Windoze 8

Yesterday I drove to Celaya, in Guanajuato state, for a largely meaningless meeting to be held at 10 am. I had to wake up at 4:30 (am) in order to make it. I woke up at 4:29 (this is impotant), which is when my cell phone started beeping a "LOW BATTERY" warning (does it occur to anyone the incessant beeping actually drains the battery faster??). I managed to charge it a bit, but at home I need to hook it up to the PC to do that (long story). So I left with a finicky phone losing its charge and turned off (to preserve the battery).

All this means I couldn't listen to an audiobook on the way. I still had my cheap MP3 player, loaded with tons of History of Rome episodes. So I listened to that. I covered the end of the Julio-Caludian dynasy, the brief Flavian dynasty, the miraculous interregnum to the Antonine dynasty, and left off in the middle of the surprisingly long reign of Antoninus Pius.

This is a re-"reading," so between that and the early hour and the effing battery beeping warning, I got to thinking about bad designs on and off through the 520+ km round trip. Which naturally led me to dark, dark thoughts about Windows 8 (did I mention these were dark, dark thoughts? good!)

I keep reading how the M/M/W (that's the "Metro/Modern/Whatever they call it this week") interface's start screen is superior to the start menu. That, to me, is like saying leaky Roman triremes are superior to a modern cruise ship, or that a Wright Flier is superior to a B-777, or seafood is fit for human consumption.

Let's say I want to run a game I downloaded last year. I open the start menu/all programs/Gamehouse and then find the game on an alphabetical list. I've no idea how win 8 would even classify it in the M/M/W start screen. What I've heard is that it could be anywhere, but let's say in the all "apps" view it were categorized under "games." Well, in my PC that would include a really long, long, long list. How long? this long: Gamehouse, Sims2, Sims3, RCT3, Myst, MS games (gotta have a freecell fix at least once a day), XvT, X-wing academy, and at elast three or four others I no longer even remember (I don't play them all, they're just been istalled in the 6+ years I've owned the computer). Oh, and the Gamehouse folder has, oh, over 100 games in it. they're free to try, so....

Now, how the hell is that superior to one folder per game, ordered alphabetically by game?

I suppose I'd use the superamazingincrediblemiraculous new search. Fine, but then it would find, oh, hundreds of Bing results for, say, "Delicious." (that's a game series).

Sure, much better.

Let's face it, Windows 8 is the Comodus of MS's empire. (Do I need to say "extra points for explaining the reference"? Ok, consider it said).

Quote: Nareed

Yesterday I drove to Celaya, in Guanajuato state, for a largely meaningless meeting to be held at 10 am. I had to wake up at 4:30 (am) in order to make it. I woke up at 4:29 (this is impotant), which is when my cell phone started beeping a "LOW BATTERY" warning (does it occur to anyone the incessant beeping actually drains the battery faster??). I managed to charge it a bit, but at home I need to hook it up to the PC to do that (long story). So I left with a finicky phone losing its charge and turned off (to preserve the battery).

All this means I couldn't listen to an audiobook on the way. I still had my cheap MP3 player, loaded with tons of History of Rome episodes. So I listened to that. I covered the end of the Julio-Caludian dynasy, the brief Flavian dynasty, the miraculous interregnum to the Antonine dynasty, and left off in the middle of the surprisingly long reign of Antoninus Pius.

This is a re-"reading," so between that and the early hour and the effing battery beeping warning, I got to thinking about bad designs on and off through the 520+ km round trip. Which naturally led me to dark, dark thoughts about Windows 8 (did I mention these were dark, dark thoughts? good!)

I keep reading how the M/M/W (that's the "Metro/Modern/Whatever they call it this week") interface's start screen is superior to the start menu. That, to me, is like saying leaky Roman triremes are superior to a modern cruise ship, or that a Wright Flier is superior to a B-777, or seafood is fit for human consumption.

Let's say I want to run a game I downloaded last year. I open the start menu/all programs/Gamehouse and then find the game on an alphabetical list. I've no idea how win 8 would even classify it in the M/M/W start screen. What I've heard is that it could be anywhere, but let's say in the all "apps" view it were categorized under "games." Well, in my PC that would include a really long, long, long list. How long? this long: Gamehouse, Sims2, Sims3, RCT3, Myst, MS games (gotta have a freecell fix at least once a day), XvT, X-wing academy, and at elast three or four others I no longer even remember (I don't play them all, they're just been istalled in the 6+ years I've owned the computer). Oh, and the Gamehouse folder has, oh, over 100 games in it. they're free to try, so....

Now, how the hell is that superior to one folder per game, ordered alphabetically by game?

I suppose I'd use the superamazingincrediblemiraculous new search. Fine, but then it would find, oh, hundreds of Bing results for, say, "Delicious." (that's a game series).

Sure, much better.

Let's face it, Windows 8 is the Comodus of MS's empire. (Do I need to say "extra points for explaining the reference"? Ok, consider it said).

Pin it to your start menu or put a shortcut on your desktop or pin to your tool bar.

Quote: boopsahoy

Pin it to your start menu or put a shortcut on your desktop or pin to your tool bar.

You do not pin Comodus. You either kill him or flee to Parthia ;)

I bought a refurbished Dell in Dec for $175 and
am very happy with it. Win 7 and 750 hard drive,
10 times more than I'll ever use. Upgradable to
4 megs of RAM.

Lately I've been posting comments on some tech op eds and articles, and I opened a timid front at the MS blogs, too.

I hit upon one thing that bugs me no end. On one reply I told someone " I feel I'm talking about some amateur, wannabe, too-big-for-its-britches startup with delusions of grandeur rather than Microsoft when I discuss Windows 8."

That's exactly it. I'm stunned that a company like MS turned out an operating system that bad. Worse yet that it's trying to sell it as though it were the bestest thing ever that ever happened ever to personal computers since the invention of personal computers. Seriously, it amkes MS look like some amateur, wannabe, too-big-for-its-britches startup with delusions of grandeur rather than like Microsoft.

There's nothing left now but to write an epitaph. MS will thrive for decades yet, but Windows is dead.

This is too good.

Accordnig to PCWorld, MS will be giving up the trade name "SkyDrive" due to a trademark dispute with BSkyB. Perfect. First they lost title to "Metro" and now this.

Here's a link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2045634/microsoft-to-rename-skydrive-after-losing-trademark-suit.html

I've been having a rather long (on my part) and fragmented (on their part) and amazingly civil conversation with some Windoze fanboys on the comments section of a Microsoft blog (I went there to plant a "No start menu, no deal" teaser). I'm far from swayed by their arguments. For instance, no less than three people keep bringing up "search" as a cure-all for running any program. I've used the search function in the Vista start menu exactly zero times. "Search" and "run" just don't mesh in my mind, not when I want to run a program. I did not, however, make the comparison of having Google as a home page, and typing the name of whatever website you wanted on Google search each time you wanted to visit it (maybe that's how they surf the web).

Seriously. This idea of searching to run is so alien to me I'm hard pressed to come up with an analogy to illustrate just how foreign it feels. I mean, if I were to find a Chinese text written in Greek phoenetics transliterated as a Japanese Haiku in Etruscan lettering, I might make more sense of it (see? that's just ridiculous).

Anyway, it seems one can download the Windows Hell.1 (sorry, that's 8.1; or is it?) preview and run it. That's not such a bad idea, assuming I can either 1) make it run in an old, old, odl, crash-prone XP machine I've lying somehwere (actually I know exactly where it is, so I don't need to run a Catch-22 search first), or in a partition in my test laptop where I've yet to install Linux Mint.

I'm posting this as a heads up. I figrue if I try the evil thing myself, all my rants thus far will fall far, far, far, far short.

You've been warned ;)

I revived the old XP PC. At once one can tell time has passed. Lots and ltos of time. Would you believe it's running Firefox 2? I'm having trouble even running the automatic MS updates... Fun times! The PC isn't even up to SP2 (amazing!!) I'm trying to get there...

"Well, I've wasted a day." Golan Trevize in "Foundation's Edge."

Long story short, it took a lot longer than expected to download the Windows preview. Then the old XP refused to burn it, then it refused to run the boot from the CD (oh, it tried). So I wound up downloading it to the laptop. I should try it tomorrow.

I expect the worst, and I fear I shan't be disappointed.

Ok. It's on.

Thus far:

I tried moving my quick launch icons to the right of the taskbar. I can't.

Also, they don't work like quick launch icons. More like minimized windows. That is, if I click the Firefox icon pinned on the taskbar, it does open Firefox. But then the icon becomes a task square, and I can't open a second window by clicking on it. I always keep (at least) two browser windows going.

So much for that.

Not to mention the effing "charms" keep popping up when I want to close a window.

I've yet to try the M/M/W interface yet (leave it to MS to so horribly misname something so simple; Hmm... Nareed's First law of Hollywood is "Nothing is so simple that Hollywood can't screw it up." I think that can be adapted to Nareed's First law of Microsoft: "Nothing is so simple that Microsoft cannot FUBAR it beyond recognition." Yes, that's a pleonasm, and I apologize for the language, but I think the irritation level merits that much at the least).