Windows 8 Without A Touch Screen?

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Shaman said:
Precisely. 8.1 is just polish on a turd.

What a mess. At least 5 different programming APIs in one operating system, two distinct and largely differing interfaces which the user has to switch between to interact with programs and their computer settings.
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[h=3]Mad, but not stupid[/h] Microsoft remains silent. It's apparently happy for developers to think that HTML5 and JavaScript are the only option for immersive Windows 8 applications, regardless of the distress and damage this is causing. And the longer the company remains silent, the more convinced people will be that the reason that Microsoft isn't debunking the claims is because there's nothing to debunk: HTML5 and JavaScript really could be the whole story when it comes to immersive applications. If it isn't, the decision to say nothing is incomprehensible. Saying nothing can only hurt. Developers are losing faith in the platform today; waiting to September to set them straight is madness.
But Microsoft isn't stupid. Its messaging and PR around this issue may be crazy, and the way developers have responded is rational, but the company isn't going to alienate its enormous base of developers and force them to trash everything they've ever learned. Windows 8 will offer a new API, and you're not going to have to write webpages to use it.
The company may not have made any official statement about it, but leaks are coming out, and a picture is starting to emerge. The details aren't clear yet, but next time we'll take a look at the pieces of the puzzle we have, and we'll learn why Windows 8 won't be a HTML-driven horror after all.
 
ZX600 said:
Exactly

I freaking love the fact that there isn't a start button to click and then go find a program, when all i can do is start typing said program name and it appears, damn windows for making things "so hard"
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Change, for change's sake, impacts productivity. That is the bane of industry. You didn't have to click the Start button to find programmes, in Win7, if you pinned your favourite applications to the Taskbar as I do. I only rarely have to go to the Start button and when I do, it's typically for maintenance functions.

I'm with Shaman; it sucks.
 
imkruzen said:
You can do that in Win 8 as well.
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But you have to go through an unnecessary menu page in order to get to it. That's a waste of time.

imkruzen said:
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
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And those who believe in change for change sake tend to waste both time and money. Intelligent change is how we move forward, not just throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks.
 
Rob MacLennan said:
But you have to go through an unnecessary menu page in order to get to it. That's a waste of time.



And those who believe in change for change sake tend to waste both time and money. Intelligent change is how we move forward, not just throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks.
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Drag and drop to Quick Launch on task bar, your short cuts.

Technology is riddled with failures that bring refinement to the final product. In pharmaceuticals research, only 1 product out of a thousand gets past clinical trials. Success is the result of failures and it costs money. In general it's progress. Research is throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. Thalidomide, Gardasil has killed 110 , Injured 25,183 and the numbers are climbing.

In Canada, Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus was confirmed in all provinces and territories and carried a mortality rate of 1.3 per 100,000 population. The highest hospitalization rates occurred in children aged less than 5 years of age. Influenza activity for the 2009-2010 far exceed the expected range and occurred in two distinct waves. The peak period for the first wave was May 31/09 to June 20/09, and for the second wave October 25/09 to November 14/09). For weekly reports, visit Canada's FluWatch site.

Failure Is a Key to Understanding Success
 
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imkruzen said:
Drag and drop to Quick Launch on task bar, your short cuts.

Technology is riddled with failures that bring refinement to the final product. In pharmaceuticals research, only 1 product out of a thousand gets past clinical trials. Success is the result of failures and it costs money. In general it's progress. Research is throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. Thalidomide, Gardasil has killed 110 , Injured 25,183 and the numbers are climbing.

In Canada, Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus was confirmed in all provinces and territories and carried a mortality rate of 1.3 per 100,000 population. The highest hospitalization rates occurred in children aged less than 5 years of age. Influenza activity for the 2009-2010 far exceed the expected range and occurred in two distinct waves. The peak period for the first wave was May 31/09 to June 20/09, and for the second wave October 25/09 to November 14/09). For weekly reports, visit Canada's FluWatch site.

Failure Is a Key to Understanding Success
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Powerful words, even if I don't agree with you
 
imkruzen said:
Drag and drop to Quick Launch on task bar, your short cuts.

Technology is riddled with failures that bring refinement to the final product. In pharmaceuticals research, only 1 product out of a thousand gets past clinical trials. Success is the result of failures and it costs money. In general it's progress. Research is throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. Thalidomide, Gardasil has killed 110 , Injured 25,183 and the numbers are climbing.

In Canada, Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus was confirmed in all provinces and territories and carried a mortality rate of 1.3 per 100,000 population. The highest hospitalization rates occurred in children aged less than 5 years of age. Influenza activity for the 2009-2010 far exceed the expected range and occurred in two distinct waves. The peak period for the first wave was May 31/09 to June 20/09, and for the second wave October 25/09 to November 14/09). For weekly reports, visit Canada's FluWatch site.

Failure Is a Key to Understanding Success
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Not in software development. Not really. Failure is just failure.

And from a marketing point of view how difficult is it to realize that a company's attempts to be more like it's competition, and failing, are driving their customer base to the competition?
 
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Rob MacLennan said:
Not in software development. Not really. Failure is just failure.
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I'll say it again, Win8 failed so spectacularly that it took out the CEO and the lead developer. :D

And from a marketing point of view how difficult is it to realize that a companies attempts to be more like it's competition, and failing, are driving their customer base to the competition?
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Oh it's better, though. They deliberately pushed their customers to the cloud, where all the lions and bears live. They made themselves irrelevant... thinking that they were going to force more lock-in. Deranged thinking processes, IMHO. Their only lock on the monopoly was... their lock on a monopoly. With Win8.x they gave away the keys... hahahahaha
 
Rob MacLennan said:
But you have to go through an unnecessary menu page in order to get to it. That's a waste of time.
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Right click on the task bar>choose>Toolbars>new toolbar and navigate to the folder as listed below, choose your account where it says your name. Same as Win 7 does. You can fill it by dragging your short cuts there. Not that difficult and you'll only need to do it once.

C:\Users\your account here\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch
 
http://blogs.computerworld.com/windows/22952/windows-8-shines-amid-shrinking-pc-sales-apple-get-whacked

Windows 8, surprisingly, helped buoy the market. IDC said:

"While shipments remained weak during the early part of the quarter, the market was somewhat buoyed by business purchases, as well as channel intake of Windows 8.1-based systems during September."
U.S. PC sales was a surprising bright spot, shrinking only 0.2% compared to a year ago. The top PC makers, including Lenovo, HP, Toshiba and Dell, all saw increasing sales. The reason? Largely Windows 8, and to a lesser extent, Windows 7. IDC reports:
 
imkruzen said:
Right click on the task bar>choose>Toolbars>new toolbar and navigate to the folder as listed below, choose your account where it says your name. Same as Win 7 does. You can fill it by dragging your short cuts there. Not that difficult and you'll only need to do it once.

C:\Users\your account here\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch
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And there's still a stupid tile screen, that I don't want to use, that has to be bypassed unless you're using a third party shell, or until an update allows you to do away with it.
 
Just switched to Windows 8.1 (from 7) on my desktop. Though I don't like the metro BS, I can suffer through. I just set my default programs to ones other than those default Metro "apps," and now the only time I have to deal with Metro is if I need a program that isn't pinned to my task bar or desktop.

I did like the installation process (having it take care of the drivers itself) and I am a huge fan of the multi-monitor support. I have 3 monitors, and having the task bar extend all the way across, and update each monitor's task bar when a window is moved to it is fantastic. Much much better than Windows 7. That is enough for me to stay with Windows 8.1, regardless of metro.

If I had only 1 monitor, though, I might be inclined to revert back to 7
 
tricky said:
I did like the installation process (having it take care of the drivers itself) and I am a huge fan of the multi-monitor support. I have 3 monitors, and having the task bar extend all the way across, and update each monitor's task bar when a window is moved to it is fantastic. Much much better than Windows 7. That is enough for me to stay with Windows 8.1, regardless of metro.
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You can also do this to a certain extent with Win7. There are additionally some apps that can help you with it. FYI.

"While shipments remained weak during the early part of the quarter, the market was somewhat buoyed by business purchases, as well as channel intake of Windows 8.1-based systems during September."
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This is what happens when you buy your own press. Microsoft got egg all over their face when they made announcements of how Win8 was selling, only to later pull back billions of dollars of unsold units, which it seems that it had "sold" to distributors (aka shipped to them for warehousing as "sold units" without actually selling them). Trust me, the seller channels are horrified by all of this and companies like Techdata, Ingram and Supercom are begging retailers and integrators to find new sales whilst simultaneously begging manufacturers to supply them with Windows 7 "downgrades" so that they can sell anything at all into business or government.

Unless you're in the business, you won't find that... the big box stores like Future Shop etc. have to toe the company lines and companies like Microsoft and Apple are paying them boucoup dollars to put their products right out front and center (Apple wins that on the phone and tablet side, btw) while shoving competitors like Samsung in the back. Sales of Win8.x are mostly coming from that sales avenue because the big box companies are making as much money on the stock placement spiffs as they are on the hardware sales. For the average consumer it's hard to buy anything but Win8 for a PC at those stores, and even then Windows 7 is being installed on many of those computers after the fact... there were 70 computers went through my shop in one buy alone that were all backdated to Windows 7 last week.

So, yeah. That's statistics for you.
 
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And then there are the businesses that are required to buy a Win8 pre-licensed system but have organization wide licensing for Win7, that are simply wiping and reinstalling the already licensed PCs. Those appear as Win8 sales, but Win 8 is never even booted up once.
 
Rob MacLennan said:
And then there are the businesses that are required to buy a Win8 pre-licensed system but have organization wide licensing for Win7, that are simply wiping and reinstalling the already licensed PCs. Those appear as Win8 sales, but Win 8 is never even booted up once.
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You got it.

Also, there's this article: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9245050/Chromebooks_success_punches_Microsoft_in_the_gut

Remember, Windows is now irrelevant. That's how the future is going to roll now that they let the cat out of the bag.
 
Rob MacLennan said:
And there's still a stupid tile screen, that I don't want to use, that has to be bypassed unless you're using a third party shell, or until an update allows you to do away with it.
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Win 8.1 has option to boot to desktop. Right click on task bar>properties>select options
 
tricky said:
Just switched to Windows 8.1 (from 7) on my desktop. Though I don't like the metro BS, I can suffer through.
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Metro is what most people's desktop looks like in the older windows.
 
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