Real people dealing with Windows 8

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SomeGuy
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by SomeGuy »

Pisarz wrote:I hate people with closed minds.
Look in a mirror. Your post demonstrates your mind is just as closed as everyone you are complaining about, if not more so. People are all different, and have different preferences and ways of doing things. That is one of the hard parts of making any kind of user interface, there is no one single way that will make everyone happy.
Pisarz wrote:Yes, I mean all of you, who installs all those "Classic Shell" crap to remove all the new features from only one reason - You're too lazy to adapt to the changes.
Lazy?! You have got to be kidding me! Most people spend every second of their day busy with important real-world things, and would have to struggle to find the time to learn a new UI, even if they very much wanted to. If they could just click a button and make it look like the old one so they can get on with their life, then why not do that?
Pisarz wrote:I hate people who use USB mice instead of built in touchpad out of pure laziness.
Trackpads tend not to have the same accuracy as a good mouse. Also, many people who have been using mice for a long time may not have the physical agility to use a trackpad as efficiently. Smart people choose to use solutions that actually WORK for them, rather than suffer with poor solutions. But I am glad trackpads work well for you.
Pisarz wrote: I hate people, who are installing Windows XP on brand new computers. "WINDOWS 7 IZ A CRAP COZ ITZ NOT XP!1111". "WINDOWS 7 HAZ A SUPERBAR ITZ A CRAP". "WINDOWS 7 DOZNT HAZ LUNA THEME ITZ A CRAP". "WINDOWZ 7 HAZ DIFFERENT WALLPAPER ITZ A CRAP" etc. People, that are installing lots of crap that is consuming their PC's resources, just to make it look more like XP. But after that, they realize how sluggish the OS became, so "WINDOWZ 7 IZ A CRAP COZ ITZ SLOW", even though it would run much faster if they only could adapt to the changes.
What language do you speak? (I can't really tell from your post) How would you feel if suddenly you were informed that starting tomorrow, everybody was required to speak Esperanto? Unless you happen to be one of the rare people who is happy to learn new languages, I think you would be quite upset.

The difference between Windows XP and Windows 7 (and even more so with Windows 8) is basically the same thing. The user interface is a language that people learn. It can take years to become proficient. When a user interface changes drastically, it is essentially speaking a new language. People don't like the fact that they have spent time, money, and hard effort learning to do things one way, only to have to start all over.
Pisarz wrote:Yes, closed minds. Hating everything, that it's different from anything they already know, cause it's different. Just don't give it a try, hate it! Just stay in the 2001, while world is going further and is constantly changing.
Perhaps when you are older, and have lived some, and had things you have known and loved torn down around you, perhaps then you will realize that change just for the sake of change is a bad thing.
Pisarz
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by Pisarz »

I think that you're not completely right here. Using an UI is not about learning things, it's about understanding what's on the screen. Trust your intuition, not knowledge, just improvise, think.

You've used the language metaphor, so I would use another, similar.
When you're communicating with other people, you understand what they say, or try to remember, what you should do when you hear that?

And yes. It's about being lazy. My sister recently replaced her old PC with a brand-new netbook. It was a quite big change - switching to Linux, learning how to use touchpad etc. The point is, that she isn't less busy with her real-life issues (work, school, boyfriend, household duties etc.) than anybody else, spends only hour or two a day using computer and her knowledge about IT isn't much different from what the most of people (who aren't dealing with IT on daily basis) know. The point is, that she wasn't learning - just exploring, relying completely on her intuition. If those people would just have some will to explore and understand, and not just repeat the schematics they've learned, it would be for them much easier to adapt.

I actually like changing an OS every month or two, just with no purpose. Windows, different Linux distributions, Haiku, and even used OS X few times. It took me one, or two days to get used to all the changes between an old OS and new one. Few days I've switched to Windows 8. Even though I don't like Metro UI, I've managed to adapt to it and do things equally (or more) efficiently like on 7.
Z98
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by Z98 »

Ahem. A note to keep things civil.
Dave3434
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by Dave3434 »

people have a right to be upset if they don't want change then don't force it on them, let them choose. there alot of people out the loves the windows 9x style ui including me.to be honest all the eyecandy stuff is not needed.
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jonaspm
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by jonaspm »

i don´t like the ne metro UI, but i don´t like the Classic one too..
SomeGuy
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by SomeGuy »

Pisarz wrote:I think that you're not completely right here. Using an UI is not about learning things, it's about understanding what's on the screen. Trust your intuition, not knowledge, just improvise, think.
I see where you are coming from now. I used to think the same way you do.

In an ideal world people should be exposed equally to general computing concepts. For example they should be taught to use file managers, web browsers, word processors, spread sheets, presentation program, etc. And then they should be able to adapt to any reasonably designed computing environment.

Unfortunately, that is not how it works in the real world. Look in a catalog for computer training classes - it is all Microsoft® brand Windows™, Microsoft® brand Internet Explorer™, Microsoft® brand Word™, Microsoft® brand Excel™, etc. And most of what is taught is "click here to do this" "click here to do that".

It is a sadly enlightening experience doing application support for a large number of people. If you tell them something to do on their computer they will write it down on a post-it and do exactly the steps you told them. Eventually they might memorize the steps. But if the system changes and those steps no longer work... your phone is going to ring... a lot.

You will have the occasional person who can figure it out by themselves. This rare person, you, and I, spend more time dealing with computers than most. It is like someone who knows 30 languages - they might be able to intuit what someone is saying when they encounter their 31st.

And things are more complicated by the fact that there are different optimal user interfaces for different groups of people. The main ones being Business, Home, and Mobile.

Business requires an interface that is clean, formal, and acts as a tool to get a general variety of jobs done.

Home - if you go by the sales figures - requires bling, eye candy, loud sound effects, and bright blue LEDs that will literally burn out your retina.

Mobile - Usually focused around a single task such as making phone calls, or keeping tack of appointments. Has be designed with significantly different input and output devices in mind such as touch input and tiny displays.

It is human nature to want to do things one single way. And OS vendors repeatedly try, unsuccessfully, to provide a single OS and interface that meets all of these needs. But some of the requirements between each of these groups are mutually exclusive.

You wouldn't want to constantly use a 28" touch screen for 8 hours a day at the office would you? Well, you might think it sounds cool until you have tried it and your arm aches after 2 hours. (And your screen is covered in greasy fingerprints from you and your co-workers) On the other hand it would be silly to use a mouse on a typical PDA or smart phone.

Optimizing the UI for one environment can destroy optimizations made for the other.

For example, the new Gnome 3 menu (or whatever exactly it is called) is designed for mobile devices. On a mobile devices an application menu needs to take up most of the small screen, uses large icons so it is easy to select, and has a separate list of program groups so you don't have to deal with menu levels on a small area. Unfortunately, on a desktop this covers the many things you might have running, requires huge mouse movement (especially because the menu button is in the upper left and the group list is all the way over on the right), and as far as I can tell there is no way to create sub-sub menus or customize it for the very, very, large number of applications that might be installed on a desktop PC. And there are many more issues than that.

In these cases, it is not a mater of learning, it is a matter of wanting or needing to do things an optimal way with as little distraction as possible. And unfortunately there is no One True Way that will accommodate everyone.
Dave3434
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by Dave3434 »

i don´t like the ne metro UI, but i don´t like the Classic one too..
i do.
Pisarz
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by Pisarz »

SomeGuy, I must admit, that I hate the way today's UI's are changing in the direction of... hm... "tabletizing" (not sure If I could use that word) everything. And I hate the conception of putting touchscreen-oriented GUI on desktop computers. Although I still don't understand people hating ribbon, even though IMHO it's more clean, better organized and easier to use than toolbars - only because it's different.
PurpleGurl
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by PurpleGurl »

It is not about laziness, but doing things the way YOU want to do them on YOUR computer. And it is about performance.

If I could hack the crap out of Windows 8 to make it act like Windows 2000, I would. That is what I prefer, and Microsoft needs to get with the program and give people what THEY want, not arrogantly deciding for others. I wonder how possible it is to hack out RT and replace it all with Webkit.

For instance, I liked the IE-6 browser as it was, but the industry became bigoted against it out of the blue. It was cleaner, simpler, and a decent performer. Firefox of that day was kludgy and rendered a little slower. The slow rendering off-set the gains from a better-performing network interface. From IE 7, it went downhill. Sure the newer ones are more compatible with the changing web standards, but they seem to suck in terms of performance and memory use. I used to prefer IE over third-party browsers, but now, give me Chrome or Firefox. What is better, the actual 3rd-party standards or a bastardized version of them?

Then Firefox, Google, and IE spent lots of time to shove the new tabs things down our throats. I preferred the taskbar tabs for that. Now we lose several more lines of visible screen. Tabs make it no more easier than OS tabs in the tray, though if you do a lot of non-browsing tasks, then it does reclaim real-estate. I spent several years trying to hack Firefox to look and act more like IE 6. Eventually, I gave up. I did find a nice experimental skin set to get it close. Now I use Chrome, tabs and all. One thing good about that is that I can close with all my tabs in place. I just hate it that all the big companies get so arrogant and assume that because they like it, everyone else has to as well. You should have the right to configure YOUR PC and the software you use, ANY way you want it.

Oh, and built-in touch pads are a poor way of implementing a mouse and are best used for emergency situations where you do not have a working mouse.

As for the tablet stuff, if I wanted to use that, I'd just get a tablet, which I have no use for.

And yes, bigotry against conservative approaches to things is still bigotry.
Last edited by PurpleGurl on Tue May 08, 2012 9:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
SomeGuy
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by SomeGuy »

PurpleGurl wrote:For instance, I liked the IE-6 browser as it was

I see you are mainly talking about the speed, but if you are talking about the UI I would like to remind people what happened here. IE 6 and earlier tried to mimic the more professional looking Netscape browser. With IE 7 they tried to make it look like Apple's Safari browser which was gaining commercial popularity at the time. Unfortunately the Safari look just doesn't fit in a Windows environment.

BTW, todays Dilbert discusses how Microsoft created Windows 8: :D

[ external image ]
Dave3434
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by Dave3434 »

i agree these days software is just too slow, back in the day all you need was a pentium 2 with windows 98 and that was fast now you need a pentium 4 for windows 7.
Z98
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by Z98 »

Considering the security holes that 98 suffered from, I'll take the higher performance requirements for Windows 7.
PurpleGurl
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by PurpleGurl »

SomeGuy wrote:
PurpleGurl wrote:For instance, I liked the IE-6 browser as it was

I see you are mainly talking about the speed, but if you are talking about the UI I would like to remind people what happened here. IE 6 and earlier tried to mimic the more professional looking Netscape browser. With IE 7 they tried to make it look like Apple's Safari browser which was gaining commercial popularity at the time. Unfortunately the Safari look just doesn't fit in a Windows environment.
Actually, I was speaking more of the whole experience, though maybe the way I said that was too convoluted.

It seems they forget that it is the look and feel that draws them to their products, and if others wanted to use something else, they already would be using it. If they are going to compromise and be like everyone else, then I'd rather have the 3rd parties as they have been doing it differently for longer.

Steve Gibson, of Gibson Research Corporation (GRC), who is best known for his development of the Spinrite hard drive utility and for his work in PC security, basically says that one problem with Microsoft is that they take a "me too" approach to designing their operating systems. There are features in Windows that hardly anyone uses, yet Microsoft put it in there just to compete or to try to head off a market trend. A number of security flaws entered that way. If you have a handful of services that you don't need, and they relate to the internet or other access to the machine, then it seems you have a larger attack surface. The original UPnP had its flaws.

As for the performance comments, yes, I loved how it was in the Windows 98 days, since implementations were cleaner with more of an eye on performance. But Z98 has some good points about security. Thanks to processors with PAE and NoExecute instructions (PAE doesn't make it safer, but PAE mode enables the NoExecute instructions), a whole class of vulnerabilities have been greatly reduced. The way things are now, you might have up to 3 firewalls you didn't knowingly install (ISP-level blocking, the router the ISP gives you, and Windows Firewall). That certainly helps. Thanks to a lot of the inherent protection from Windows and from the ISP, I haven't used AV programs in a long time, and I have no evidence of problems. Besides, most AV programs won't stop certain hijack viruses. Safe practices are the best way to prevent those. Avoid the most likely to be exploited sites (porn and hacking sites), avoid weakening the browser settings, close suspicious pages immediately (maybe us an on-demand scanner and a spyware scanner afterwards), and don't click on things on your desktop that you are not certain you put there (discover the files involved and research them so you will know what files and registry keys to delete before you have a full-blown infection). I've even killed viruses without an AV (if you know your system, you know what belongs in the folders and what is new). If you can boot into command line mode, you can delete the unfamiliar files clustered around the approximate time of infection, then reboot and use registry tools to clean up the loose ends. If files have random file names or share exact sizes with a number of other files, they are certainly suspicious.

One thing I don't care for in the modern browsers is the fact that they run under multiple threads and tend to be leaky. Sure, a single thread is more prone to complete failure, but they tend to be tighter.
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by Z98 »

You do realize that for the longest time (it still might be for that matter), Firefox was single threaded? And a stall in its JS runtime or rendering engine would stall everything?

Older programs seem to run faster because they were doing a lot less. It's not that people back then were intrinsically any better at programming. Based on how many hacks MS had to add just to Windows 95 to get older programs to work, people were as lazy/crappy programmers back then as they are now, nevermind those who intentionally used undocumented functionality which MS then had to preserve, adding to the complexity of Windows and opening up potential security issues because users demand that their 10 year old broken programs continue to work.
PurpleGurl
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Re: Real people dealing with Windows 8

Post by PurpleGurl »

Z98 wrote:You do realize that for the longest time (it still might be for that matter), Firefox was single threaded? And a stall in its JS runtime or rendering engine would stall everything?

Older programs seem to run faster because they were doing a lot less. It's not that people back then were intrinsically any better at programming. Based on how many hacks MS had to add just to Windows 95 to get older programs to work, people were as lazy/crappy programmers back then as they are now, nevermind those who intentionally used undocumented functionality which MS then had to preserve, adding to the complexity of Windows and opening up potential security issues because users demand that their 10 year old broken programs continue to work.
I didn't use Firefox back then, since IE was single-threaded too. Sure it locked up on occasion and crashed everything, but I managed. It didn't bother me to reload unless of course I had a bunch of pages open. Likewise, I prefer Explorer (Windows shell) to open all windows in the same process. Performance and memory utilization are higher priorities for me. Too bad others don't share my philosophy and I cannot have the software on my PC running as I believe it needs to. Oh, I know the other option, but I don't know how to code on that level.

I do believe that older programs were coded better *because* the hardware was so limited. Now, it is like the Western world views wealth, where there are plenty of resources to tinkle away. I know, I did my best programming under a 386. By the time it got to a Pentium, why optimize real mode programs? You have more CPU, so why bother? Similar is true with memory. I have 8 GB system RAM and will probably get 2 more 4 GB sticks to take advantage of all 4 channels and the supposed bandwidth increase. So with all the memory available, it is tempting to write sloppier - hey the customer can always install another stick of RAM. Memory leaks? No problem, just install more RAM and you will terminate the program before all the memory is gone.

Yes, I know about undocumented features, even in MS-DOS days. Loading another instance of command.com while in the middle of a program used an undocumented call, and plenty of programs used it. Or running FDISK with the /MBR switch. That was used internally since the installer would place a modified MBR to let you know you were still installing DOS or something. Well, it had to have a means to get rid of that. But users used that switch for all sorts of things, even disk recovery and virus removal. Then there were the CPU instructions. There were a few undocumented opcodes, like one where you could shift to multiply by 10. Very handy instruction, but not a standard one. I think that was only available on the V20 and maybe V30, and not the 8088/8086. If someone was smart about using those, they would use a CPU detection routine and only use the non-standard code where it will work and use a more standard approach for the other processors.

As for stalls in JS, Google found a way around a lot of that. Since most implementations of that use an interpreter, memory management is a challenge. It used a rather vague way to clean the memory, resulting in frequent memory leaks. The new way is more precise, and it knows what is what. They now compile the code before running it, use hidden classes to optimize similar code, and use precise memory management. Flash seems to be the challenge these days.

I'm not asking for aging programs to run here, but I am asking for a look, feel, and approach similar to those. I wouldn't complain at all if Chrome had a good IE 6 skin. Chrome is compatible with modern sites and rather fast, and if it had a similar UI to IE 5/6, it would be the best of both worlds.

Of course, some of the "aging programs" out there are not that old. In fact, a number of games available for purchase through Yahoo! won't run on Windows 7, and a good handful require compatibility options. Plus some that I own I cannot install the full version because they discontinued support (see the Windows activation discussion on the split off PR thread to understand the dynamics of this). But I may be able to do a work around. They used registry keys to save the licenses, and the PC I was running previously is still usable, so I should be able to save those and merge them into Windows 7.

One feature that nearly every browser omits, is a way to completely block certain site activity. The blacklist only reduces functionality of sites and won't stop them from loading in the background as 3rd party sites, and you cannot truly block specific cookies. Spend just 5 minutes on the web these days and you get 20-30 cookies and lots of nonproductive network activity. Sure, I understand the need to run ads, but they do a bunch of other things in the background which add nothing positive to the experience.
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