Posts by moistbuns

ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer

Re: Microsoft is missing a trick

That can already been done with NTLite. Admittedly you have to build it new with each major update if I'm right - or a WU will refresh the machine with a full 10 image. Removing integrated apps and telemetry components is robust though if you go deeper you can end up running into problems.

Windows is surprisingly modular although MS have made it very difficult to pick and choose. Just recently they changed DISM so removed components are just "hidden". In a day and age where most people are constantly connected to the internet you'd think could save bandwidth and SSD space by just having components download on-demand. Instead it's typically a 4GB+ iso unpacking to 20GB or more. The barebones for fully functional Windows 10 is less than half that.

BT 'UK's most powerful Wi-Fi'? Why, fie, for shame! – ads watchdog

I always find the adverts for BT Hubs amusing because of the three Hubs I've had the pleasure of using, the Hub X being my own - none of them have managed to not drop out and reset on a daily basis in three separate households. I'd say the Hub X is the better one but I think that's probably due to a firmware update being sneaked on to it; it used to crash just as much as the previous models. That or I'm just not noticing it.

Aside from the crashes, the Hub X struggles to carry stable WiFi over to other side of my small flat and it's mainly hollow plasterboard walls in-between. So it gets moved from room to room.

The speeds aren't usually terrible mind you. I can usually get the quoted 60Mbit - behind other countries but still just fine for me. There's also no usage surprises but they're also not cheap.

Windows 10 can carry on slurping even when you're sure you yelled STOP!

This is all very important and all but NO ONE has commented on how pretty the man is in the stock photo.

He's GORGEOUS.

Ugly, incomplete, buggy: Windows 10 faces a sprint to the finish

It's going to be hard for Windows 10 to satisfy anyone unless Microsoft really steps up it's game. MS decided it wanted to cater for lap/desktops, tablets and phones and the answer isn't necessarily integrating all of them.

I'm not sure what's going on inside Microsoft but you can see from Googling (or Binging, if that's your thing) "Windows concepts" that there's clearly some excellent and terrible ideas for the Windows UI out there - most of them are straight-forward and tweak the original formula closer to perfection. They are mockups that make me wonder why Microsoft never came up with them.

Instead we're in a situation where Microsoft will pick and choose all the feedback they want and said "hey, we listened to you". What they should be doing is listening to all that feedback, adding in the options to let users choose what they want from their desktop or tablet experience.

Meanwhile people seem to be deluded that it has to be one or the other. Windows 8 doesn't demonstrate that users won't let go of old ways - it demonstrates that Microsoft is capable of making terrible design decisions.

At the end of the day Microsoft aren't far off something that could satisfy both end-users if they just added in options to tweak the interface bit-by-bit, with a consistent and good-looking design language. You only have to go as far as image search to see how Microsoft could be capable of offering a rich desktop within a Metro-style design language.