the time most ARM tablets are out they'll end up having to rename it Mojave 2 to be able to sell any. It'll be like trying to sell brown Zunes by saying they run Vista vs a "fashionable" iPad (while also costing more and offering less).

    There's only Ballmer and Sinofski who think they can actually pull this. I hope shareholders won't tolerate them much longer.

  14. this is done already. VS2010 can compile SSE2 (that's why Win8 requires SSE2 compatible CPU) and VS2012 adds GPU ciding : AMP C++

    I guess my point wasn't all that clear. Yes, VC++ can definitely use SSE2 instructions, but I meant for .NET languages (like C#). Either ways, the general point was that there are so many improvements they could do which would be extremely useful. But instead they seemingly spent 100% of their time on screwing up the UI and on Metro garbage instead (killing XP compatibility in the process).

  15. Windows 8 is the future it is superior

    That's your opinion. To reuse your own words, one could say it's a delusion too. I'd say it's vastly inferior, and if that's the future of Windows, then my future is bound to be mostly Windows-free.

    Adapt or perish

    With Metro, Microsoft picked the "perish" option :yes:

    the time it takes you to learn a new interface is nothing compared with the reduced stress from using it

    It's easy to learn the new stuff, just like it's always been. It's just too bad that Metro is just a gimmicky hindrance, merely getting in your way. Win8 feels like a crippled version of Windows -- and borderline not calling it Windows anymore (closer to a phone OS)

    I wouldn't say it will be another Vista. It'll be far worse than that!

  16. is it even possible to replace the Metro start screen with anything like this? (My semi-educated guess is that it is not.)

    Just that part alone? That's highly unlikely. You'd most likely have to replace the desktop along with it too, and the file explorer (some parts of IE might rely on it too), the taskbar (with the zone for tray icons), various shell-provided features like the control panel, volume control, network connections, etc (lots of things having to be compatible with the old system it would replace). To recreate Win7's shell as-is it would take millions and millions of lines of code. It would take years to write, maintain and bugfix -- assuming you can even find the developer talent (a small army of highly skilled programmers willing to work for free instead of spending time with their families). It's a whole lot easier to just keep using Win7 until 2020 or later ;)

  17. Frankstained OS already happened since DOS era though

    Sure, we tweaked it a bit but we weren't exactly swapping large complex parts like we'd be today. Systems were much simpler back then. And yes, it's been that long since.

    Some replacing PC-DOS's IBMIO.COM & IBMDOS.COM with their own bios handling routine

    I can't think of too many specific examples here as 99% of the work I've done under DOS was with MS-DOS. But TSR's and hooking interrupts with your own handler was extremely common (it's the way things worked, from mouse drivers, to mscdex, to networking and whatever) and not frankeinstein-ish. If you're referring to using lightly patched files, then that wouldn't be a big deal either. I wouldn't say that replacing large-ish parts of the OS with completely different code was very common back then either (everything was bolted-on in a very hack-ish manner), albeit more so than it is today.

    replacing MS-DOS's command.com with one from Norton

    Or 4DOS which I used back then but it never gained much popularity either.

    And of course those numerous shell replacement for win 3.x

    None of which I've ever heard of (my memory might be failing me though) or that got overly popular...

    I've seen employment of specifics shells in kiosks or net-cafees

    I've written such shell replacements ;) Last time being a year ago or so (for Karaoke systems for someone on this forum). That's been the main use for alternate shells since Win9x really. It locks people out of stuff they shouldn't touch, and such simple "kiosk apps" are often very quick and easy to write unlike full-featured shell replacements. For example, KDE (a desktop environment for Linux) has over 6 million lines of code (whereas the Karaoke app was closer to 60 lines)

  18. The idea sure is intriguing, although it looks like the most recent version is more than two years old. Maybe the release of Windows 8 with the Metro UI will give 'em a boost.

    There's been a bunch of such alternative shells for years. Most of them aren't well known, because there's never been much of a demand, and most of them suck pretty badly too. The feature (replacing the shell) has been used mainly by people who want to lock the system down, allowing a single program to run (a "kiosk mode" of sorts). I don't see such shells taking off anytime soon. If anything people will just stick to older versions of Windows or move on to something else (just like they always have), instead of building themselves a frankein-OS consisting of the kernel of a unusable OS, along with a so-so 3rd party shell nobody uses or has ever heard of, and perhaps some extras bolted-on top of it.

  19. This illustrates well why user choice is so important.

    I very much agree. In fact, I think that's the whole point of using a computer (even more so one with Windows): you got choices. Tons of them. Not only do we have tons of customization in the OS department (we've always had to tweak some settings in Windows to make it better), but there's so much software for just about every job, and fantastic developer tools too. Whatever you need, there's software to do it -- some aimed at beginners (with simplified UIs e.g. a one-click video transcode app) and others for experts (e.g. avisynth scripting and MeGUI). With Win8, Microsoft is making choices that please almost nobody (unless you're on a mobile device -- something MS proved they can't sell time and time again) and they're making it the only option (more like a "device"), along with an Apple-like walled garden.

  20. Windows 7 is a step back from this precisely because of what you described. Grouping taskbar items means that I need an additional click to see what's open.

    That's definitely not what I'd personally call a step back. Yes, grouping was bad in the XP era (and to some extent Vista too), where we had super-wide taskbar buttons which very much suck. With a few tasks opened, the text was too narrow to be useful (the text might as well not have been there at all -- just like in Win7). And without grouping (if you're a heavy multitasker) you just end up with 72 gazillion buttons that are a few pixels wide which is even worse (don't know which one it is? Click them all one by one!). Win7 gave us nice big icons which you can spot far quicker than before (looks good too), and if you have loads of documents opened in the same app (which isn't the case with the vast majority -- it's mainly things like Explorer and Word which do) you can use the thumbnails to find it. And if you don't like grouping, you can disable it too (unlike Win8, we still have some options over functionality).

    If anything, I'd say it's by FAR the best taskbar ever, and Win7's best feature hands down. It's one of the main reasons why I loathe to use older versions of Windows. Just my $0.02.

  21. that is Sinofsky and no one else. He likes it so now all 1 Billion Windows users have to like it :realmad:

    Well, it's not like I was blaming individual developers (who obviously have no say in it). Most likely other incompetent managers like Ballmer have a say in it.

    if I want I can change the view to an advanced and now I get all control options I need. All users are happy. This is great UX and not the bul***** Sinofsky does :realmad:

    But Windows with Sinofsky is the opposite: "f*** you customers, we (MSFT) are gods and you stupid normal users have to praise us and use what we (MSFT) think is the best." :realmad: :realmad: :realmad: :realmad:

    Exactly. Give users options and you could turn this disaster into a success. Won't happen though. They'll continue on their journey to kill desktop computing, only to see massive growth in Android and iOS devices. They're just making themselves slowly irrelevant by making their core product worse, thus pushing users to their competitor's products.

    yes, with Dev10 (VS2010) a lot of users complained about the blurry font and they tweaked it so that it is now ok to use.

    I never experienced that specific problem. There are so many things to fix and improve though... VS2010 was a massive improvement over VS2008 for C# users. For C++ users though it's not quite that clear cut (no refactoring support, no intellisense in C++/CLI, things like "go to definition" have gotten very slow, etc).

    They're fixing the main issues (read: extremely stupid decisions) in VS11, but I don't really care for any of the new stuff (there isn't much new either) as far as C# development goes. I'm still looking for a single worthwhile reason to upgrade to it. It seems like I'd gain exactly nothing from using it (less than MS Office 2010 brings over MS Office 2007?) Instead of messing with the GUI so much (mostly screwing things up), they could have added something like Resharper (or CodeRush), LINQPad or the REPL from Roslyn. Better support (built-in) for other source control and tests frameworks than TFS (which nobody uses or wants of) and tons of other things (like using SIMD instruction sets, or something for GPGPU programing). But instead, you get ALL CAPS MENUS and what not. C++ developers would kill for something like VisualAssistX built-in, along with leading support of C++11 features but they get none of it. It feels like they're wasting a massive amount of man-hours on pointless stuff while ignoring the real problems.

    it seems like using Comic Sans ( as BOB used to) is considered the most painful one and with the lowest chance of being lethal (fail at failing :w00t: )

    They haven't updated it to include Metro yet.

  22. News is coming out that Microsoft is giving in to developers' clamoring for a free desktop development platform in the wake of Windows 8.

    @CoffeeFiend, @MagicAndre, @jaclaz among others: What do you think? Is this a hard-earned victory; too little too late; something better/worse?

    It shows that DevDiv actually listens to users and paying customers. Nobody wanted the old depressing everything-looks-the-same monochrome theme so they gave in on that. All-caps-everything is ridiculous, so they're adding a setting to disable it at least. It's way too soon to lose XP support, so it will come in a feature pack. Metro-only development in the express ed was a braindead move, so they brought back desktop development. Yes, we have to be pretty loud before it actually happens, but we're getting positive results on most of the big issues. If enough people complain, they do something about it. At least it's not much worse than the previous version anymore.

    Unlike WinDiv which doesn't care about users or customers, nor how they use their computers. They're right and everybody else is wrong. Metro you will use, and you'll like it -- they've decided so. It doesn't matter if the interface is backwards and counterproductive. And of course they're too arrogant to give us any options. It's a lame and desperate attempt to use their desktop monopoly to sell a few tablets that's going to backfire.

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