
Hail to the Chief
Less like R2 than Master Chief
167 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2009
The entire feedback system on ebay is rubbish anyway. I've had most of the negative feedback I've left removed, for example
"Charged £9 shipping for a 2nd hand crushed jiffybag with no extra packing"
"Listing said complete,arrived missing 2 parts"
I can't see how either of them break ebay's rules
The reciprocal negative feedback the parties in question left me is still there however <shakes head>
A benevolent dictatorship under Vince Cable. At least when he prevaricates, avoids answering the question and casts doubts on the other parties plans I don't feel like I've been insulted, smacked with a hammer and molested in the process like the others do. For examples please refer to Moron Brown's performance on the Today programme this morning and no doubt Shamarons tomorrow
If you're happy with what you've got as it works very well, why get something new that may or may not be as good?
It's like buying a brand new car because your's is 3 years old and you've got-to-have-the-latest-model...oh hang on, people (and I use that in the loosest possible sense) do that already.
Which also explains why my boss is in his wife's saxo because his brand new bmw broke after a week and went back to the dealer :-)
I dunno, digital TV was pushed onto us by the government and there aren't many people who wanted 120 channels of garbage that are physically barely watchable (as well as the impact on your soul of watching Viva for 2 minutes)
Since I've gone digital I've had to give up watching telly as the sound cutting out and the picture breaking up like a spectrum loading screen all the time, means it just isn't worth the effort to figure out what's going on, who said what and what program I'm watching anyway.
I'd have settled for 1 channel of quality programs over 120 channels of top gear repeats, RnB videos and dodgy adverts
"From midnight tonight there will be no stamp duty on properties worth up to £250,000 for first time buyers, double the current threshold."
How many people's firsrt house costs a quarter of a million?
As for public transport as an alternative to cars, lad at work's just made a trip from Sale to Runcorn on bus. 45 mins in the car and it took him 3 hours and 4 buses.
"I think you are saying this because you haven't ever used this search feature. It improves productivity by a long way. It can find files within a second without having to browse through folders. I find myself using the Windows Explorer less and less these days in favor of the Start Menu Search. Plus you can find anything in the Control Panel using this feature. Wanna change the screen resolution? Just type "resolution" in the search box and immediately you get a link to change the screen resolution."
There's been a running joke for years from a lot of MS fanbois laughing at the fact that mac users were all idiots because they stored things all over the place and used the search to find anything as opposed to putting their stuff in a logical structure. Congratulations Microsoft, you've finally succeeded in making your fans hate themselves :-)
Want to change the resolution? Press Windows key, S, C which opens the control panel, then click on display. What's so hard about that?
Libraries, yay, the photo's of me on holiday are in the same place as the button images for the sites I'm working on. Progress???
AeroPeek a badly skewed image that let's you see that it *is* a window, but not what's on it and that eats into your PCs capacity, so something that's marginally just about as useful as alt+tab but runs slower because of the overhead it has.
Similarly Tab previews are small and worthless if you've got 2 things which are vaguely similar, like 2 word documents.
If you've got 2 web browsers open and ones of a red site and ones a blue site then yes, handy. If you're in the more likely scenario of 2 applications with similar content, then...notsomuch!!!
"it's fairly clear to all that in the World of IT, people tend to be rather resistant to change"
No, in the World of IT, people are resistant to garbage, backed up with a glossy advertising campaign being palmed off on us as a radical change into the greatest thing in the universe and if you don't rush out to buy it the bogey man will break into it and steal your souuuuuuuulllllll.
W7 is not radically different, it's just another iteration of windows 95, with a slightly larger padlock, more blue in the colour scheme and some useful accoutrements taken away for no reason.
When the first thing we got shown in the demo from the MS salesman was that the mouse pointer reflects on the taskbar...a billion $$$ in development and the first thing you show us is a white pointer shadow instead of the usual black one...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
"Does this warrant the amount of hate going on in this thread?"
The hate is reserved for the people who think that anyone who doesn't love W7 must :-
- not have a 1337 PC
- is stupid
- is lying
- is a technological luddite
- be a Linux or Mac lover
If Microsoft made a new OS I liked, I'd like it, not hate it just because it's M$ or because it's new. As it is, they've failed to make something, I and many others think is nothing special
Look again, the Emperor is naked.
The beautiful UI that's the same as XP but with bigger edges and rounder corners? And the semi-transparent background so you can see through to the windows below which if it's cluttered, makes trying to read the top bar of the top window difficult. It's time to take out shares in specsavers because that's going to cause eyesight problems down the line.
Yes, they really went all out to leave XP's interface behind, "Forget XPs thin grey windows, now Windows comes in slightly wider blueygrey" Woo and hoo
And the address bar...which doesn't show you the full path if your window isn't full screen and you're more than 4 folders deep. So you know you're in a folder, but where are you exactly. To find that out you've got to click on the address bar...if there was space to click on it because there's no room, so it's just thrown you up 2 levels because you missed with your mouse. And the mouse-sniper game which is the dropdown on the breadcrumb that takes you to folders at that level (the same mouse-sniper game which is trying to turn off the computer, click start, then try to click the little dropdown without clicking whatever you've set as default). It'd be easier if there was a demarcation seperator between the button and the dropdown but no, you've kinda got to guess where one starts and t'other ends.
The "up level" button was simple to use and most importantly, never moved. You click on the breadcrumb trail when you can't see all of it and everything moves to the right, so then you've got to find the next level. Or you can hover over "up" and press it as and when you like without moving. Want to find the desktop when you're searching. Thump up a half a dozen times and you're there.
I ran the index on the last W7 PC I had, I left the index running over the weekend on a machine with pretty much nothing on it but the operating system. 3 days later...it was still running and sat in the background churning away for the entire time I had it. And were the searches any faster...no. After 2 months, it still dragged when searching and was still builiding the index.
If you go into a folder in the search results, and then go back, it starts the whole search off again, slowly, from the beginning. XP remembers the search results, so I can go back to the results and go in the next one without having to wait while it rebuilds the list. If I want to re-search I can click the button to start the search off again.
From a usage point of view, I'm more likely, when searching, to want to look at a number of files/folders which match a criteria than to look at each one individually, then do another re-search to see if anything has been added in the 5 seconds since I looked at the first file/folder. Especially if the search results are ordered in a different way each time, so before I can use the results I have to order them which, yes, you've guessed it, kicks off the search AGAIN this time putting the them in order.
Yes, I could go on that advanced mouse training course, Mr Miyagi and Yoda could get together and teach me the inner Zen of mouse clicking...or MS could practice what they preach on their courses and make things easy to use, reusing what you can (processing and searchingly speaking), customisable and logical.
The design of W7 would fail any software course (MS or other) I've ever been on or heard about.
I never had trouble with malware on XP ever...anti-virus software anyone?
Moving/resizing a window within an inch of the edge of the screen snaps the window to that edge, it's not about throwing them around, it's about moving a window and then it jumps to fill half the screen. Either that or you've got an inch wide no-go zone around the edge of your monitor.
The windows key + right/left arrow was nice, shame you can't have that on, while having the snap feature turned off. It's the designers saying, these are our toys and you'll play with them the way we want you to or we'll take our toys and go home. <stampy sulk>
Same with the search box on the start menu. You can stop it doing a search, but it's still there but does nothing. The only way to remove it altogether is to turn off search all together, so you can't search for anything, which isn't particularly helpful.
Like the grouping of items on the task bar. You can move them around which is nice, but it groups instances of a program together and you can't order those instances around. I depressingly frequently have to work on 3 sites at a time, with 3 copies of visual studio and 3 ftp programs open and where I'd like to have to be able to group them so :-
VS for site a, ftp for site a, VS for site b, ftp for site b, VS for site c, ftp for site c
it lumps the vs and ftp buttons together. Why not group on open, but allow you to move where you want. The code is almost there in the OS to do it, just seperate the instances.
I'm using it as I type, on my brand new works machine, that came with W7 preinstalled. I've been using it now for 9 months, on 3 seperate machines. I've never used Linux.
Why does everyone who disagrees with the "W7 is worse than XP" point-of-view say that you've never used it or you're lying about what it does/doesn't do? I'm not making this stuff up, lifes too short. I'm sitting here with this OS and it makes my working day harder. Not in a list of major killing ways, in a death-by-a-thousand-cuts way.
It's petty little stuff that snowballs together to make doing things harder. For example, in explorer the view folders button. In XP you want to hide the folder view for a second while you look at the file list shown, you click the folder button, do whatever you want to, then click the folder button and it's back. W7 has no folder button so you have to resize the window or the slide the vertical bar to the left, then move it back. Why take out something that's useful when there's plenty of space for it in that big empty bar at the top?
And in the folder view, why does the expand/contract subfolder triangle disappear when you're not hovering over the list? What's the advantage in this over having it always visible?
Why, if I've got a load of folders expanded so that the vertical scroll bar appears and I expand a folder does the screen scroll so that folder is at the bottom? So everytime I open a folder, I then have to scroll up? If it went to the top so you could see what subfolders there are, it would be annoying but would at least make sense, but going to the bottom of the window ????
Little stuff but there's so much little stuff that it gathers together into a huge ball of hate.
"well done, you've successfully managed to confuse yourself. The file copy delay was was Vista. It also sounds like you need to be booked into some week long training courses on mouse control too."
We'll make no jokes about W7 being a vista service pack :-P
No, I'm here on my new W7 preinstalled machine and copying files from it, to my new, formated by this very W7 machine, flash drive. Watch as I drag a textfile containing the word "hello" from my desktop to the explorer window of my flash drive. Watch it think about it. Watch it think about it. Watch it decide that I'm allowed to...this time.
Other times it'll pop up the "can't move" box so I can "Try again" on a notepad file I haven't opened today. What's stopping it? Who knows? And then there's the "permission denied" box that will randomly pop up. I don't have permission to copy the file or move it. 10 minutes later it'll be fine but right here, right now. No, I'm not allowed.
And what's mouse control got to do with it?
"I don't know what pile-o-crap you were testing the RC on, but I've been soak testing 7 on a few machines round here for a while now, and found it to be pretty much bullet-proof. I was particularly impressed with its tenacity, when it successfully booted on a machine with multiple hardware failiures, and then attempted an auto-repair. Obviously, software can't pick up a screwdriver and swap-out a motherboard, but it tried its best, bless."
3 machines, 1 a vista ready PC, 2 W7 PCs and while it hasn't BSOD on me yet as Vista was want to do and while it's nice that it'll try to fix itself, I feel that when I open an explorer window, it should open, not open then hang while it does...whatever it's doing.
"But this means nothing to you. You're a User. If cars were software, you'd be asking "well, they can go forwards and backwards, it should be a simple enough process to make the go up and down too". I personally love the UAC. It's a kick up the arse for developers who still write their software for single user environments with full admin rights."
Of course I'm a user (sorry "User" with a capital "U" we are using it as a term of abuse aren't we) of the operating system as is everyone else who has it installed. And if I buy a car I expect that when I ask it to go forwards, it does it. I'm not expecting it to go up or indeed down. I'm expecting it to go forwards/backwards/round corners. True, the wheels don't randomly fall off like in the vista-mobile but when I turn the wheel left I'd appreciate the car turning left rather than waiting or turning right.
Anyone who wants to come and try any of the W7 machines at the places I've used them, feel free. This isn't trolling, this is the User (abusive "U") experience
I'm still not going to upgrade from XP because W7 truly does suck. Oh I can't use IE9! Who cares? I'll use Firefox and actually be able to find files on my computer and not have to wait for an age while my computer decides if I'm allowed to copy a file until it does, then dies and kills both copies in different ways. And be able to position windows on my screen without them leaping about. And, and, and....
Mine's the one with the still beating hearts of the people who designed the UI on this pile of dross in the pockets.
And when you do get digital, you'll realise that the picture is carp and blocky, everything freezes and jumps periodically and occasionally the picture and sound fall out of sync.
And that's if you can find something to watch. 100 channels to choose from and nothing on any of them. If digital TV is the future, I'd rather go to the past where there were 3 channels and at least 1 thing to watch each night.
</technological prima donna grumpy old man rant>
Have you seen the police? They're either tiny fat women, tiny skinny girls, blokes who make Goody from the Thin Blue line tv series look macho or big fat men. They have to bus in actual real policemen from all over the country if there's any kind of serious fracas in the offing to get a decent showing of useful sized blokes.
We had an exciting EDL/BNP rally in Stoke the other week, it was amusing to see how many police they'd brought in from how far away to police the event and they still had dwarfs (not the good kind with axes) and stick insects trying to hold back the raging tide.
The salvation army would do a better job, they'd at least be able to lull them to sleep with their fine brassbandmanship.
A mate joined up about 12 months ago and he's the kind you'd want to arrest someone, 6' 4" built like a tank and he says that the diversity training and the compassion training and the admin training means that the 5 minutes a week they spend on learning how to arrest people basically comes down to gang tackle and sit on their head.
If you want proof on how bad the training is, watch how they hold a nightstick. It's a really devastating light, fast weapon when used correctly and that starts by holding it by the handle but instead they hold it like the old fashioned weighted truncheon and try bludgeoning people with it.
You lasted half an hour awake :O
If your son wanted to go, someone else's son wanted to go, so just let that son's parent take yours to go see it too. It's good for time and efficiency and good for health and safety (your face isn't damaged because you're banging your face on the chair infront).
My mates been doing this with his kids for years or as he puts it "Hannah Montana is for other people"
Which gives you more time for that beer and the price of tickets these days, you can now afford 4 more of them :)
Right now, there's a local "entrepreneur" that, whenever they bring out a new design on the ID card with new security features has a fake knocked out in a couple of days.
These cards make about as much sense as a security code on a radio, which as anyone who's ever lost their code will tell you, takes a guy in a garage about 30 seconds to reset to 12345.
Mines the one with the collar turned up
Any court case for any reason going against that destroyer of souls george "merchandise me" lucas is a winner. The man's scum, after producing the prequel trilogy which destroyed the hopes and dreams of a generation with it's shoddy shoddy shoddyness and it's toy production like the george lucas family cameo figure set, the darth vader garden sprinkler and this nugget which is surely not suitable for children
http://www.play.com/Gadgets/Gadgets/4-/3433501/Star-Wars-Han-Solo-30th-Anniversary-Figure/Product.html?ptsl=1&ob=Price&fb=0&&_$ja=tsid:11518|cc:|prd:3433501|cat:Film+Memorabilia
What am I saying, kids can't afford lucas toys, they're only there for collectors to not take out of the packet
Not that I'm in anyway traumatised by the man's total lack of soul :P
While the CRB check has your convictions on it doesn't the E-CRB have all interactions with the police on it, no matter how spurious? And while the DNA may *may* be removed from the database in 6 years, the fact that it was taken will still be there.
So all these yoofs they're arresting just to get DNA are going to be screwed in a few years as about half of the bogstandard developer jobs I was interviewing for wanted the CRB and 2 wanted the E-CRB, not even jobs in kid-related areas.
You are exactly right but as in all concerts there are always flyers handed out and posters stuck up on the wall saying "no recording devices may be used in this venue", that means that you can't do it...or crowdsurf :-(
@Chris Wareham
I'm 5'11 weedy with glasses and they've never bothered me, usually cause they realise they're in the wrong and when they turn round there are 10 people glaring at them who I've just made friends with by smacking the phone down :-D
I dont' have a pic of the amstrad that someone had had under their desk for 3 years and when I took the lid off, it was full from front to back with dust and sandwich bits. I lifted it out pretty much intact and threw it out the window where it exploded in the wind and bits of it scattered and landed on the MD's car. So not a total waste
Not to mention, that you can ignore as much scientific evidence as you like with no problems, unless that is you've proclaimed how you're going to have evidence based policy.
Regarding horse riding, Johnson (could there be a man more aptly named?) doesn't quite understand the concept of the metaphor then.
Dr Who started off well but the scripts ahve devolved into pointless running round and whatever Trashwood is supposed to be. They've run out of ideas after strip mining films and tv series.
The least said about Trashwood's children of blah the better, the plan to get rid of the aliens was to get Cap'n Jack to tell them to leave or else...or else what ????
Pathetic
@Mosh Jahan" - You're very much "the glass is half empty" type, I imagine. A lot of your complaints are about trivial things that can be easily rectified or only need configuring once after initial setup."
I'm sorry if you consider the UI trivial and MS breaking the rules it's been saying I should follow on their expensive courses for years
@John 104 "Search can be turned off. its called the indexing service, or, more correctly on Win7, Windows Search."
Yes, the search can be turned off, which makes it a bit difficult to do a search. I'm not on about the search indexing I'm on about the physical act of searching and making changes to that search, which is why I was talking about how you request a search not how vista/w7 actually performs it
See what I put "Search is the same as vista, doesn't search well, doesn't let you search higher or lower in the file structure without going back and reentering your criteria"
"Desktop Icons. Um, Yes you can. Turn Auto Arrange off and you can put them anywhere you want...Seriously, are you that inept of a user that you can't figure these things out"
Can't see where I said this, about the desktop items. Especially as my icons on the desktop are spaced out just where I want them :S
Maybe I'm just that inept
@lennie
If you're going to call me a liar, you can go and try the computers I've used and the people around me have used and then, and only then, if it behaves completely differently for you than everyone else who I've seen use it, can you call me a liar
It's easier to read and comprehend where something is when you can see the file paths all together i.e.
c:\program files\winapps\logfiles\log 1.txt
c:\program files\winapps\logfiles\log 34234 3.txt
c:\program files\winapps\logfiles\log 20091021 from a car.txt
than via folders
(log 1.txt)c:\program files\winapps\logfiles\
(log 34234 3.txt)c:\program files\winapps\logfiles\
(log 20091021 from a car.txt)c:\program files\winapps\logfiles\
Finding that the log files are in "c:\program files\winapps\logfiles\" is much harder in this view than via the paths column.
"it doesn't stutter at all."
So when you type "windows" for example it doesn't start looking for "w"s then refresh and look for "wi"s etc.
This computer is brand new so presumably it can cope, it's a 3Gb ram 3 Ghz HP
"I find the search function in the start menu a welcome addition I use all the time, even if I'm looking for a program, I use the search to find it, thigns are much faster to find that way. don't know why you would not want to use it, but that's your prefference."
If you can't organise your start menu properly and need to search for things instead of arranging it how you want, that's your affair
And the option to turn it off would be such a crime???
If you disable search entirely it goes, why not an option in the preferences?
"and also, there is no search button beside any shutdown button anywhere in the OS. if you're talking about the start menu search box, it does not have a search button because the search box auto-searches as you type....so that complaint is stupid and is a lie."
Are you blind or stupid? Next to the search box is a little blue button with a magnifying glass in it, when you type it turns into a little blue box with a white cross in it.
"I was gonna go through all your full comment and show how lie you are with your "complaints" but then I thought I'll leave you alone because clearly your comment is not worth anymore of my type dissecting."
Calling me a liar after demonstrating your obvious idiocy!!! It's true, it's not worth your "type" or even your "time"
@Lupus
No, you don't :P
Bad things
5) When you enter a folder it doesn't auto expand in the folder pane.
In explorer, Tools => options
The bottom box "Navigation pane" tick
"Automatically expand to current folder"
That one bugged me too for it's pointlessness
Good things
2) Doesn't take bloody ages to dim the screen for UAC prompts.
So does what XP does not vista :P
4) Search doesn't suck.
Search is the same as vista, doesn't search well, doesn't let you search higher or lower in the file structure without going back and reentering your criteria
So the reasons you should buy W7 is because it installs fairly quickly and it works a bit better than Vista???
At the new job I've got Windows 7 and it's nice to know that the maxim about not complaining because things could be worse certainly applies.
Vista is excrement, pure and simple; when they screw up the interface so much that nothing stays how I left it and there manic insistence that grouping things alphabetically is the only way. I'm not 4, I can tell in a list of words where the As stop and the Bs start (or is that A's and B's ???) I don't need a line and pointless space being taken up.
And next time I go into the directory it'll have changed what columns are there again and how the items are viewed.
The search disfunctionality!!! If someone can explain how they came up with the idea of listing the folder path in semi-reverse order
instead of "c:\a\b\c\d" you get "d(c:\a\b\c)"
In what reality does that make sense???
It starts searching as soon as you type, then stutters along while trying to keep up with the full thing you're typing in. WAIT. Let me finish typing before you start, the button is there after all which should let me do this.
The paperclip has taken over the operating system
So along comes W7 and my god they've proved that you can't polish a turd.
The reviews of Windows 7 all concentrate on piffle...you shake a window and the others minimize and if you have a touchscreen (I don't know anyone with one, do you?) you can ...touch the screen :-O
What about having the power button replaced with the Button of Screaming Death. Instead of it popping up a page saying, log off, restart & shutdown there's a button with which a single click does one thing...you can set that one thing but windows update (i presume) keeps changing it to "Shut down" because it wants to restart AGAIN. To restart/log off/etc. you have to click on the tiny drop down next to the button...just don't miss or poof and the computer turns off mad
To the left of this is the search button which you CANNOT TURN OFF. I wouldn't mind so much but you can turn off it's ability to search and pretty much everything else it's supposed to do, but you can't get rid of it. If I can stop it doing anything, why can't I get rid of it altogether? And the clear search button is jammed right next to the Button of Screaming Death so 1 false move and poof the computer turns off AGAIN
That and the groupby colums at the header of the columns in explorer mean that you've got to play mouse sniper to make sure you get the right thing otherwise...screaming pain. AGAIN
You used to be able to position items in folders like you do on the desktop. Not any more.
In explorer there's an option to turn off the tree view on in the left panel tracking where you're navigating in the right. Why? and why when I expand a directory in the tree view by double clicking on the directory name scroll the window up so you can't see the tree you've just expanded?
The UI is as broken as it was in Vista, but now, more so
The system tray...you want to minimize something, feel free but then you've got to go and customize the notifications for each application so you can get it back.
You can move the items round on the task bar which is handy but if you've got 2 of the same program open, they're nailed together.So I can't put one copy of studio next to the word doc that the spec in and another next to a word doc with related material in.
So the only vaguely good idea is half-baked.
I'd got quite used to the side bar and found some of the gadgets handy in their block on the side of the screen, so if you maximized, you could see the gadgets.
W7 gadgets just float around without the sidebar, so they either get in the way or you can't see them. half-bakedness incarnate.
I want to know what colour crayons the designers used to make this pile of poop
There may be a better user interface than the windows 95 interface which basically this still is. But breaking, buggering and generally annihilating user interface rules and any sense of logic means that vista & W7 are moving us farther from it.
@Pierre
It's never the parents fault, you should know that by now, kids are badly behaved in schools because of the schools, never the parents at home.
Blame does depend on the class of parents too. If you're a working class family and you leave your 3 kids in a hotel room while you and some mates go to a tapas bar to get drunk and say one of them gets kidnapped, then the other 2 get taken off you and you go to jail. If you're middle class you get to tour the world crying about how bad it is while people send you money.
Go figure
@npupp
Her back catalogue, now there are some criminal records <ba da bum>
and watch the tumbleweed go rolling by
So what's the price of a new DVD/CD/Bluray (bluray...bwa ha ha like I'm going to buy all my films again, this time for even more money) in OZ/NZ land...see what I did there :P
The bit about getting rid of stock...how much stock can there be? The local supermarkets have all got old things like gladiator for £2 but they've also got new "special/dircetors cut/platinum/wadeva" editions for £2 as well.
Paris because even though she's had a criminal record, she's not deluded enough to think that talking off key about her lack of communication skills is classed as a song.