Newell: Win8 is a catastrophe; Pardo: I don't disagree.

[Lightman]

I've just installed W8Pro + MediaCentre upgrade on my HTPC yesterday. I must say it makes sense for Living Room PC and Metro there is easier to use for my wife and 10 year old son.
I like loading times to desktop on normal HDD. Compared to Vista I had there is nearly 3x quicker.
In Living Room it will be great to use Metro UI with Kinect type of device. I know it should be coming soon, but haven't heard anything about it for a while.
BTW does anyone know if I can use XBOX controller to navigate in Metro? I forgot to check it out yesterday :smile:.

Once I familiarize myself with it on HTPC I will probably install it on my main PC as well.

 

[Albuquerque]

I'm using Server 2008R2 as my HTPC (it also serves as the central virtualization host for the entire house); I've turned on the desktop themes and aero services, along with creating a very-limited rights user account for auto-logon. My wife gets plenty of use from it via a Logitech wireless keyboard + touchpad combo device.

I'm very interested in the move to Server 2012 for her use, as she'd LOVE the Metro interface for quickly getting to her TV shows ,movies, music, et al directly from the metro interface (via gestures on the multitouch-capable touchpad) rather than surfing the desktop.

 

[Xmas]

The share of Android smartphones is growing rapidly

It looks like the absolute shipments are wrong in this image and that they have been corrected at the source.

 

[swaaye]

Honestly I don't notice Win8 being faster even though I keep reading about that. Even Vista seems fast to me these days with SSDs. Maybe differences become apparent if you have hardware like Atom and a slow HDD. You also never have such hardware trying to run Aero in 8's case. First impressions...

I played with one of the ASUS Win8 Tegra 3 tablets this weekend and the OS is definitely slick there. Fast and easy to use. I loaded up a magazine PDF and the Win8 PDF app was impressively fast. That's my most valued benchmark heh.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I played with one of the ASUS Win8 Tegra 3 tablets this weekend and the OS is definitely slick there. Fast and easy to use. I loaded up a magazine PDF and the Win8 PDF app was impressively fast. That's my most valued benchmark heh.

That's encouraging. I still have to find time to stick Win8 on my Win7 slate (Atom). PDF performance was always the most disappointing thing on it. Making it faster won't make it more useable (16:9 screen ratio, bleh), but at least it would make it less tedious.

Regards,
SB

 

[UniversalTruth]

New version of Windows, lots of people crying about it on tech sites. Hardly unpredictable.

Hmm, was it really the case when Windows 7 was launched?

As a touch interface Metro is at least as good iOS or Android, and x86 desktop is faster and leaner than W7 and has other improvements too. What a disaster.

I think it can be considered as a widely accepted knowledge that Windows in general is considered as "soap opera" and people don't love it very much. Trying to compare it with Android and even with iOS no matter what arguments about performance, etc you find, will hardly make any difference. Fate.

I've just installed W8Pro... I like loading times to desktop on normal HDD. Compared to Vista I had there is nearly 3x quicker.

That only shows how poorly MS executes. Tomorrrow they will unleash something new and it will be 2-3X faster. That doesn't only mean that the new one is "great" but also shows how bad the old one is.

W8Pro + MediaCentre upgrade on my HTPC yesterday. I must say it makes sense for Living Room PC and Metro there is easier to use for my wife and 10 year old

Yup, it is okey for consuming but what about creating?

Honestly I don't notice Win8 being faster even though I keep reading about that.

That's what I heard earlier today too. Same speed with Windows 7.

I played with one of the ASUS Win8 Tegra 3 tablets this weekend and the OS is definitely slick there. Fast and easy to use. I loaded up a magazine PDF and the Win8 PDF app was impressively fast. That's my most valued benchmark heh.

Well, this is exactly one of the reasons behind low PC sales. With these tremendous hardware requirements and this impression how "awesome" one relatively slow smartphone or tablet is...

Though these "dashes" do a less dramatic take over. But I don't find them interesting, a Windows 3.1 grid of icons is not my taste.

This.

they want a universal ui
pc's, netbooks, tablets, phones

I agree but metro with this look is crap. Should work harder on it to modify it to acceptable level.

 

[function]

Hmm, was it really the case when Windows 7 was launched?

It was when 95, 98, ME, XP and Vista were released. Of these only ME was genuinely bad. And the reaction to Vista - which was better than any previous version of Windows if you had the hardware to run it and once drivers were fixed - shows what a feckless bunch most bloggers and forumites are.

And no, I haven't forgotten about 2000, its just that it slipped under most gamers / users radars when it came out and so avoided the bitters tears of all the people that confuse change with badness and danger.

I think it can be considered as a widely accepted knowledge that Windows in general is considered as "soap opera" and people don't love it very much. Trying to compare it with Android and even with iOS no matter what arguments about performance, etc you find, will hardly make any difference. Fate.

I don't love Windows, iOS, Android or any other operating system, and don't understand why anyone would. What I said was that the user interface was as at least as good (it's probably better), the point being that in all the bitter tears the actual qualities of the product were being completely ignored. And you still have the desktop.

That only shows how poorly MS executes. Tomorrrow they will unleash something new and it will be 2-3X faster. That doesn't only mean that the new one is "great" but also shows how bad the old one is.

So it show how badly previous versions were while at the same time ...

That's what I heard earlier today too. Same speed with Windows 7.

... it's not actually any faster!

Well done, Universal Truth!

 

[UniversalTruth]

So it show how badly previous versions were while at the same time ...

... it's not actually any faster!

Hint: if you follow quotes, 1st- Vista vs 8, 2nd- 8 vs 7.

Well done, Universal Truth!

No need to make it personal, one would assume.

 

[function]

You weren't talking specifically about Vista though, you were talking generally about "how poorly MS executes" based on improvements in successive products:

That only shows how poorly MS executes. Tomorrrow they will unleash something new and it will be 2-3X faster. That doesn't only mean that the new one is "great" but also shows how bad the old one is.

... and so pointing out the contradiction was entirely valid IMO.

No need to make it personal, one would assume.

This is fair enough though. The sarcasm didn't add anything. You caught some of my impotent fury at "people" and "the internets" and "pro bloggers". I should remember that I'm a "people" and part of "the internets" too.

At least I'm not one of those dirty "pro bloggers" though!

 

[NRP]

shows what a feckless bunch most bloggers and forumites are.

Truer words were never spoken.

 

[swaaye]

Well, this is exactly one of the reasons behind low PC sales. With these tremendous hardware requirements and this impression how "awesome" one relatively slow smartphone or tablet is...

Let me rephrase then. Tegra3 and Win8's PDF app was impressively fast at PDFs on an ARM platform. Though I have not recently played with Tegra3 and Android PDF readers. It's many times faster than my overclocked Nook Color though.

I am watching the x86 offerings closely. Something with Ivy Bridge at a non-insane price is dreamy.

 

[Sxotty]

I've just installed W8Pro + MediaCentre upgrade on my HTPC yesterday. I must say it makes sense for Living Room PC and Metro there is easier to use for my wife and 10 year old son.
I like loading times to desktop on normal HDD. Compared to Vista I had there is nearly 3x quicker.
In Living Room it will be great to use Metro UI with Kinect type of device. I know it should be coming soon, but haven't heard anything about it for a while.
BTW does anyone know if I can use XBOX controller to navigate in Metro? I forgot to check it out yesterday :smile:.

Once I familiarize myself with it on HTPC I will probably install it on my main PC as well.

I am debating about doing this as well for my htpc as well. It really does seem like a nice match.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I believe Windows 8 obviously improved, at least under the hood compared to 7 and Vista before it, without being demeaning to Vista.
XP SP2 improved on SP1 which improved on original release (I really hated that one), 98SE was way better than the preceding versions (though it's a lot more resource hungry than 95), or Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.04 to 10.04..

If your software doesn't improve with newer releases (at least those within a common technical line), or if it even worsens you're doing something wrong. This killed Netscape for instance, netscape 4.x was bad and patching it was hopeless. (the rewrite came too late, and released unfinished as Netscape 6)

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Hint: if you follow quotes, 1st- Vista vs 8, 2nd- 8 vs 7.



No need to make it personal, one would assume.

Except you miss out one thing.

In terms of speed. Vista = Win7 = Win8. Some things are faster on Vista. Some things are faster on Win7. And some things are faster on Win8. But overall, they are pretty similar.

People only had problems with Vista if their hardware had problem drivers (Nvidia, HP, Broadcom NIC, etc.) during the launch window. On the other hand, if you had hardware that had good launch drivers (AMD, Samsung, etc.) then Vista launch was as smooth and trouble free as the Win7 launch. It's a shame that Vista got a bad rap due to some lazy hardware companies because it was a very good product.

In fact, far less launch problems and incompatibilities than WinXP by far. But people conveniently forget just how bad the WinXP launch was when ranting about Vista. And Win2k was multiple times worse if you were an average consumer with very poor 3rd party hardware driver support.

Regards,
SB

 

[Arwin]

Vista SP3 = Windows 7, almost. So the two can't be fully compared. But Vista's UI had some really annoying flaws, like defaulting to huge icons with no text, and unintuitive ways of setting/remembering folder view settings across the board. Windows 7 is basically Vista with a better UI, and the internal version number shows it. Plenty of other optimisations happened, many of which went into Vista in the form of SP3.

Now Windows 8 is actually quite similar to 7 internally when it comes to the PC side of things, and then there's the new RT layer that runs, as far as I can tell, basically on top of Windows 7 on the PC and on x86/64 based tablets,, and by itself on the ARM tablets and phones.

I think that should inform your expectations regarding performance and compatibility ...

 

[dZeus]

Vista SP3 = Windows 7, almost. So the two can't be fully compared. But Vista's UI had some really annoying flaws, like defaulting to huge icons with no text, and unintuitive ways of setting/remembering folder view settings across the board. Windows 7 is basically Vista with a better UI, and the internal version number shows it. Plenty of other optimisations happened, many of which went into Vista in the form of SP3.

Now Windows 8 is actually quite similar to 7 internally when it comes to the PC side of things, and then there's the new RT layer that runs, as far as I can tell, basically on top of Windows 7 on the PC and on x86/64 based tablets,, and by itself on the ARM tablets and phones.

I think that should inform your expectations regarding performance and compatibility ...

pretty much. And now Microsoft is resorting to not backporting certain applications to their older NT6-based OSes (Vista and 7) as to lure people over to their new OS.
Including not delivering on their promises (I'm still waiting for WMP12 for Vista).

I'm guessing that if Microsoft had switched to an incremental OS upgrade system starting at Vista and up, and charged lower amounts for each upgrade, things would have been much better on their side.
While Metro is a definitive step up for touch-UI, I get quite bothered by it on my regular non-touchscreen notebook. Might push people over to stick with what works for them (mostly 7), or to switch to Apple. We'll see...

On the plus side, ultra-fast wake up from S3 sleep and super low memory usage because of more services started on-demand are very nice

 

[UniversalTruth]

Microsoft was left by Windows unit head

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.overclockers.ru%2Fsoftnews%2F50637%2FMicrosoft_pokidaet_glava_Windows-podrazdeleniya.html&act=url

Sinofsky resigned just three weeks after the official start of sales of Windows 8, and while network resources are full of comments such as "not sustained disgrace" and similar jokes, the true reasons for leaving one of the old residents of the corporation, which he devoted almost 23 years of his life remains a mystery...

 

[CouldntResist]

pretty much. And now Microsoft is resorting to not backporting certain applications to their older NT6-based OSes (Vista and 7) as to lure people over to their new OS.

Just for the record, backporting is a misnomer. MS never ever "backported" DX in its entire history. It simply developed their API from the beginning with multiple Windows versions in mind. It's a fricking hardware abstraction afterall. The term "backporting" was creatively applied by Microsoft apologists during Vista & DX 10 case, to put the blame on imaginary technical burden, impossible to handle by the company. Now, when this shit is repeated in even more blatant way, let's call it for what it really is. It's deliberate API denial.

 

[I.S.T.]

DX10 and XP would be backporting as DX10 was a loooooooooooooot more than just shader model 4.0. A lot of it is friggin' OS level changes. To port DX10 to XP it'd require enough work to count as a minor OS release unto itself, ala the yearly OS X updates.

 

[CouldntResist]

And you still believe it, without evidence.