Microsoft Co-founder Dings Windows 8 As 'Puzzling, Confusing' 343
CWmike writes "Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has called Windows 8 'puzzling' and 'confusing initially,' but assured users that they would eventually learn to like the new OS. Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975, left the company in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. In a post to his personal blog on Tuesday, Allen said he has been running Windows 8 Release Preview — the public sneak peak Microsoft shipped May 31 — on both a traditional desktop as well as on a Samsung 700T tablet, designed for Windows 7. 'I did encounter some puzzling aspects of Windows 8,' Allen wrote, and said the dual, and dueling user interfaces (UIs), were confusing. 'The bimodal user experience can introduce confusion, especially when two versions of the same application — such as Internet Explorer — can be opened and run simultaneously,' Allen said."
Re:Like he said (Score:3, Interesting)
We will be forced to like it as manufacturers will set it as your only option. Reports so have not been good so far.There have been some user that have liked but not many.
Re:Like he said (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's improductive (Score:5, Interesting)
For me it's quite simple Windows 8 interface doesn't make me more productive.
Unless you use a tablet; where its just fine. Or count the fact its genuinely snappier than Windows 7... both of which are positives for productivity.
Looking at my physical desktop, I don't have fancy clocks, tons of post-its, shinny gadgets... No, just a couple of books, some papers. I don't want distractions. I want to be focused on my work.
And when you launch 'desktop mode' its pretty much windows 7; but faster, and even fewer distractions. Sounds good to me.
Really, I've been running windows 8 on one box for a couple months now. My biggest complaints are that there isn't a button on the task bar for the start menu -- its 'hot corners' and the shutdown command is a bit klutzier to get to. The former is an easy tweak to fix if i care enough; disable hotcorners, add a 'button'. The latter even easier.
The new start menu is really no less efficient to use than the old one on a desktop. Its a bit more distracting that it goes full screen, but thats about it, and as a result I'm motivated to pin more apps so i use it pretty rarely.
I expect we'll see some refinements over the next little bit, but really, on a desktop I never use the metro tile stuff, so its just not relevant. I cleaned up my start menu so there are no pinned tiles for shit i don't care about, same as i've always removed irrelevant default crap from my start menu. Overall the win8 desktop experience is fine with minimal tweaks.
As a tablet/ultrabook OS its a big improvement over win7.
WinRT (ARM)-- I'm not impressed or interested in it whatsoever, and hope it gets axed.
Re:Google could upend this whole forced upgrade BS (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm. Well, you might have a point, but I'm not sure this would be in character for Google. So far Google has offered two types of software upgrades:
I'm not sure that either option is unambiguously better than the MS treadmill (which applies to pretty much all proprietary packaged software, not just MS). Webapps have their advantages (especially from the developer's perspective), but at least with traditional packaged software, you can choose to stay put or even roll back to an earlier version if the new release doesn't meet your needs. And, since all the software runs on a standard PC hardware platform rather than the unique little snowflakes that ARM SoCs seem to be, your access to updates is less dependent on the willingness of your hardware vendor & ISP/telecoms carrier to spend money on software development & QA.
I actually have come to peace with it (Score:5, Interesting)
In short, I hate not having a start menu and I hate note being able to just start typing an application name to find it and run it (I know I can press windows+f in Win 8 but it's no where near as easy).
However, I will say this. Windows 8 and more importantly Server 8 is fucking brilliant -under the hood-. The ability to natively team NICs, ReFS, the *enormous* improvement that is SMB3, better clustering, better management of machines from one location, storage spaces, the improvements in Hyper-V etc leave me stunned - compared to Server 2008 it's like comparing Windows 2000 and Windows 98. The underlying tech is miles in front of the old architecture. It's just such a pity they put this bloody interface on at the same time and made it compulsory because a lot of people are going to skip on Win8 and never notice how damn good the underneath tech actually is, this time around.
Better than the unix command line? Seriously? (Score:3, Interesting)
Tell you what - try remote managing a Win7/8 machine purely via the command line (of course you'll have to install sshd since MS don't bother to ship one) then get back to me about how much "better" the windows one is.
MS Made Wrong Turn in 2000 (Score:3, Interesting)
Almost everything MS has done to Windows since 2000 has been a mistake.
First the exceptions: 48Bit HD Addressing, 64 Bit Computing, and Cleartype.
Just off of the top of my head, here are a few things that went wrong with XP and W7.
XP's Melted plastic interface.
XP's and forward has different sized windows controls.
Visa/7's has huge memory footprint, too large for a phone, and delayed services.
W7's Computer logs are slow as molasses on my 3.4 2600k, with 16GB ram. It takes a minute to open and check the hardware log. Some logs cannot be cleared by the user through the UI.
The W7 small start button orb is too large for the rest of the bar, but otherwise the bar is good, that's why they will be changing it in W8.
Personal menus were a waste of user time. Menus are faster to use if they don't change.
In W7 many file properties like filesize are more tedious to retrieve.
Vista and W7 take a long time to boot.
Briefcases were a nice idea, but they crashed and were never fixed.
Too much indexing going on in the background. I cannot belief that W7 defaults to reading through every file you have.
Windows update should have never been done in a web browser. What were they training people for?
W7 needlessly removes all but 2 power schemes.
W7 audio is abyssal, with huge lag and delay recording anything with preview.
System restore takes up too much space on large drives. 10% of 3TB is too much. I patch windows to fix it.
Windows 7 updater is so stupid it won't even take the service pack first.
Desktop gadgets failed and died.
The idea that you would separate 32 and 64 bit programs into 2 folders was just plain messy.
Local, Roaming, LocalLow gave too many places to look for stuff.
W7 backpadaled meaning we still have the word "My" in front of everything.
W7 networking is slow out of the box.
In W7 deleting or copying files is slower than XP or 2000.
W7 hangs all the time in odd places, such as when opening "My computer"
They removed Regclean for the sake of registry cleaning companies.
They made the defrag less informative and stopped freespace optimization for the sake of defrag companies.
Anyway, from what I have seen of W8 is W7+W7phone. Windows 8 looks like quite the pigeon-rat. It's too large to be a phone OS and too limited to be a desktop system. I feel bad that I have an expensive CAD program as well as Photoshop, and have only this crap of Apple's walled in garden of weak hardware to choose from. Maybe they will fix Gnome 3, and add the dual pane back into Nautilus. Perhaps they will bring back the minimize button.
I am very disappointed with Microsoft, Apple, Android, Ubuntu, and Gnome, and there is no where else to turn : (
I would think that if Gnome got rid of hot corners, un-dumbed Nautilus, and brought back multi-pane windows, it would be the best of the above.
I am not chattin, texting, and facebooking all day. I write books, whole 110,000 word books, and sometimes, I actually have more than open at once! I edit large photoshops documents, once again, more than one open at once.
The thing of it is: we need to work on these computers!
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Better than the unix command line? Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll go one better.
The company I work for is starting our mass rollout of Windows 7, upgrading from Windows XP. The team I work on has fully automated this process to the point where a site technical coordinator goes to a web page, clicks the assets he wants to migrate, selects "roles" for the machines (what application package sets they get for the user's responsibilities) and then clicks a button to execute. The XP machine then does the following:
1. Check to see if there's enough free disk space to complete the migration
2. Download a RAMdisk image of WinPE to boot from
3. Swap out the bootloader for the Windows 7 version, which allows booting from the RAMdisk image
4. Update the firmware on the device (BIOS / uEFI)
5. Reboot to the RAMdisk image
6. RAMdisk image detects if the device has an encrypted file system (laptop) and retrieves the unlock key from the encryption keystore server, and unlocks the filesystem
7. Create a virtual hard drive file from the network that contains everything this system needs to remotely reimage, minus applications.
8. Data is migrated out of user profiles to a temp folder
9. Old OS and applications are moved to a backup folder
10. New OS image of Win7 SP1 is dropped on the disk around the migration store and backup folder, from the VHD created before
11. Drivers specific to the device are injected into the new Win7 install, from the VHD created before
12. Reboot back to the hard disk
13. Drivers are found and installed
14. Applets and agents necessary for hardware (Laptop power management, Lenovo "craplets" necessary for hardware features, etc.) are installed, from the VHD created before
15. Antivirus is installed and updated
16. Encryption agent is reinstalled if it's a laptop (no mandate for desktops to be encrypted at this point)
17. Reboot
18. User data is migrated forward from the migration store temp folder
19. Applications are delivered by our software deployment infrastructure
20. User is presented with "Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to login".
21. When they log in, they find all their stuff is still there, and all their applications are freshly installed. Total time on hardware that isn't an antique? 40 minutes.
All kicked off from a web page. On an 11 year old Windows XP. Don't knock what you don't know, or haven't spent time to learn.