Posts by Edentifier1 11 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2012
I'm just wondering why The Register framed this as an 'apology' a couple of times in the article, when it is not an apology, it is simply a statement on a blog post that the company has offered to pay off those that wished to leave due to disagreeing with the company policy of keeping politics to personal time, rather than company time.
Strange editorial decision, there.
Personally I disagree. I've been using an HP TX2 (touch screen, convertible) for a few years and now with Windows 8 it actually has been a pleasure to use. It isn't as slim as an iPad, nor as 'cool'... but typically when I meet up with friends and we end up using our devices, the cool thing the iPad users do is pay for their parking using an app that is location aware. Lots of nice animations, very slick interface.
After that, it goes downhill, and we invariably end up using the old TX2 as it has a keyboard and I have a 'mobile mouse'. And it can run serious applications, not just apps.
This was before Windows 8 - and now with it, the iPad people are the ones who are impressed with the combination of being finger swipe friendly, but still a proper computer. I'll wait to see if the Surface Pro is worth spending money on, but currently i'm very happy with old hardware that now has a new lease of life.
I was a cynic about Windows 8 for a long time, especially the 'first 30 minutes' experience - but really once I persevered, it's a really good attempt, and a step in the right direction.
It's a possibility (I phrase that carefully). that actually what will happen is the reverse of what you foresee, and that in fact tablets will be supplanted by devices that also allow content creation, as consumers begin to want more functionality. A bit like the Netbook story...
It had nothing to do with Microsoft or Intel, it was the consumer.
People bought the low specced Netbook and once the novelty of having a device that was cheap and had a long battery life wore off, they found that actually, what they really needed to do anything useful was closer to a lower specced laptop. 4GB of storage ... sorry, but that doesn't go far these days.
The original Netbooks didn't really have much of an advantage over the larger mobiles with good screens when it came to browsing and email etc. And in the many situations where you could simply have used a laptop, then the Netbooks were really pretty pointless attempts at cost saving.
The best thing about the arrival of the Netbook was that it triggered a revisiting of the laptop form, and encouraged an evolution into making the more powerful device more portable and with longer battery life, and for that I am certainly thankful.
@ Al Jones
Until you mentioned it, I forgot how good the installation process was. No problems with drivers.
One of the things that really amazed me was that I did an in-place upgrade from Windows 8 Consumer Preview to the Release Candidate when that came out - and *all the while it was installing the new OS files*, people were still talking to me on that machine on the Messenger app - all the networking and core application support was still running.
I was kind of amazed. It required a reboot and the end of course, so presumably Microsoft have used some sort of shadow copy approach to this.
Of course after it was released via MSDN I did a bare metal install.
Windows Update is a lot less intrusive too - I hardly even notice it now and it seems much quicker.
I haven't tried the built in 'Refresh Windows without losing data' or 'Factory settings reset' yet, but it looks promising that Microsoft are heading in that direction.
I still think that the desktop needs to be far more integrated. I used Start8 with the preview releases, and that made the new Start menu seem much easy to get to grips with. Now I don't use it, but I think Microsoft should look at these (Classic Shell, Start8) as examples, and build something in to a Service Pack that makes the desktop integration more seamless.
Also another slight downer is IE10's lack of compatibility with a lot of websites that don't have problems with Firefox or Chrome. I think that is probably the biggest disappointment - that after all this time, they still don't have the browser right. In the current market, that is unforgivable, and Microsoft really need to get the browser engine right, and quickly.
Well, it's not really designed for us in a VM. Maybe its the hypervisor causing the speed problems, because Windows 8 is noticably quicker than 7.
I was also sceptical about Windows 8, having tried both previews, and I was ranting to friends that it would be a disaster, how I couldn't figure out how to use it.
But I stuck with it, and now, I wouldn't go back. Once you 'get' the way Charms work, that it actually does work quite well with a mouse keyboard combination, you do learn to appreciate a lot of the improvements.
It's fast, for example - the startup on my 4 year old laptop with an AMD Turion is about 22 seconds from cold-boot bios screen to Windows log in screen being available. From sleep mode to using fingerprint recognition to sign in is about *3* seconds to show the new Metro UI / Windows 8 interface etc etc.
It certainly isn't perfect - the switch to desktop happens far too many times for my daily workload, and it's still jarring - but that's probably because most of us here are in the industry and use our computers in a completely different way to many consumers.
All in all, I think it's a pretty good effort from Microsoft. For a first release, it's usable and with promise. It is not for everyone, but given time, I think this will be a winner.
The biggest problem is that it really is different for people.
@Homer 1
They cannot charge him, until they have first questioned him.
I really despair that Assangists still use this argument - as if they would be happier with charges being made, before he had been interviewed about them - the Swedish want to hear his side of the story, and by law he needs to be arrested on Swedish territory as part of their legal process. Arrest does not mean charging, and charging does not mean guilt. Assange supporters really need to wake up.
The Swedish are following the same legal process as just about any democracy (people with tin foil hats on need not reply).
They Swedish police informed his lawyer they were going to arrest him so they could question him about the more serious of the charges (the ones concerning the Swedish definition of rape). Assange skipped the country - while he was still applying for residency there, as he admired the Swedish legal system and its support for freedom of speech... oh the irony...
Now he turns to that beacon of free speech - Ecuador.
Well I just did a test, and it seems to have taken about 50 seconds to stream Word 2013 onto a laptop with Windows 8 that doesn't have Office 2013 installed, and no cached copy of streamed Word 2013 has been used on that machine. I admit I have a fast internet connection, but not so fast it just downloaded 500 MB, for example...
Start up time for streamed Word 2013 the next document I opened from SkyDrive was around 2 seconds. Different document, not cached.
I haven't noticed any huge difference in disk space - but seriously, if a few of hundred MB is too much for your hardware, you really have other issues.
Well you can never completely remove user stupidity from the equation - at least that is the general rule I follow when designing security into products - once in the wild, people will try to use software / hardware in ways that would never occur to a development team :-)
It has been available on my outlook.com account for a short time and it is really a very nice feature. In combination with SkyDrive / Office web apps / Windows To Go on a USB stick, it's a very neat way of being able to access data in a number of different situations.
Sorry Will Godfrey, but I think the example of someone using an internet based service, then trying to access it without an internet connection, is what I personally call 'cross-platform stupidity'. It isn't a reflection on the service, or the OS, or the concept - it's the person who is the point of failure.
If they are travelling to do a presentation, if they are not prepared for lack of even the basics such as power (take a fully charged laptop with spare battery), a projector (I take my own, just in case), let alone an internet connection (store your apps and data locally - you have practices the presentation, right...?), they probably don't have anything interesting to present.
I believe it was Logitech who had something aesthetically similar a couple of years ago - It was a silver, wedge shaped 'micro mouse' for laptop usage - and I we really happy with it until it went missing from my desk...
I think the pictures in the following link put the size into a better perspective- I'll reserve judgement for I can test one myself...
http://gigaom.com/mobile/banking-on-windows-tablets-microsoft-creates-mobile-add-ons/
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