JorgeA

Cool, I will pass it on. The only note is that, according to the web page, this workaround will work only with retail (not OEM) versions of Windows 8. So presumably it wouldn't work on a factory-installed Win8 machine. But if the time comes to consider moving to 8.1, he can try it anyway, see what happens, and then decide what to do about getting that MS account. Thanks very much! --JorgeA

Here's an article by a Linux enthusiast, who makes many of your same points about that OS. In light of the latest outrages about Windows 8.1 reported by MagicAndre, TELVM, and Formfiller (see the last several posts above this one), this will all be good to know going in. --JorgeA

Also via @Charlotte, Neowin has also published a new interview with the creator of Classic Shell, Ivo Beltchev, on the Windows 7-style Start Menu and other program features introduced with their recently released version 4.0. Another good, short read. --JorgeA

For future reference: is signing up for a Microsoft Account and then going through the Windows Store the ONLY way that a Windows 8 user can change over to 8.1? Once you have 8, is there a legit way to move from 8 to 8.1 without opening an MS account? I know someone who, like me, has successfully avoided getting a Microsoft account all these years. But he did buy a Win8 machine, now he's asking if he can get 8.1 without an MS account the same way you can visit the appropriate MS web pages to download updates and service packs for other versions of Windows, without having to enter any information. --JorgeA

Maybe I should add THIS one to the Start Button thread!! --JorgeA

Now that Windows 8.1 has been released, time permitting I will go through the master list and try to determine which of them also work on Win8.1, or have separate new versions that do. If you've tried any of the Start Button/Menu replacements on the list, please let us know if they did (or didn't) work on Windows 8.1, and preferably if they've put out a version that does work there. --JorgeA

Tihiy, the developer of StartIsBack, was the subject of an interview on Neowin last week where he gives some of his professional background and the motivation for creating this Start Menu replacement. Well worth reading! Thanks to @CharlotteTheHarlot for the tip. --JorgeA

Decent interview but as expected NeoWin didn't demonstrate enough integrity to put a link to Tihiy's site or to here at MSFN. Jorge, you may want to add this to the Start Menu thread! Good idea, I'll do that -- thanks! BTW, doesn't Stardock own a piece of Neowin? Maybe that's the reason why they didn't put in a link to Tihiy's project. --JorgeA

Ah, yes, the goold ol' days. I remember my first computer, a Sanyo MBC-550, came with a box full of MS-DOS ring binders, with the text printed in Courier like a typewriter. Hmm, come to think of it that means that my memory of it is that the documentation back then was quite extensive. I think they were for DOS 1.25, I could probably still find them. But maybe you have in mind an even earlier DOS release. That's a good (and apt) way to loook at it. With Metro, they've definitely shifted over into the "decreasing efficiency" side of the bell curve. You can say that again! Five years into using the Ribbon in Office, and I'm still hunting for where the desired commands are. The way they're organized just doesn't make any sense to me. --JorgeA

I loved the "commands" that it didn't recognize... The final insult comes at the very end where it talks about "legacy" shutdown!! --JorgeA P.S. Clicking on one of the choices after the video ended led me to this Windows 8.1 review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2PK_rTmFk9E

As we gleefully jump into the totalitarian cage: MIT's 'Kinect of the future' looks through walls with X-ray like vision [emphasis added] I don't know which of these possibilities is scarier: that Mr. Adib is oblivious to the implications of the technology that he's helping to develop -- or that he's not oblivious. Brought to you by the Forward-Looking Folks at MIT --JorgeA EDIT: typo!

Point well taken. Documentation for Linux itself and for Linux software is generally quite poor. And there ARE the Linux snobs out there who expect people to build their own cars. But what I'm saying is that, at least, most (all?) Linux distros have not been Metrofied such that the user is limited to looking only at the surface of things as if if were a magical box that does stuff. That's where Windows seems to be headed. Instead, Linux distros are (so far) keeping to the desktop + CLI model where you can look inside and get into the file system, explore, and learn how it's all put together. --JorgeA

Oh yeah, another reason (not) to do your work in the cloud: Outage Disrupts East Coast Internet Traffic So let's say I'm hip and have eagerly joined the ranks of the cloud, thinking I'm helping to bring in the future. I'm preparing a crucial analysis spreadsheet, or I'm putting together a complex price estimate for a customer, or I'm on a deadline to submit a magazine article. Not quite ready for submission yet to my boss/customer/editor, there's some work yet to do -- and then all of a sudden the Internet goes down "for several hours" and I can't get to my critical document. I must wait until the 'Net goes back up and only then get to finish up what I was doing and send it. As a result, my company misses an investment opportunity, or I lose the bid with my customer, or my editor cancels the article. What's the cloud service going to do for me in that case, huh? Maybe give me a prorata reimbursement out of the monthly subscription for the time the service was down? Big whoop. Note that this hazard is in addition to the danger of the Internet going down just when you need to send that file. In cloud computing, because you are dependent on the Internet 100% of the time, the probability of an ill-timed harmful failure of this type increases exponentially. ¡Viva Windows 8 and the Brave New World of computing that it's helping to bring about! --JorgeA

TELVM, That is a ROFL on the illustration!! Yeah, with most Linux distributions that I've seen (except for Ubuntu and maybe Fedora, which I tried once and couldn't make heads or tails out of), I get the sense that they RESPECT users, instead of looking down on us as if we were barely trainable monkeys who are capable only of punching big blocks on a screen. --JorgeA

Only if he's on a wireless connection, LOL. --JorgeA

Arts and crafts peak, and once they do, they go downhill. Take literature: I would say it peaked in the 19th century around with Dostoyevsky, Hugo, Goethe, Dickens, Tolstoy and went downhill from there. Sure, there were some great works in the 20th century, but they haven't reached the greatness of Brothers Karamazov etc. and the 21st century so far is an utter trash heap compared to the 19th. Music: You've said it yourself. And by the way, where's the new Ninth Symphony? That story is pretty similar as with literature here. And arts peak far sooner now: Movies, despite a far younger medium than the above, have already peaked, too. 70s and 80s (and many 90s) films wipe the floor with most newer productions. Even straight action films twenty-thirty years ago had a lot more heart and skill than today's "teal and orange" abortions. Computer games: The retro scene is thriving, and for very good reasons. Engineering: The dumberization in computing, the still unmatched designs and reliability of "classic cars", CRT monitors from 12 years ago often have STILL superior color representation than the newest flat displays (along with no ghosting and blurring), analog radios from the 20s can still work while the newest digital models die due to missing codecs and stuff, analog TV was able to withstand anything and produce a picture, while the newest digital TVs die once the signal becomes slightly distorted. There are examples galore here. Stuff turns to s*** a lot faster nowadays, and progress moves backwards quite a lot. That's pretty downbeat, but I'm going to give my reply anyway even if it is a bit OT... Sometimes I get the feeling that we're living in a civilization which has run out of cultural and spiritual steam and has begun to decline, the only question being how steeply. And the things that you bring up are illustrative of this. It's as if in literature all the important philosphical points have been made and in music all the interesting combinations of notes have been composed already, and there's nothing new left to say. We see it in film, too -- sequels and remakes seem to be the order of the day. Not to mention painting, where simple geometric shapes and random drippings and other stuff that even I could do have dominated the landscape for decades. Art used to inspire, then it delighted or sparked curiosity or admiration, next it meandered into incomprehensibility, and having exhausted that mine finally it has descended into simply shocking and offending as much as possible. But now the culture has lost so many standards (of beauty, of propriety) that before long there will be nothing that can give offense and no one to shock anymore. Maybe at that point inspirational art will return to shock the adherents of Anything Goes, but I'm not banking on it -- the art world is losing its relevance and soon there will be nobody left who gives a hoot. We see a similar trajectory in tech. I wasn't in on the dawn of computing, rather shall we say sometime in the morning. The IBM PC with its stark DOS prompt was a source of unending fascination for me, and more importantly for countless others who went on to make their mark on the industry. It was an almost purely intellectual challenge: "what can you do with me?" Then Apple introduced the GUI to the broader public (I do know that it was first devised by Xerox) and interest in computers began to explode. Though the GUI represented a decline in the amount of mental effort needed to understand what's going on, the multi-window environment did enable users to see more of those inner processes simultaneously, so ultimately it was a boon to exploration, understanding, and creation. But now, with the introduction of Metro and consumption computing devices, access to the inner workings of the computer is being slowly closed off. If the Windows Desktop (and with it the command line) disappears completely -- as Mary Jo Foley predicts and Paul Thurrott seems to advocate -- then where will the next generation of IT savants and geniuses, tinkering with their machines in their bedrooms, come from to bring the next wave of technological breakthroughs? They will have been too busy updating their profiles and watching the tiles scroll up the latest inanities to bother. Superficial people in a culture of people whose diminishing capacity for attention focuses on the ephemeral. Well, maybe there won't be a need for a next wave of breakthroughs. By then our civilization will have become one of people lurching from one short-term impulse to the next, devoid of meaning or purpose and ripe for conquest by some alien culture that still believes in something, even if that something is anathema to the one value of Tolerance that we still nominally believe in but aren't willing to do anything about other than bleat. After writing this, I'm so depressed now, I'm going to surf the Web for some pr0n to snap out of it. See you in 5-6 hours. --JorgeA

Thanks . It's interesting to compare what's happening in Windows against this declaration of principles: "... We want to give you, the user the feeling again, that you actually _own your computer_, that you’re in control and have the freedom to make it work any way you want it ..." Yeah, so far they've been pretty good about it. Here's a sample image of my Netrunner desktop (with some tweaks to create a more familiar Windows look): (Click on the image for a full-size view.) Note the 3D window buttons and the translucent window borders. I have a lot to learn yet about this OS (or about Linux in general), but this is a promising start! --JorgeA

Additional security news: Judge: Google’s Tracking Not Harmful Ridiculous -- so you have to wait 'til Google (and therefore the NSA) know everything about you, such that they can enforce a single-party state by threatening to embarrass all potential opposition by disclosing private information, before you can "prove" harm? Gimme a f******g break. Microsoft security guru: Abusing data should be a felony No comment, this is just too rich. Just one quote, though: [emphasis added] --JorgeA

A couple of cyberprivacy-promoting ideas out there: Researcher argues for open hardware to defend against NSA spying Lavabit’s Founder Has An Idea: Make His Code Open Source --JorgeA

Emphasis mine. Of course as time goes on, Windows is changed to protect people from themselves because Microsoft has no care to properly educate people. We had a discussion about this before, about why the UAC exists. No, I'd say that Windows 2000 would be the last "real" Windows. One could argue that XP would be so instead, but the building blocks were already in place when it would complain about not having anti-virus installed. I took what TELVM said to mean in terms of the interface (flat and tiles vs. 3D and windows), but your point is something that had never occurred to me. Thought-provoking. --JorgeA

The alternatives I'm looking at are some flavors of Linux, mainly Netrunner and Zorin OS. Zorin was my early favorite as the UI is specifically designed to ease the transition from Windows to Linux, but the most recent version has taken on the Win8 look so it's fallen behind, in my book. Netrunner (so far, anyway) is visually stunning IMHO. --JorgeA

More security/privacy news: Top sites (and maybe the NSA) track users with “device fingerprinting” Down in the comments, the following website is offered as a way to check yourself for uniqueness: https://panopticlick.eff.org/. Although I have to wonder how only 1 out of every 3.5 million PCs could possibly have the same system fonts as my PC, given that I haven't installed any new fonts on it and it has whatever standard list of fonts came with it. (I did read the FAQ explanation, and I still don't get it.) One data bit that serves as both irony and a warning is the following: If I understand this technique correctly, then one way to combat it would be to try hiding in the crowd by using the most common settings and features possible. Buy a vanilla PC and use IE as your browser. Another take on this story about fingerprinting: Websites use device fingerprinting for secret tracking * * * * * Two of our favorite companies are getting in on the fun (we'd already reported this for Google): Microsoft, Google working on super cookies to track your activity on every device A good argument for never getting a Microsoft or Google account. Or a smartphone, let alone one with GPS on it. --JorgeA

In a discussion of the sales and prospects for Surface and Windows RT with Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott, Mary Jo Foley (who knows more than most about Microsoft's plans) issues a grim forecast for the future of the Windows Desktop. Discussion begins around 3:50. Quote starts at about 9:15: [emphasis added] This is not a surprise to us of course -- our deductive powers are considerable -- but it's significant to have our suspicioins pretty much confirmed by someone so familiar with the inner workings of the company. If she's right, then we need to either start getting used to Tiles, or start thinking about an alternative OS that's better suited to our needs and preferences. :angrym: --JorgeA

: nah nah nah. You should have been honest and said: "Because half of people click on the first result on the search results page, pre-rendering that page will be useful one haf of the time. The other half? Oh well. Wasted processing. Wasted power. Wasted time." The only reason I even mention this is because of the rationalization for destroying Windows, particularly the aesthetics like Aero Glass, for alleged power savings ( even if you don't have a battery in your wall-plugged PC! ). This is the second time now we have seen Bing spending all that saved power and CPU cycles thanks to Windows 8. Wasting power is just fine whenever they say it is. MicroHypocrisy at its finest. And what about bandwidth. And local storage. Did they really just admit to 'background download to local storage'. That adds wasted bandwidth and wasted disk space to the hypocrisy. And one more thing ... Let's hope that first search result isn't something dangerous! What if you search for "FBI Ransom Virus". Sounds to me like the authors of poison webpages only need to jack up their Google/Bing rank to make result #1 and get a free ride to the local hard drive, no clicking necessary. As long as there's a way to turn off that feature (and unless they keep burying the command in increasingly arcane places, as with JavaScript in Firefox), then I'm OK with this. Good to find out in the comments section that Chrome already does this pre-rendering. Talk about a waste of bandwidth and power. --JorgeA

LOLReverse Engineering a D-Link Backdoor A flaw, or a feature? At this point I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the NSA or some similar agency had a hand in this, too.