JorgeA Posted July 10, 2015 Share Posted July 10, 2015 By the looks of this, we may get less support time with Windows 10 than older versions. The oldest desktop I currently have is from 1998, has 256MB of RAM (upgraded) and still works, I used Win2k on it last night, it also has Win98SE. If Windows 10 were to be "supported for the lifetime of the device", I should be getting updates longer than a decade, as this PC has clearly lasted longer than a decade. Heehee, that would be great! But I "trust" the lawyers over at MSFT to make sure that whatever terms they come up with, end up excluding this very scenario. --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted July 10, 2015 Share Posted July 10, 2015 Your table, chair, and coffee mug?? You really don't think your life is a bit empty without a connected coffee mug?http://www.pauligmuki.com/index.php?lang=enPaulig Muki is a coffee cup with an e-paper display that's powered by nothing more than hot coffee. You can download your own pics on the screen, but that's not very revolutionary, right? We have all seen the "I'm the Boss" mugs before. The fun starts when you fill your first cup in the morning and your friend’s messages appear on the screen. It might be hilarious, exciting, romantic or even embarrassing. That depends entirely on your friends. I guess a lot of people miss gross images and pranks very early in the morning....... or maybe the friends and colleagues I ever had are actually (much) worse than average . jaclaz Well, I don't know your friends so I can't confirm or refute this... But it's amazing that somebody has ALREADY thought of a networked coffee mug. Hey, to judge from some of the names associated with that website, it sounds like the mug is Finnish. I wonder how many exiles from the Nokia massacre they have working for them? They do have experience designing connected devices... --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted July 10, 2015 Share Posted July 10, 2015 @NoelCWell it's still the same disagreement, which is not at all a disagreement , it's just a difference in the metrics used, I judge a product as it is delivered by the manufacturer, then - only later - I consider the potentiality it has once tweaked properly, which in the case of Windows 8/8.1 is more a matter of completely turning the OS upside down and rebuild it. In a perfect world your books (how many pages it is now the 8/8.1 version? 123 pages? ) would have no relevance whatsoever, as well as many of the third party software that is vital to make it work and look the way it should, the OS would be already fully functional (or almost so) and the end user would need to make only minor adjustments. @JorgeAWell, if you think about it the technology in itself is nice, though applied to the "wrong" use.I will give you an example of a "right" use (when and if a similar technology will be actually available to all) and of course in my perverted mind, let's use it to replace the images of disappeared children on milk cartons, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/04/etan_patz_case_why_did_dairies_put_missing_children_on_their_milk_cartons_.htmlor to broadcast to population TORs and similar high priority advice:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_warning jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoelC Posted July 10, 2015 Share Posted July 10, 2015 (edited) The thing is, Win8.1 has more bad parts to avoid than any previous OS by Microsoft. And it seems to need more tweaking than previous OSes in order to get it into good working condition. More bad parts and an unprecedented number of tweaks and augmentations, yes - but it IS possible. Maybe it's because the 3rd party developers are stronger now that Win 8.1 can be molded into goodness. Simply said, the things Microsoft wrecked can be worked around to the point where it's actually very good. It's probably a Good Thing, as I'll most likely be running it for a while. I envision the kernel and window dressing as two different parts. Up to the early 2010s there were still some folks with real talent engineering the kernel, and long-running projects came to fruition. The kernel hasn't changed very much, implying the people engineering it have just given up or retired, and the window dressing is changing for the worse - WAY worse - implying the dolt application programmers there have taken over and think they can make an OS. Only the gaming aspects of the newest system seem to have any strong engineering backing them. So far with Win 10 it's NOT possible - with any level of effort or expertise - to make it the best OS ever. It's not even possible to make it as good as the systems that have come before. Even once the desktop is tamed (via many of the same tweaks and augments that work for Win 8.1 and some new ones) it's less efficient to do the same things. Plus Windows Update now kills the tweaks, which have to be remade, quite regularly. Just saying it's good doesn't make it so. I'm afraid Microsoft's "perception is reality", "customers are stupid", "there's one born every minute", "you will be assimilated" stance isn't going to fly when the rubber meets the road. "Break it" thinking only works if the talent is available to "remake it" better than it was. -Noel Edited July 10, 2015 by NoelC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted July 10, 2015 Share Posted July 10, 2015 You don't say! Wi-Fi Sense in Windows 10 could result in privacy and security problems Windows 10 is about to arrive and with it comes a host of new features, like Cortana. There's also Wi-Fi Sense which is designed to allow a Windows Phone to connect automatically to any open network it knows about, and even accept the terms of use automatically.[emphasis added!] This feature hazard was turned on by default on my Win10 test laptop. One intriguing implication of this automated acceptance of terms of use: conceivably, it could weaken the ironclad argument that "you agreed to it, therefore you're subject to it." Realistically speaking, how many Windows 10 users out there will even know that Wi-Fi Sense is automatically connecting them to whatever hotspot it finds -- let alone that they can turn off this function? It's hard to argue that you have consented to terms if you don't even realize that there are terms to consent to. * * * About something else, down in the comments section: Microsoft has a real problem LEARNING anything. Are you too young to remember when, a few years ago, Microsoft was spouting off that machine-assisted coding and debugging would totally eliminate the frequent errors repeated in nearly all of their products? What happened? --JorgeA 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoelC Posted July 10, 2015 Share Posted July 10, 2015 Microsoft has a real problem LEARNING anything. Are you too young to remember when, a few years ago, Microsoft was spouting off that machine-assisted coding and debugging would totally eliminate the frequent errors repeated in nearly all of their products? What happened? --JorgeA As a daily user of Visual Studio, with its "machine-assisted coding", doing C / C++ work I can honestly say that: 1) as compared to prior technology it does actually help you to write better code more quickly 2) that said, it's still quite possible to code absolute crap with it - humans know no bounds in that regard 3) Visual Studio itself has plenty of bugs in it, though they're not usually Earthshaking 4) it can be downright disconcerting to constantly have all manner of "helpful" things constantly popping in front of you while you're working - it can definitely be overdone. Fortunately that stuff is configurable - if you can find it - and dialing it back to less than ludicrous levels is possible. Not long ago we upgraded all of our software baselines to use the /Wall switch (which turns on every conceivable warning and is not the default). With one product it did help us find 3 bona fide minor coding bugs (out of 14,000 new warnings) in a quarter million lines of code. Those bugs had escaped notice and had actually been in several product releases. Am I happy to have had to correct thousands of warnings to find 3 bugs? I suppose... At least it's picky as hell now about getting any new code just right. I don't know how complex Windows source code is. My guess would be it has hundreds of millions of lines of code, and I doubt very seriously they are going through the exercises we did above. If Windows itself compiles entirely without warnings I'm a monkey's uncle. No doubt they "manage" such things, with some bureaucrat deciding on a level of quality that's "acceptable". -Noel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tripredacus Posted July 11, 2015 Share Posted July 11, 2015 If Windows itself compiles entirely without warnings I'm a monkey's uncle.In my experience, Windows is fine on its own. It is only when 2nd or 3rd party software is involved is there a problem.Let's make an example. Said company says to the software maker "hey your software needs to do this in order to be allowed."The software maker goes IDK WHATEVS YOLO LOL.So then the company says to manufactures that all software must comply these rules.But with test (this goes back to prior to Windows 8.0 RTM) manufactures deem software is not in compliance.So manufactures bring this bring this up to software maker and... ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ (aka no response which is happening with Win7 issues too) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted July 11, 2015 Share Posted July 11, 2015 Your table, chair, and coffee mug?? You really don't think your life is a bit empty without a connected coffee mug?http://www.pauligmuki.com/index.php?lang=enPaulig Muki is a coffee cup with an e-paper display that's powered by nothing more than hot coffee. You can download your own pics on the screen, but that's not very revolutionary, right? We have all seen the "I'm the Boss" mugs before. The fun starts when you fill your first cup in the morning and your friend’s messages appear on the screen. It might be hilarious, exciting, romantic or even embarrassing. That depends entirely on your friends. I guess a lot of people miss gross images and pranks very early in the morning....... or maybe the friends and colleagues I ever had are actually (much) worse than average . jaclaz One more thought about this: How long before a friend of the user of one of these networked coffeee mugs gets a virus, and the user receives a phishing picture message on his mug? If the friend's account (maybe from Facebook) is hacked badly enough, the networked coffee drinker could get a photoshopped image of his friend's face to show (for example) terror, with a suitable attached message like, "Charlie, I've been kidnapped by Romanian gypsies and they're demanding $50,000 by TOMORROW!!!! Please HELP!!!" Imagine being suddenly confronted by something like that as you're sipping your morning brew... --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaclaz Posted July 11, 2015 Share Posted July 11, 2015 If the friend's account (maybe from Facebook) is hacked badly enough, the networked coffee drinker could get a photoshopped image of his friend's face to show (for example) terror, with a suitable attached message like, "Charlie, I've been kidnapped by Romanian gypsies and they're demanding $50,000 by TOMORROW!!!! Please HELP!!!" Imagine being suddenly confronted by something like that as you're sipping your morning brew... You see , you are NO better than my friends and colleagues, your first second thought was about a possible way to make the thing into a prank. jaclaz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoelC Posted July 11, 2015 Share Posted July 11, 2015 I'm just imagining it as a "too expensive to ever try washing it" coffee cup. Ugh. In my experience, Windows is fine on its own. While I agree that the (attempted) integration of 3rd party drivers is a source of much strife, we can't let Microsoft off the hook that easily. Their software is bloated and clunky, as though programmed by 1st year high school students - not professionals with inside knowledge of how the system works and the proper experience to be building the system for everyone. There are, for example, subsystems that allow you to have the system check your software for resource leaks. Yet we see to this day the system itself leak resources as time goes on. It's getting better, but it's not perfect. There are settings that will cause it to emit warnings for every "unsafe" system call you make, yet every Windows Update delivers security fix after security fix showing vulnerabilities where buffers can be corrupted or data inserted in ways that can result in "an attacker running arbitrary code" on your system. -Noel 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted July 11, 2015 Share Posted July 11, 2015 Analysis: Microsoft is Scaling Back on Windows Phone Dramatically Yes, we were right to be worried about Windows Phone. Satya Nadella’s email only touches on first-party phones for the short term, buying Microsoft time to transition to a “mobility of experiences” future in which it doesn’t matter which phones its customers use. Another Microsoft product with an ugly, flat, squared-off interface bites the dust. When will they ever learn?? Windows Phone is failing Actually, that’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. The company that makes over 96 percent of all Windows Phone handsets in use just wrote off $7.6 billion related to its Windows Phone assets, and has announced plans to dramatically scale back its mobile operations. And, yes, Windows Phone has fallen to just 3 percent market share worldwide too. Things aren’t going well. Sorry.Let me summarize this even more succinctly: Short-term, Microsoft will make phones. Long-term, Microsoft’s mobile strategy is to push the “mobility of experiences” thing, where it doesn’t matter which devices customers use. Today, Microsoft’s customers are not using Windows Phones. They won’t be in the future either. [...] I still love Windows Phone. I desperately want it to succeed. But you can’t get emotional about this stuff. Windows Phone is failing, and has been on a downward trajectory pretty much forever. You can pretend otherwise, but I can’t do that disservice to the community. I can only be realistic. And realistically, things have gone from bad to worse. If you are a Windows Phone fan like me, relax. Nothing is changing for the short term and we at least have a few flagship devices to look forward to. But keep your eyes and mind open, and pay attention. This ride could be coming to a stop sooner that we had hoped. OK, so all that Metro sh!t having failed everywhere it's been tried, when can we expect Windows itself to revert to a sensible UI? --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ralcool Posted July 12, 2015 Share Posted July 12, 2015 http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com.au/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html Whoa, this little gem perfectly illustrates the internals workings (if that is even close to 'working') of M$. Too many teams. Now add the insiders program, we get a even larger version of the problem described here,http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100201/a-little-less-conversation.html I've enjoyed reading Joel Spolsky and his links... Much of what was written 10 years ago is terrifyingly true today. -sean 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dencorso Posted July 12, 2015 Author Share Posted July 12, 2015 Consider this: I'm begining to think MS market chief strategist must be Dr. Fu Manchu himself (or Professor Moriarty, or both). You see: 8.x took forever to painstakingly overtake XP. Now 10, which is hands-down more limitating than 8.x will inherit almost all the 8.x *and* *the 7* percentage, overnight, *all at once*, the day 10 goes RTM! And may the die-hards fend for themselves! I can't help but admit: it's brilliant (in a quite crooked way, of course)! And most of the user-base will be foolled into it, no matter what we (who can see it) do, nor how hard we may blow the whistle. 10 is bound to launch capturing ca. 75% of the maketshare at the launch-moment! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoelC Posted July 12, 2015 Share Posted July 12, 2015 Well... Could be the user base isn't as stupid as they give us credit for and a whole bunch of people will just not upgrade... -Noel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted July 12, 2015 Share Posted July 12, 2015 Maybe people aren't (quite) as clueless and sheeplike as some of us on either side of the Win8/10 debate may think. I just heard the following remarkable exchange on the What the Tech podcast: AZ: ...Everybody's gonna upgrade. Everybody. PT: I don't think everyone is actually, but -- AZ: You don't think so? PT: Why would you screw with a perfectly working computer? Name me the Windows 10 feature that you can't live without, that you just gotta have today. AZ: Why do people rip out their intakes on their Honda Civics and put a cold-air intake on them? PT: Those aren't people, though, those are enthusiasts. We're talking about normal people. AZ: I think the bigger the better, I think the fact that you know that you get something better, you want it. It's new. It's the same reason -- Microsoft knows that we have no self-control when it comes to this... PT: In the Apple event yesterday, they did a couple of comparisons between uptake on iOS and Android in one case, and iOS and Windows 8.1 in the other case. The percentage of users who had upgraded to the latest version of Mac OSX was what -- do you remember what it was? I want to say that it was 55 percent. The percentage of people who had upgraded to Windows 8.1 was, I don't remember, 8 and a half percent, something like that. It was a very sharp difference. Here's the thing: Mac OSX is free! AZ: Yeah. PT: Almost half of all the people who use Mac OSX have not upgraded to the latest version of Mac OSX. Now, some of them maybe can't, some of them have older computers that can't. But even on the Mac, where we've known for years that upgrades are free, they still don't have 80, 90 percent upgrade rates. So, I mean, in the Windows world we tend to be a little more skittish. We're not as accepting that the mother ship has all the answers and is going to do everything right. I don't think we're going to see that kind of upgrade. And by the way, I think that's why they're pushing it so hard, because I think Microsoft knows that.[boldface added; italics reflect speaker's own emphasis] A bit later, Paul corrected his percentages: PT: By the way, the numbers were 55 percent for Yosemite, and 7 percent for Windows 8.1. So maybe there IS hope for all those Windows 7 users out there that we fear (and the other side hopes) won't know any better than to fall into the Windows 10 trap. --JorgeA *** P.S. With @dencorso's permission, I'd like to post this over on the Win10 First Impressions thread in the next few days. *** Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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