Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

[JorgeA]

Yeah, that was kind of a silly title, wasn't it?

 

Meanwhile, back on the dumbification front, I just discovered this thread from Technet where people are complaining about the scrollbar button disappearing into almost nothingness in IE10.

 

I came across it while searching to see if there was a way to bring back the 3D scrollbar button in IE11, which I recently installed on a laptop. (IE10 wasn't any better in that respect.) It's so faint, you can hardly tell it's there. Can somebody explain to me how this constitutes an improvement in usability?

 

I did apply the CSS idea mentioned towards the end of the thread. The black scrollbar button I came up with is definitely easier to locate on the screen than the dim gray default one, but it's still a boring solid black rectangle.

 

Selected comments from the Technet thread:

 

I have installed IE10 and I am wondering if there is a way to change the color of the scrollbar. The light grey is so light it's hard to see. I have tried a few things and searched around and come up with nothing. I love the preview otherwise and would like to keep it but this one thing might make me use another as I swap back and forth between IE and Comodo Dragon.

 

.

 

Microsoft has degraded our Windows 7 experience on purpose by drop-loading this Windows 8-looking IE10 bullsh!t on our systems via Windows Update. I've held back for few weeks to give it an honest try, but here I come tonight to complain and lo and behold there's already a thread here, right on top.

 

These flat, gray scroll thumbs cause a serious reduction in usability. When it's difficult to see something it's difficult to see it, no matter how much you practice trying to get used to it.

 

There's no getting used to this. It causes a long-term, albeit small, reduction in usability.

 

It isn't about the color, it's about the style, which of course includes the color. But those few little extra pixels that define the edge, and the lines within, areuseful for helping us all spot that control, visually. That's why they were put there.

 

Microsoft, who said it's okay to remove the proper, conformant visual styles from controls in applications you provide for Windows 7 users? If I'd have wanted Windows 8 I'd have bought it. You're breaking your own published standards!

 

Now we have flat, unrecognizable scrollbar thumbs in IE10 on Windows 7 that depart from standards and are barely visible instead of scrollbars that have the style of all the other applications, as defined by the theme of the desktop. It's clearly a move designed to degrade the user experience for millions of Windows 7 users.

 

Do you children on the IE10 team think it's great fun to play "hide the scroll thumb" from all the old Windows 7 users?

 

I hope this offends you r*tards who put extra effort into the coding to specifically avoid adhering to the desktop standards of Windows 7 in order to try to make Windows 7 users like it less, because you sure as h*ll don't deserve any praise for making my computer work day a little more difficult. If some executive forces you to do stuff like this, you need to tell him or her to kiss your shiny metal...

 

You're going to drive your company into the ground trying to manipulate people, instead of just engineering a good and proper product.

 

 

 

--JorgeA

 

[JorgeA]

It's becoming common wisdom now, and not just the opinions of a few cranks and haterz:

 

The scale of Windows 8.x’s failure is staggering

 

From launch on October 26 2012, Windows 8.x took 18 months (with a little rounding up) to get to where it is now -- 13.73 percent. 18 months after it launched on October 22 2009, Windows 7 was at 33.22 percent. At the rate it’s going (an average of 0.76 percent a month), Windows 8.x will take another two years to reach that mark[...]

 

We can make excuses for Windows 8.x failure -- Windows 7 followed an unpopular OS, people were looking to upgrade from XP, and tablets didn’t exist when Windows 7 launched. And of course that’s all true. But here’s the thing -- Microsoft’s desktop dominance has only lost three percent in six years and is still at around 88 percent (most of that erosion is down to OS X). Remember, we’re talking about desktop market share, not users.

 

Need a bit more convincing about the scale of Windows 8.x failure? Let’s look at the unpopular Vista. In the 18 months after it launched on Jan 30 2007, it had 16.87 percent market share, 3 percent more than Windows 8.x has now.

[boldfacing added]

 

The bottom line:

 

No matter what you have, if someone offers you something better you’ll likely take it. And if you perceive it to be worse, you’ll leave it. Windows 8.x's slow growth, and Windows 7’s rock solid market share make it pretty clear what people think of Microsoft's "New Windows".

 

--JorgeA

 

[JorgeA]

And a peek ahead at Windows 9:

 

Microsoft’s head of research opens up about Google X, Windows 9, and the future

 

New CEO Satya Nadella has made clear his vision of a cloud-enabled Windows. He even stressed it in his first letter to the to the company.

 

Yet Windows at present doesn’t rely on the cloud for computing power. Sure, there’s OneDrive, a great place to store stuff, and the Office family of apps can be run from the cloud. But unlike other Microsoft products, that’s where the integration ends.

 

Bing, by contrast, lives and breathes because of the hidden, back-end power of the cloud, as does Siri – and by extension, some of the neatest features of the Windows Phone platform (Android too, of course). But the desktop? Not so much.

 

That’ll change in Windows 9, if Microsoft Research has anything to say about it.

 

[...]

 

Microsoft has a lot of customers that are big companies with hundreds of thousands of employees. Your smartphone may realize you take the same route to work everyday, thanks to data stored and analyzed in the loud, but Windows apps and the OS itself just don’t get it.

 

“Using machine learning to extract relationships, entities, key ideas being worked on and bring those to the surface in tools. Maybe even digital-assistant tools to make companies more productive and smarter. That’s one area we’re going at” for Windows 9, Lee said.

 

--JorgeA

 

[jaclaz]

 

 

 

Microsoft has a lot of customers that are big companies with hundreds of thousands of employees. Your smartphone may realize you take the same route to work everyday, thanks to data stored and analyzed in the loud, but Windows apps and the OS itself just don’t get it.

 

“Using machine learning to extract relationships, entities, key ideas being worked on and bring those to the surface in tools. Maybe even digital-assistant tools to make companies more productive and smarter. That’s one area we’re going at” for Windows 9, Lee said.

 

Well, a lot of people is unhappy with the fact that the NSA (or other three or more letter Government agencies) are capable of snooping on your private life and communications.

 

Some are even upset by the fact that with a Court Warrant this is actually legal.

 

BUT, after all, these are the "good guys", and - mainly - they are in good faith.

 

Imagine that the one snooping on your habits is Microsoft or the company you work for (or just the geekish IT guy in it). 

 

No, it's not going to end well.

 

jaclaz

[Flasche]

Well, a lot of people is unhappy with the fact that the NSA (or other three or more letter Government agencies) are capable of snooping on your private life and communications.

 

Some are even upset by the fact that with a Court Warrant this is actually legal.

 

BUT, after all, these are the "good guys", and - mainly - they are in good faith.

 

Imagine that the one snooping on your habits is Microsoft or the company you work for (or just the geekish IT guy in it). 

 

No, it's not going to end well.

 

jaclaz

 

 

Actually that is a good point Jaclaz. I know this is old news, but its still an Important one. http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/politics/nsa-snooping/

 

CNN Snippet---

(CNN) -- The National Security Agency's internal watchdog detailed a dozen instances in the past decade in which its employees intentionally misused the agency's surveillance power, in some cases to snoop on their love interests.

A letter from the NSA's inspector general responding to a request by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, lists the dozen incidents where the NSA's foreign intelligence collection systems were abused. The letter also says there are two additional incidents now under investigation and another allegation pending that may require an investigation. --- End Snippet

Edited May 12, 2014 by Flasche

[jaclaz]

@Flasche 

You may have not read "The Dead Past" by Isaac Asimov, a short story written in 1956, which I recommend you to read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past

In the immortal words of Thaddeus Araman:

Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone, and may each of you fry in hell forever. Arrest rescinded.

 

 

jaclaz

[Flasche]

@Flasche 

You may have not read "The Dead Past" by Isaac Asimov, a short story written in 1956, which I recommend you to read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past

In the immortal words of Thaddeus Araman:

Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone, and may each of you fry in hell forever. Arrest rescinded.

 

 

jaclaz

 

Alright I'll check out this short story of yours. (is this the story http://www.bestlibraryspot.com/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27323.html)

Edited May 12, 2014 by Flasche

[JorgeA]

 

 

 

 

Microsoft has a lot of customers that are big companies with hundreds of thousands of employees. Your smartphone may realize you take the same route to work everyday, thanks to data stored and analyzed in the loud, but Windows apps and the OS itself just don’t get it.

 

“Using machine learning to extract relationships, entities, key ideas being worked on and bring those to the surface in tools. Maybe even digital-assistant tools to make companies more productive and smarter. That’s one area we’re going at” for Windows 9, Lee said.

 

Well, a lot of people is unhappy with the fact that the NSA (or other three or more letter Government agencies) are capable of snooping on your private life and communications.

 

Some are even upset by the fact that with a Court Warrant this is actually legal.

 

BUT, after all, these are the "good guys", and - mainly - they are in good faith.

 

Imagine that the one snooping on your habits is Microsoft or the company you work for (or just the geekish IT guy in it). 

 

No, it's not going to end well.

 

jaclaz

 

 

Good catch, about the implications of the next version of Windows. Let's just say that it will make the NSA's job a lot easier...

 

It doesn't bother me that private companies might want to collect information about me -- what are they going to do with it, try to sell me something?

 

Incomparably more serious is what could happen if the information ends up in the hands of government agents: if a person is "interesting" enough, they could arrest him or send a drone his way. The possibility of government using the information is the reason I don't like private business knowing a whole lot about me.

 

Had the technology been available back then, I have no doubt that the British monarch's men would have aimed drones at the Continental Congress, or read the e-mails of the Committees of Correspondence to know what they were up to.

 

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

And speaking of government spying on private individuals, here's more good news on that front:

 

Second House committee approves bill to end NSA bulk collection

 

The House Intelligence Committee, in closed session, voted to approve the USA Freedom Act Thursday instead of advancing the committee's own NSA reform bill. Many privacy groups had criticized the Intelligence Committee bill, called the FISA Transparency and Modernization Act, saying it would have made minimal changes to the NSA's mass collection of U.S. telephone records.

 

Instead, the Intelligence Committee, by voice vote, approved the USA Freedom Act, which would require the NSA to get case-by-case court approval before collecting the telephone or business records of any U.S. resident.

 

[...]

 

The USA Freedom Act, which now heads to the House floor for a vote, would also limit the controversial bulk collection program by allowing the FBI, asking on behalf of the NSA, to request U.S. phone records from carriers only if there are "reasonable grounds" to believe that the information sought pertains to a foreign power, an agent of a foreign power, or a person in contact with a foreign power.

 

--JorgeA

 

[jaclaz]

Alright I'll check out this short story of yours. (is this the story http://www.bestlibraryspot.com/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27323.html)

Yep.

 

 

 

It doesn't bother me that private companies might want to collect information about me -- what are they going to do with it, try to sell me something?

Just as an example, imagine that the "private" company knows about your income, knows about your politicla preferences and culinary tastes, can identify you online and filters your search results "pushing to the top" what you "should" like according to them.

Are you really-really going to (say) page 38 of google results to find the first non-pushed article/site/resource/whatever?

(and this provided that they just don't remove altogether what according to them might not suit you)

 

Incomparably more serious is what could happen if the information ends up in the hands of government agents: if a person is "interesting" enough, they could arrest him or send a drone his way. The possibility of government using the information is the reason I don't like private business knowing a whole lot about me.

Well, again, normally the GI are the "good guys", and directly or indirectly they are (or should be) controlled by *someone* (the people you contributed to elect to the Government), at least in theory.

A "private company" has normally three points in it's agenda:

1. money
2. more money
3. yet more money

with "ethics" between 12th and 38th place .

Having access to your habits, tastes, etc. is not a good thing, you personally may be technologically evolved enough to be able to deal with the traps that they may lay before you, bit the vast majority of people may be not.

 

Had the technology been available back then, I have no doubt that the British monarch's men would have aimed drones at the Continental Congress, or read the e-mails of the Committees of Correspondence to know what they were up to.

You are I believe confusing the technology with the "principles", the British intercepted (and opened with some steam from a teapot ) or simply kept letters sent by the US representatives all the time, it is called "spying" or "intelligence", nothing has changed much.

Here is an example of a letter that President Washington might not have wanted to fall in the hands of the enemy :

https://web.archive.org/web/20071111224808/http://www.clements.umich.edu/Spies/letter-1781may29.html

(of no particular relevance from a military standpoint, though)

 

 

jaclaz

[TELVM]

Microsoft’s head of research opens up about Google X, Windows 9, and the future

 

"Presently, Windows doesn’t rely on the cloud for computing power … That’ll change in Windows 9."

 

 

“I really worry about everything going to the cloud, I think it’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.

 

With the cloud, you don’t own anything. You already signed it away through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to.

 

I want to feel that I own things. A lot of people feel, ‘Oh, everything is really on my computer,’ but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it."

 

 

“Nowadays in the digital world you can hardly own anything anymore. It’s all these subscriptions… and you’ve already agreed that every right in the world belongs to them and you’ve got no rights. And if you’ve put it on the cloud, you don’t own it. You’ve signed away all the rights to it. If it disappears, if they decide deliberately that they don’t like you and they cut that off, you’ve lost all the photographs of your life.

 

When we grew up ownership was what made America different than Russia.”

 

Steve Wozniak

 

 

 

As far as here your servant is concerned, here's to the cloud:

 

[JorgeA]

LOVE those images!!

 

Do you create them yourself?

 

Here's some more about the pleasures and perils of cloud computing:

 

'Everything as a service': A key piece of Microsoft's push to get IT to the cloud

 

Will these latest overtures do anything to win over IT pros and developers who are still not willing to take their first tentative steps toward the cloud? The reaction among the thousands attending TechEd in Houston this week should be a good litmus test.

 

Judging from the comments at the bottom, they have their work cut out for them:

 

I think Microsoft is in bed deeper with the NSA than one can possibly imagine. Operating System as a Service? LOL. Over my dead body.

 

And an interesting point-counterpoint on cloud computing:

 

Are Consumers Better Off Putting Everything in the Cloud?

 

--JorgeA

 

[TELVM]

... Personal cloud services are an important advance. To ignore them is to remain stuck in the PC era as the rest of the world moves on ...

 

No problemo.

 

[JorgeA]

 

It doesn't bother me that private companies might want to collect information about me -- what are they going to do with it, try to sell me something?

Just as an example, imagine that the "private" company knows about your income, knows about your politicla preferences and culinary tastes, can identify you online and filters your search results "pushing to the top" what you "should" like according to them.

Are you really-really going to (say) page 38 of google results to find the first non-pushed article/site/resource/whatever?

(and this provided that they just don't remove altogether what according to them might not suit you)

 

I use a search engine that doesn't (AFAIK) filter or sort search results according to anything I've done before.

 

You might know the answer to this: can Google prioritize your search results according to what it thinks you like, if you do not have a Google account or if you're not signed into Google?

 

Regarding my political affilliation, for better or worse that's a matter of public record. And, come to think of it, if I were searching for restaurants in a given area I do think it would save me time to be spared results for cuisines that I can't stand. Not that they'll be able to know what I like, anyway, for the reasons already stated.

 

Again, though, all this goes out the window if and when this type of information becomes accessible to government agencies. To repeat, it's for that reason that I do object to private companies collecting it.

 

 

Incomparably more serious is what could happen if the information ends up in the hands of government agents: if a person is "interesting" enough, they could arrest him or send a drone his way. The possibility of government using the information is the reason I don't like private business knowing a whole lot about me.

Well, again, normally the GI are the "good guys", and directly or indirectly they are (or should be) controlled by *someone* (the people you contributed to elect to the Government), at least in theory.

A "private company" has normally three points in it's agenda:

1. money
2. more money
3. yet more money

with "ethics" between 12th and 38th place .

Having access to your habits, tastes, etc. is not a good thing, you personally may be technologically evolved enough to be able to deal with the traps that they may lay before you, bit the vast majority of people may be not.

 

That's where I definitely have a different perspective than you. I don't view guvvies as necessarily the good guys; in fact, from a global perspective, historically they are the single largest agents of death and looting. And even states with established traditions of constitutionalism or general orderliness can turn violent and tyrannical in the space of a few years, and have.

 

From a practical standpoint, government is much more difficult to control than private businesses. Using Albert O. Hirschman's "voice and exit" model of acting on dissatisfaction with a given system, in a market setting the individual can both use his "voice" (contacting the company, calling reporters, organizing consumer protests) and then, if all that fails, "exit" the system (stop doing business with the company altogether). In a state setting, the individual can (sometimes) use his "voice," but then the "exit" option is typically much more difficult to apply: it's a lot easier to stop buying from Microsoft than it is to move to a different country where the language and culture might be vastly different and you don't know anybody.

 

Hence it's easier to get a private company to do the right thing than it is to get a government to do the right thing. Elections are blunt instruments where a multitude of different factors go into making a single decision (whom to vote for, once every several years), whereas in the market you are making daily micro-decisions based on much narrower criteria (do I like that browser's UI? do I like how this car accelerates, its gas consumption? do I like the way the salesman treated me?). You can customize your life much more closely to your own preferences by dealing with the vendors who offer more of what you value, and avoiding those who offer less of it.

 

And don't get me started on the "ethics" of governments or the actual motivations of government officials... Just remember that it's a heck of a lot harder to remove them (or to get away from them) than it is to fire your grocer or electrician.

 

 

 

Had the technology been available back then, I have no doubt that the British monarch's men would have aimed drones at the Continental Congress, or read the e-mails of the Committees of Correspondence to know what they were up to.

You are I believe confusing the technology with the "principles", the British intercepted (and opened with some steam from a teapot ) or simply kept letters sent by the US representatives all the time, it is called "spying" or "intelligence", nothing has changed much.

Here is an example of a letter that President Washington might not have wanted to fall in the hands of the enemy :

https://web.archive.org/web/20071111224808/http://www.clements.umich.edu/Spies/letter-1781may29.html

(of no particular relevance from a military standpoint, though)

 

Nice find.

 

Agreed that spying is as old as the hills. Technology, though, is making a whale of a difference today to the espionage arts: it's becoming feasible for a government to intercept the vast majority of communications by its subjects citizens, as well as their movements, and to correlate all of these in near-real time.

 

--JorgeA

 

EDIT: wording improvement

Edited May 13, 2014 by JorgeA

[JorgeA]

In cyberprivacy news -- some good, some bad:

 

What the Most Secure Email in the Universe Would Look Like

 

The question of exactly how secure any communication can be is of no small relevance either to national security watchers worried about losing secrets or to a public increasingly concerned about governmental invasion of digital privacy. The breakthrough shows that it is possible to send a message that can’t be intercepted, no matter how determined the National Security Agency is to intercept it.

 

[...]

 

University of Oxford quantum physicist Artur Ekert calls quantum encryption the ultimate physical limits of privacy. Other key distribution schemes such as the Diffie Hellman scheme, rely on the difficulty of mathematical problems to work, whereas quantum encryption does not. According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, objects viewed on the atomically small quantum scale change their behavior when viewed. Quantum encryption offers the possibility of a message so secure that any attempt to read it without authorization will destroy it, not because of some programmer’s whim but because of the way subatomic particles operate.

 

 

Scientists develop first completely covert communication system with lasers

 

As computing power continues to increase, previously unbreakable forms of encryption have crumbled. Now, though, we appear to be on the verge of what may be truly unbreakable quantum encryption. It’s possible in the not too distant future no one will be able to spy on a message secured with these advanced methods no matter how long they hammer at it. Researchers are now looking to take things one step further and completely camouflage a message so no one even knows that a message was sent in the first place.

 

Greenwald: NSA Plants ‘Backdoors’ in Foreign-Bound Routers

 

Journalist Glenn Greenwald’s new book highlights a snooping exploit of interest to Silicon Valley: the National Security Agency, he asserts, plants intelligence-gathering “backdoors” in U.S. suppliers’ routers and other networking hardware before they reach foreign customers.

 

[...]

 

“The NSA routinely receives–or intercepts–routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported from the U.S. before they are delivered to the international customers,” Greenwald writes.

 

“The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal, and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some ‘SIGINT tradecraft…is very hands-on (literally!)’”

 

There is no indication that U.S. companies were aware of the practice.

 

This'll do wonders for the U.S. tech export trade. Any network equipment manufacturers based in, say, Switzerland?

 

--JorgeA