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 From:  Lucy (X3N0PH0N)   2 Aug 2015 22:54 
 To:  Matt      Poll 47 of 110 
41543.47 In reply to 41543.41 
Windows is in a weird position now, though. It's still overwhelmingly dominant on the PC, obviously, but it's in a strange kind of dead-end.

Outside of the PC it's irrelevant (ignoring WinCE embedded stuff which is more of an anomaly than anything else) and the narrative for the past few years has been that the desktop is dead/dying. Which is obviously bollocks but it's certainly true that mobile has been the growth area for the last few years and MS have spectacularly failed to do anything at all in that market.

So they're left with a woefully outdated* desktop OS and their choice is: play it safe and give that creaky old OS another new coat of paint or play it risky, try to shoehorn that OS onto mobile and hope for some penetration (YJ).

And they've kinda opted for... both. Which leaves them with a technically quite good but massively unpopular mobile OS and a technically dead but massively popular (though not hugely profitable) desktop OS. They can't afford to do an actual new Windows for a market no one is sure matters any more but they can't withdraw from a market they have like 90% share of. So... we get Windows 10, while they figure out what the fuck to do and/or hope that people suddenly start liking Windows on mobile.

And with the diminishing significance of the OS on the platform they still control (largely due to the rise of web-apps but the diversification of computing in general has played a big part too) they're slowly bleeding out in that market too as users opt for Macs, Chromebooks or just an Android/iOS tablet instead of a laptop.

It'll take a long long time for MS to lose their dominance on PC, obviously, but without new tech or genuine new features (so not Cortana) even fanboys are going to struggle to find reasons to stay after a while.

* Basically the NT4 kernel; weird, semi-64bit support (and mostly 32bit userland); outdated, feature-poor filesystem (which is poor on SSDs) - no snapshotting, no decent built-in (and trusted) encrytion, no decent (i.e. 'free') compression, no (real) on the fly-resizing, no pooling/cloning/subvolumes etc. etc.; Poor security model (even aside from NSA-backdoor concerns (which business in particular is increasingly concerned about)); No real sandboxing (nothing like chroots or BSD jails); terrible containerisation support; shitty VM tech and no in-kernel hypervisor.
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 From:  Peter (BOUGHTONP)    3 Aug 2015 00:25 
 To:  graphitone      Poll 48 of 110 
41543.48 In reply to 41543.38 
You're curious.

Which two fingers and how?

 
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 From:  graphitone   3 Aug 2015 07:48 
 To:  Peter (BOUGHTONP)       Poll 49 of 110 
41543.49 In reply to 41543.48 
I suspect 90% of people would be similar, but it'd be index and middle finger wrapped around the handle, coming back into one's palm with the thumb placed on top to steady things.


images?q=tbn:8nj2HfmLhyV7yM:b
Drawings n' that
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 From:  Queeg 500 (JESUSONEEZ)   3 Aug 2015 11:34 
 To:  Peter (BOUGHTONP)       Poll 50 of 110 
41543.50 In reply to 41543.1 
When I say 'attempted', what I actually mean is that I got home from work, turned my machine on expecting it to notify me to install. It didn't, so I didn't.

I'm happy to wait for the notification rather than faff about with an ISO or USB install.

You know what he said? Ah need 'bout tree-fiddy.
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 From:  ANT_THOMAS   3 Aug 2015 12:43 
 To:  graphitone      Poll 51 of 110 
41543.51 In reply to 41543.49 
Maybe I'm in the 10%. Thumb on top, three fingers in the hole/handle (YJ) and little finger outside at the bottom for support.
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 From:  milko   3 Aug 2015 12:51 
 To:  Queeg 500 (JESUSONEEZ)      Poll 52 of 110 
41543.52 In reply to 41543.50 
You don't have to use an ISO or USB, you just go to the link and download a wee exe file which does it all in-place. If you want to do it.
milko
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 From:  Queeg 500 (JESUSONEEZ)   3 Aug 2015 13:05 
 To:  milko      Poll 53 of 110 
41543.53 In reply to 41543.52 
Still too much faff. I don't have the sort of time to download a file and double-click on it! Are you some sort of mad-man?

Jeez.

You know what he said? Ah need 'bout tree-fiddy.
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 From:  fixrman   3 Aug 2015 13:14 
 To:  99% of gargoyles look like (MR_BASTARD)      Poll 54 of 110 
41543.54 In reply to 41543.43 
Eww.
 
  Did you ever see such a messed up situation in your whole life, son?
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 From:  Matt   3 Aug 2015 13:34 
 To:  Lucy (X3N0PH0N)      Poll 55 of 110 
41543.55 In reply to 41543.47 
With regards to Windows on the desktop and starting over from scratch. They can't, or rather people up-high have told them they can't. I'm sure there are plenty of developers in the Windows group that would love and have probably tried to start over, but have been shot down / don't have the needed permission from the bean counters to make it stick.

As for Windows Mobile - 8 and 10 really aren't that bad. Microsoft's biggest problem was enticing users and thus developers away from Android and iOS. Essentially, Apple and Google have done and are still doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to it's competitors on the desktop - got people too heavily invested in their platforms for them to be able to switch. But in the similar vein, Apple and Google are now nearing the same position Microsoft are in but on Mobile - they have so many users heavily invested in Android and iOS that they simply would not be able to afford to start over.

And I'm not going to touch the NT kernel stuff - obvious troll is obvious :P

doohicky
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 From:  fixrman   3 Aug 2015 13:38 
 To:  Lucy (X3N0PH0N)      Poll 56 of 110 
41543.56 In reply to 41543.47 
You obviously know WAY more than I do about an OS, but I will offer this: NT was actually good back with Windows 2000. I really liked W2K because it was such an improvement over path picky and cranky W98/98SE. ME was a shitbox OS; of course, the old saw of "every other release was OK" applies (for me), but I didn't care for XP at all.

Windows 7 was, in my opinion a better extension of 2000 but it was way too bloated. I installed W7 32 bit on an SSD and paid the ultimate price because it didn't play nice with GRUB, even though *nix and Windoze were on 2 separate drives, both OSes were hosed one fine day when something wasn't well liked.

One thing that really grinds my gears is the endless restarts on updates with Windoze. They HAVE to get away from that. With Linux (specifically Mint, but they all operate pretty much the same in *nix land), I can install 442 updates in about 4 minutes whilst continuing what I am doing without a disruption. 442 updates on Windows could take 30 minutes, and I have to watch a circular juggle of balls(YJ) whilst I do not do anything else because Windoze prevents it.

I am glad to be rid of the Charms Bar (well, it is mostly gone) but I want to be rid of 80% of those "touch the edge utilities". I don't have a tablet or a touchscreen, so stop making me use an OS that thinks I have a touchscreen or tablet, dammit! Actually, I dislike using a laptop because I hate the keyboards, preferring a full size, clacky keyboard.

Microsoft doesn't realise, nor do they care it seems, that the OS needs to be just a tool to get things done, rather than something that invades the whole time spent on the box. I don't want the OS to be so front and center that I know it is there all of the time. Now I am going back to the Linux box because whatever I borked when sonny and I were tearing the basement apart - a light fixture had fallen and knocked the FiOS cable out -  now works again.  :-D
 
 
  Did you ever see such a messed up situation in your whole life, son?
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 From:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)   3 Aug 2015 14:41 
 To:  Matt      Poll 57 of 110 
41543.57 In reply to 41543.55 
It's been interesting any time I've been to any developer-related Microsoft events (Tech Ed many moons ago, a SQL course in Seattle more recently), to hear the tales from the people on the ground in Microsoft. There's a lot of inter-departmental wrangling goes on, especially for something like SSIS, where the SQL team were dependent on what the Visual Studio team could produce for the interface, and had to deal with the Office team to figure out how the hell to extract data from the various formats of Office documents (and if you want a laugh, all you have to do is ask about date handling in Excel and 64-bit ODBC drivers).

I wonder what'll happen in the future to the stuff like Visual Studio and SQL Server - it's not sexy modern customer facing stuff, so it doesn't sell to the general public, but I imagine the licensing of that kind of thing is a fairly hefty chunk of their income, and it is dependent on having an OS that'll run the stuff.

(The main reason I wonder what'll happen is because if they were to decide to give up on SQL Server, rather a lot of the stuff I work on, and the people I work for, would be a bit screwed.)
Kenny
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 From:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)   3 Aug 2015 14:43 
 To:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)      Poll 58 of 110 
41543.58 In reply to 41543.57 
Meanwhile, I can't upgrade my home PC to 10, because "There are no supported networking devices", despite my computer having an utterly bog standard Atheros (wired) and Ralink (wireless) devices.

I'm taking that as a hint not to bother upgrading yet.
Kenny
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 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)   3 Aug 2015 15:33 
 To:  ALL Poll 59 of 110 
41543.59 
I feel a chip shop parable coming on...

----
"Giant pig hot air balloon crashes after tangling with a cowboy-shaped one"
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 From:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)   3 Aug 2015 16:27 
 To:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)      Poll 60 of 110 
41543.60 In reply to 41543.59 
I've given up on those, since my last one involved the girl from the local chip shop leaving the chip shop and becoming the UK's youngest MP since 1832, which is patently ridiculous.
Kenny
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 From:  DeannaG (CYBATRON)   3 Aug 2015 19:28 
 To:  fixrman      Poll 61 of 110 
41543.61 In reply to 41543.56 
Quote: 
I didn't care for XP at all.

Agreed! I never had a computer that locked up and crashed so much as when I had one with XP. I was SO thankful just to get away from that one it was ridiculous.

The one I have now has 8.1, which hasn't given me any issues with working, but I don't really care for some of the layout.

I don't need all that stuff they put in it. Like news, cooking, shopping, and so forth. All I need is my desktop and what I have on it. Also, I preferred the old start menu, before they started putting it all over the screen like they have it now, and I don't need that hover mess off to the side. 



 

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 From:  99% of gargoyles look like (MR_BASTARD)   3 Aug 2015 20:33 
 To:  DeannaG (CYBATRON)      Poll 62 of 110 
41543.62 In reply to 41543.61 
You've pretty much summed up why I upgrade to 7.

truffy.gifbastard by name
bastard by nature
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 From:  99% of gargoyles look like (MR_BASTARD)   3 Aug 2015 20:35 
 To:  milko      Poll 63 of 110 
41543.63 In reply to 41543.1 
So many unknown users! How is this possible?

truffy.gifbastard by name
bastard by nature
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 From:  Dave!!   3 Aug 2015 20:44 
 To:  DeannaG (CYBATRON)      Poll 64 of 110 
41543.64 In reply to 41543.61 
It's interesting how different people have different experiences. I really liked XP and found it very stable. Could be that coming from Windows 98, it was a big step forwards stability wise (on most hardware). I certainly had no problems sticking with it during the mess of Vista, and I do still run it on an old Mac Mini that turns its nose up at Windows 7. In all honesty, I cannot remember the last time it crashed on me.

I do find it interesting when they talk about Windows 10 and go on about major new features like Cortana (which 99% of PC users will probably never use), and Edge (I have a perfectly good browser already thanks).

I know they're still trying with the mobile side of things, but if you don't use Windows on a mobile device like a phone or tablet and have no interest in doing so, then most of these features are of little use. I just want a version of Windows which looks good, and is designed to be as good as possible on a proper PC. Unfortunately, Windows 7 is the last time they developed an OS with such a clear mindset. Windows 10 is definitely better than 8/8.1, but you can still see the compromises, and there's still too many messy and unfinished areas as a result.
---

 
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 From:  Matt   3 Aug 2015 20:56 
 To:  Dave!!      Poll 65 of 110 
41543.65 In reply to 41543.64 
quote: Dave!!
and Edge (I have a perfectly good browser already thanks).

I think you missed the point of Edge. Edge is Internet Explorer with a new engine (free of all the legacy cruft from IE11) and new branding. It's like what Firefox is to The Mozilla Suite.

doohicky
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 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)   3 Aug 2015 22:24 
 To:  Matt      Poll 66 of 110 
41543.66 In reply to 41543.65 
They use the same fucking icon though. Not good.

----
"Giant pig hot air balloon crashes after tangling with a cowboy-shaped one"
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