Windows 10 - Deeper Impressions

[NoelC]

Is it a surprise that the government would want to look at cloud data?

I can't imagine law-abiding citizens would want their data "in the cloud", much less criminals.

Look around...  Smart people, who know what's really happening in the bigger picture, all tend to agree that not spreading one's data around is better, for any number of known reasons, not to mention reasons even they haven't thought of yet.

-Noel

[NoelC]

My point about gadgets (or Windows Live Gallery apps before that) is that the silly little web-integrated, cloud-integrated "App" has never managed to supersede the web browser, and have ultimately fallen by the wayside.  It's as though Microsoft keeps wanting to try different ways to invent "silly little Apps" until somehow magically they strike on the right combination to make them world leaders in computing.

Get a clue, Microsoft:  You become a world leader in something by doing it well and right, not by doing it silly.

It's as though they entirely forgot what made them a world leader in business computing.

Thanks for the welcome back, Jorge. 

-Noel

[JorgeA]

8 hours ago, NoelC said:

My point about gadgets (or Windows Live Gallery apps before that) is that the silly little web-integrated, cloud-integrated "App" has never managed to supersede the web browser, and have ultimately fallen by the wayside.  It's as though Microsoft keeps wanting to try different ways to invent "silly little Apps" until somehow magically they strike on the right combination to make them world leaders in computing.

Get a clue, Microsoft:  You become a world leader in something by doing it well and right, not by doing it silly.

It's as though they entirely forgot what made them a world leader in business computing.

Oh, I see -- you were coming at Gadgets from the opposite angle! 

I do think that the Gadgets can be a useful adjunct to a classic desktop. For example, I use the CPU/RAM Monitor as a rough-and-ready guide to possible emerging issues with my system, without having to take up space for a window on the Desktop or Taskbar. But definitely nothing like the sort of epileptic seizure-inducing constant blinking and scrolling that MSFT has been promoting ever since Windows 8.

Microsoft has been pushing the notion of a "live" Web-connected Desktop ever since Active Desktop in Windows 98FE -- without notable success, as you rightly point out.

--JorgeA

Edited April 15, 2016 by JorgeA
improved wording

[JorgeA]

9 hours ago, helpdesk98 said:

I remember the Gadgets from Vista did not know they are still in 7. Are they still restricted to the Windows Side bar? I liked them mostly because they looked clean and crisp and felt like they matched the UI of the system.

Yes, you can still use Gadgets natively in Win7. Microsoft did issue a Windows Update (or was it a hotfix) back then to disable the Gadgets, so you may have to dig around for the update to uninstall.

And it's possible to install Gadgets even in Windows 10. I have a clock and a network traffic graph set up on my Win10 test system.

--JorgeA

[NoelC]

1 hour ago, JorgeA said:

Oh, I see -- you were coming at Gadgets from the opposite angle! 

Yes.  I've never been a fan the frivolous stuff - which has been available via a web browser for a long while - becoming the centerpiece of an operating system.  For one who's been in the industry since the mid-1970s, it's just ridiculous to think that such things should be influencing the direction of development.  Windows and Microsoft got so far as to take over the computing world by concentrating on computing, not distracting users.  If they make a serious, stable, useful OS adding junkware to it is trivial.  If they optimize an OS to deliver junkware, there is a SERIOUS possibility that it will never be able to support serious software.

And yes, I fully agree, Win 10 Apps now, made to work under the UWP, don't even seem as useful or pleasing as gadgets were.  Or web pages.

Speaking of Apps (not Microsoft but Apple, and illustrative of the kind of quality of service I'm alluding to)...  Yesterday my wife showed that the Weather.com App on her iPad displayed 56 degrees F for our home location in south Florida.  It hasn't been 56F for weeks or months here.  It showed the right information ONLY after she tapped on one of the sub-pages, then returned to the main page.  Right now today my wife was watching some severe weather moving in with the map animation in the App.  I was easily able to bring up the very same information - including animation - via the weather.com web site.  I cannot think of a single reason I would need or want to use the App vs. the weather.com web site.

Why the hell are so many people so enamored with Apps (to the exlusion of making OS software actually better)?  It's not like they work better, or perform better, or give better service somehow.

OK, so it's not trivial to make Windows better.  That's the state of the art, and why a company like Microsoft gets the big bucks.  Why do they insist on trying to better Apple or Google, who can only build systems that do frivolous things?

-Noel

[FantasyAcquiesce]

I really hope this OS dies off soon, its been nothing but problems for me. Its fussier than Windows Vista, currently.

Edited April 16, 2016 by ~♥Aiko♥Chan♥~

[helpdesk98]

I just liked the gadgets more as a quick view I had cpu monitor /ram monitor I am not into customizing Windows as I used to be mostly due to a lack of time so I find something that works and I keep with it for the time being.

[jaclaz]

8 hours ago, NoelC said:

Why the hell are so many people so enamored with Apps (to the exlusion of making OS software actually better)?  It's not like they work better, or perform better, or give better service somehow.

 

Yep :), hard to understand, on the other hand, get *any* home design and style magazine, check and you will see how all the sitting rooms depicted will have a table where books and magazines are "artistically" scattered around.

If you look hard enough, you will see in the same set of photos one or more almost empty bookcases.

In computing you have the desktop where one would normally place the icons for a handful of REALLY frequently used programs and maybe TEMPORARILY a few (like max three or four) documents you are actually working with a the time.

This is what a (to me already cluttered enough) desktop might look:

but all of us have seen people seemingly happy with setups more like this:

Some people actually like it this way, as always de gustibus non disputandum est, but while I can well understand how someone might have a form of "visual memory" allowing him/her to use a desktop such as above (and actually like it) I have some difficulties in understanding (on a small form device such as a phone or tablet) how much fun there could be into flipping n pages to find an app, and - given how often the actual icon is a nice exercise in design but rarely it is so distictive to be identified as a glance - I have often seen people flipping a few pages, opening by mistake another app, closing it, flipping some more pages, opening by mistake yet another "wrong" app with a deceivingly similar icon, flipping some more pages and finally open the "right" (usually pointless, crappy or both) desired app.

Though all statistical data we have revolves around the fact that on mobile/tablets, as soon as the "novelty effect" has passed the number of actually used apps are no more than 5 and on average no more than 20-30 are actually installed on the device we have all seen I believe the above scenes. 
 

You have the browser that usually has a "start page" with a handful of frequently used links (in the start page or whatever you call it) and then a vast database of bookmarks, which is actually easily navigated, where you can use a search function, etc., and the browser can provide you exactly the same contents than the specific app (as long as the "original" site is only decently laid out) so that all the page flipping and looking for hardly recognizable icons can be bypassed, and as said elsewhere having tens (or even hundreds) of very vertical programs was something that made some sense in DOS or Windows 3.x times, but now that we have browsers (and HTML5) that allows to do *anything* (or *almost anything*) inside the browser, having the Apple Store (and the Google one, and the MS one) where MILLIONS of apps are accumulated WITHOUT any meaningful order, extremely difficult to find, with hundreds (or thousands) of duplicates (i.e. apps doing the exact same thing) and with a large part of them so stupidly "vertical" that they make no sense whatever is something that is really puzzling.

jaclaz

 

 

 

[greenhillmaniac]

46 minutes ago, jaclaz said:

but all of us have seen people seemingly happy with setups more like this:

Jesus , this reminds me of computers I used to fix, that had 3 Anti-Virus softwares installed (like McAfee, AVG and Microsoft Security Essentials), and 3 browsers aswell (IE, Firefox and Chrome), of which the person only used IE. These usually came with a ton of malware aswell.

Just looking at this screenshot gives me nightmares...

[xpclient]

You write well Noel and express exactly my thoughts about Windows. Keep your criticism coming, I love it. What you see as a problem that maybe you think started with Windows 8 - I feel that it started with Windows Vista - the general trend of dumbing down and elimination of useful old features just because something new had to replace it. Whether it was better or not suddenly no longer mattered to Microsoft, it just had to be different.

Still I would say Windows Vista and Windows 7 were significant steps forward in overall functionality although that's when the attention to detail was lost and many regressions and backward steps started happening in certain areas of the OS. Windows 8.1 too as you say can largely be fixed, as flawed as it is, using third party desktop apps making up for what Microsoft could never give power users with serious productivity and professional needs. And like you, I find that with Windows 10 they have reached a point where third party apps can no longer truly fix the mess they have made.

You can't fix the forced updates, or forced drivers. They don't get it that such a design can create a problem for people, waste their time, abuse their internet bandwidth, affect a mission-critical task or simply reduce hardware functionality (in case of forced drivers from WU!). One can no longer fix what they completely removed from the UI such as seeing the size of updates. You can't fix what they eliminated completely from various Windows settings and features.

It's not that I am against fun features in Windows. Everyone loves fun features as long as they don't actually affect serious work. But it has reached a point where the silliness is getting ahead of serious computing. Silly features are REPLACING more capable features of the OS. And the feedback is just a token marketing gesture. Their culture no longer has a healthy relationship with customers. They will do whatever the hell they want and you must accept it. The touch-first UI (Settings app and most of the silly built-in apps) are still being shoved down our throat. These apps lack menus and text labels - two core UI elements which aided usability and helped mouse and keyboard operation. All of the UI is flat giving no sense of where to click, it has only icons. It is slow, hardly does anything new or impressive. Even if it's dumbed down, it's NOT easy to operate using mouse or keyboard. It's simplified but not intuitive.

And when you start using it, they will abandon it if telemetry tells them that no one uses it. Or if there's no team or no developer at Microsoft to manage that code, it will be abandoned too. The whole platform is falling by the wayside as it gets more and more irrelevant because they don't focus on the product's experience as a whole.

The majority of the world is a consumer of content, only a few create it but the OS for content creation is being modified for content consumption. Things that can help developer and power user efficiency, or productivity are just no longer important to Microsoft. It's really a sad state of affairs. The new Microsoft CEO openly says things like "Our industry only respects innovation, it doesn't respect tradition". That is code for "We will only ship new code and do planned obsolescence of old stuff, and in this process, if anything gets lost, it's not our problem. Deal with it." Despite such a toxic attitude towards customers, Microsoft's Board keeps him as CEO because he brings in money from the Azure business he once led!

[jaclaz]

Not confined to windows, "not smart" does not mean stupid!, JFYI:
http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/not-smart-is-not-stupid

jaclaz
 

[NoelC]

I have a reasonably complex computing life, where I do both business and technical development on my workstation.  As a software-developing content producer, I suggest that I'm probably nearly as far from Microsoft's focus on content consumers as one can be.

That's okay.  I have, like xpclient who also tweaks and augments Windows into becoming something more useful, been willing to accept this difference.  After all, it actually HAS been possible to make Windows a reasonable, usable system.  The operating system doesn't have to be the end-all.  Some of what Microsoft provided can be ignored, other parts of it can be tweaked (probably because some software engineer at Microsoft also really needs it to work), and still other parts can be augmented with 3rd party software.  But it had critical mass where it counts, because it was originally developed (as Vax/VMS by Digital Equipment Corporation) to have a serious computing kernel.

Examples:

• I haven't used Apps or Gadgets or Windows Live Gallery software.  I shut off things like Indexing and Cortana.  It's no problem, I have plenty of disk space.
   
• I apply literally hundreds of different tweaks via settings or registry or file manipulations.  I developed a script to help me bring Windows 10 as close as possible to being useful...  This script is up to (including comments) almost 1500 lines!
   
• I download / buy good 3rd party software such as Classic Shell, grepWin. Tortoise SVN, Sphinx firewall, and many others to add features that work, and which I need.

Honestly, you'd not recognize my desktop as a Windows 8.1 system.  It's not even close.  But it's quite useful.

Doing all these things to Windows to make each new major version a system with as much or more capability than its predecessor has been growing increasingly difficult.  I follow a guide I've written that now has way over 100 pages.  When did I write this guide?  I made a few notes and .reg files in the time of XP.  I scraped those together into a big text file in the time of Vista.  It became a full-fledged book for Windows 7.  It grew a lot for Windows 8.

As xpclient says - and this is the central crux of the current problems:

Microsoft has finally turned the corner to where it's actually impossible to equal or recover some of the functionality we had in the past.

I'm all for "new and improved", but the "improved" part really does have to be there.  I'm even willing to suffer a bit during transitions if there is potential for improvement.  For example, if the new Metro/Modern/UWP had brought things that actually made it likely that new and improved Apps would be forthcoming, I'd be patient and wait for them.  Hell, I'd probably even write some of them. 

But here we are, almost 1 year after Windows 10 was released, and even longer after the pre-release versions...  It doesn't.  They aren't.  I'm not.  Even Microsoft's own flagship Apps, such as Calculator and Weather, do NOTHING that's particularly impressive - nor are they better or quicker or cooler than things we've already seen!  And they do it with bigger fonts than we need and more slowly - even on a supercomputer.  I reiterate:  The "improved" part really, really does have to be there.

The IDEA of UWP was good, don't get me wrong - make it easier for Windows to promote software development by all kinds of geeks out here and the world will develop all the functionality needed by anyone, anywhere. 

But the devil is in the details - the new environment actually has to WORK and have some ADVANTAGES in order to accomplish this. 

It's something that simply CANNOT be marketed into existence!  It's a computer operating system.  It has to be a DESIGN that works and provides real TECHNICAL ADVANTAGES at a deep geek level.  It's a lot of things, but it ain't that.

Like a modern Dick the butcher, I say... 

The first thing we do, let's kill all the marketers.

-Noel

P.S., I just counted.  I have 44 icons on my 3-monitor desktop, and these icons, arranged in groups, actually do represent 44 of the things I most frequently do.  They're set along the top and bottom so that I have room in between to work.  I'm a positional thinker, so I know exactly where to go to start each application in an eyeblink, without any effort at all.  I also maintain a carefully organized hierarchical start menu that at some points goes 7 or more levels deep.  IMO this is what a quite complex computer system needs to be truly useful.

[NoelC]

3 hours ago, jaclaz said:

Not confined to windows, "not smart" does not mean stupid!

I think what he meant is that not making software "smarter than its own good" is better.

It seems a relative of the old "make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler".

Thanks for the link, by the way.  It was eye opening to learn that copiers / scanners are trying to actually "read" the data, making mistakes, then reproducing it with the kinds of substitution errors that humans might make but would catch because they have higher cognitive abilities.

What person / company / culture has said that there should be a concept of "close enough" in the digital world?  Digital systems make it possible to achieve perfection, but somehow marketers or managers are trying to convince us that it's okay that they don't.  It must be born from laziness.

-Noel

Edited April 16, 2016 by NoelC

[aviv00]

Hey, fmo from win7 it doesn't worth upgrading, mb for a bit
its not like the change from win95 to winxp
its better then win8.1 from tablet pov

So its OK to upgrade [not bad enuf to ban it, and not good enuf to recommended it] but there few issues:
like updates, drivers, telemetry which can be solved if u got the time

Im using server tp5 14291 with disabling telemetry to improve performance also
adminuser method to avoid malware, so i don't need updates so much
didn't have problem with drivers tho

LTSB edition is too "old" - 10240 build number but RS1 LTSB might be soon
wait for it its should be better, more finished product

[JorgeA]

Finally, there's a solution to forced Windows updates!!!

Quote

For those who have Windows 10 installed and have problems with Settings: Updates & Security being disabled by Norton AntiVirus. This stops Windows updates. This is a Norton issue which they have not fixed.

--JorgeA