Originally Posted by Steely Glint
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
'Regular apps' are just applications as you know them now. Anything that runs in Windows 7 or earlier. Everything's the same.
Metro apps are the ones developed specifically for Windows 8 and later. There tend to be differences under the hood, mainly in certain qualities and behaviors that the OS forces on them, and that you'll be able to download them directly from Windows 8 similar to how the app store works on whatever smart phone you have. Metro apps are going to be more secure - they have no direct access to your system. They're also forbidden from ever being non-responsive, to prevent you from getting into that state where you're not sure if it's frozen or just working. There's also the thing that we've been talking about where they won't consume resources if they're not explicitly allowed to by the user. In general, they should be lighter and safer than regular applications.
Other things that you probably won't care about is that they're going to be more portable. You won't need to make many changes to get an app working on a x64 desktop, ARM tablet, or windows phone. MS has also worked to expedite development of certain types of software, particularly through XAML taking care of the UI. There's a bunch of other rules and stuff that makes developing them different than traditional software, but I think I'm already well past the things you'll care at all about.
So, basically the Google Play store, but on Windows?
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
From an end user perspective, yes.
Only got to play around with it a little bit more. I plan to try and install my drivers and shit today after work. I'm not exactly having an easy time managing my files from downloading, moving, etc. without reverting to old style desktop and right clicking to bring up hidden menus to bring up the old file manager windows. I'm starting to assume metro isn't meant to be used for everything?
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
Can you Alt+Tab between Metro apps?
windows+tab to switch between metro apps. It keeps the most recent apps available there, whether they're running at the moment or not.
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Cool.
Completely Off Topic but can't think where to put it otherwise ... bought the new (I think) Microsoft Arc Mouse. Its absolutely fantastic. Works incredibly smoothly on awkward surfaces that my previous optical mouse couldn't cope with, flattens to nothing which is good for carrying and even a completely unexpected bonus as I keep losing wireless mouse usb adaptors is that got a magnetic spot to get the adaptor to stick to when its not in use. Clever - I normally like Logitech input devices, but Microsoft have done really well with this one.
Support the other way round is another issue though - drivers can cause issues with upgrades. While I'm sure most common hardware will have stable drivers soon enough to work with for regular users, for businesses with more specialized hardware it can be problematic. When windows 7 was out for over a year we went to record using a digital audio interface (24 track TASCAM), kept giving blue screens of death due to driver issues. Ended up having to borrow a macbook to work with. Anyway, for similar reasons I don't expect the computer at my work to upgrade soon - I'm controlling a particle accelerator through an XP computer at the moment, and I'm not sure if all the hardware attached will work properly after an upgrade, and stability is obviously a big issue for us because this single computer being down one day will lose GE a few tonnes in lost income.
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
Since they did not actually change anything about the driver architecture, Windows 7 / Vista drivers will work out of the box (unless the driver is doing that moronic OS check).
You lose the ability to left-click while holding the right mouse button down with this mouse, though. Not a severe issue for business applications, but it's a problem with many games.
edit: Scratch that. I was thinking of their touch mouse.
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Agreed this can be a major issue. I got very frustrated a few year ago when I built a 64 bit Vista PC when that was first released and there wasn't a 64-bit compatible Cisco driver for our company's head office VPN network. Head Office's first response was they currently only supported upto XP 32 only. Eventually Cisco never released an updated driver and said to upgrade the hardware and head office found a third party driver which they'd link to when asked with e disclaimer always that it was 'unsupported' (but they'd support it).
The upgrade from 32 to 64 was a much bigger issue though.
This isn't so much an issue with drivers being incompatible, but more an issue of Microsoft not allowing drivers that haven't paid Microsoft ($250 per OS) to say its ok to use them. The move to WHQL drivers was a small issue in Vista and 7, but allowed immediate override with that red "are you sure you want to install" window. Now it requires a special restart. That's going to put a damper on a lot of cheap hardware (Rosewill) and tweaked 3rd party drivers that people commonly put out for video and audio devices.
Last edited by Ominous Gamer; 10-30-2012 at 01:08 PM.
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
WHQL is actually a pretty big step forward if you value your computer functioning BSOD-free.
Drivers can mess up a lot of things if they aren't written correctly. WHQL prevents that to quite a large degree.
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Which is why I didn't complain about the way they handled it in 7, but I think they took it to far in 8.
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
I'm not really shedding a tear for shoddy hardware or "tweaked" drivers.
Not when it's still possible to install them anyway.
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
Currently in the process of getting used to (and installing my most common software) on my new 8 Laptop.
First big query I have (using old desktop style) is the apparent lack of for wont of a better word Aero effects:
Hovering your mouse over the button in the bottom-right corner by the clock doesn't make the windows transparent and the background appear.
Each window on the top bar of the window has a thick solid colour reminiscent of Windows 3.1/95 not the semi-transparent background of Aero let alone the faded colour of XP. There's a solid bar around each window too.
Any way to change these two back?
EDIT: To show what I mean, see the solid colours and lack of transparency on the three windows open - that's a lot of purple:
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
The aero effect has been removed. Because of that I'm trying to bring myself to use the IE app. Still on the fence about it. Not liking how the metro theme doesn't dock windows on the sides anymore. It shrinks them to like a quarter or less, and I can't seem to figure out the point of it allowing you to drag that vertical bar around cause it doesn't stick. I found myself a few times being able to drag metro apps around, but they don't tile or overlay when I release them.
I really miss tiling and docking my windows.
On a side note, I'm sorta happy that the Windows Shop is so horrible. A solid showing there could destroy entire digital markets.
Last edited by Ominous Gamer; 10-30-2012 at 08:57 PM.
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
I don't see how the removal of Aero can possibly be an improvement? I liked Aero.Even a pre-Aero faded colour would be an improvement on this solid blocky 3.1 colour theme.
Another query - when I set up my system it asked me for my email address but never asked for a username. So now my username (and thus the folder all my files are kept in) instead of being my first name as I'd choose is the first 5 letters of my surname followed by 000. Any way to change that? [EDIT]If you change your name details online it updates your details here.[/EDIT]
Last edited by RandBlade; 10-30-2012 at 11:10 PM.
Aero was a resource hog, thats the only way they can play off removing it. It didn't work well with the idea of the desktop always sorta sitting there, like an app you can't close.
Possible help on 2nd question: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials...ndows-8-a.html
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
I would have thought it wouldn't be against the realm of all possibility to have some sort of transparency effects.
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/
You're welcome
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Thoughts after a few days of heavy use:
Some of the "superficial" changes are disappointing at first - today's thing is that Start->typing now brings up just apps (you have to click to show a list of files). I'm used to typing Start->first few letters of a document/spreadsheets name and its there.
The more serious operating system changes I've come across are quite impressive. Especially network connectivity. Connecting to local PCs etc and using their printers etc has always been a bit frustrating until you've got it stable, but connecting to the 8 machine from 7 machines is dead simple. Rather than requiring to set up your homegroup first and even if you've set it to work not just home, just select the machine and enter your username/password and it works straight out of the box.
Not 8-specific but I liked Windows Live Mesh (which became Sync) and that's been discontinued now, disappointing. Skydrive doesn't have all the functionality that Sync had. So I'm lucky my old Laptop is still functional as rather than just downloading my data from Sync's Skydrive (a different Skydrive that I can't log into) to get my files I'm going to have to manually copy the files across. Glad then that copying is easy.
To change to showing "files" or "settings" without clicking, press tab, followed by down once or twice, then enter
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
So Minesweeper in Windows 8 nows has adsnot google word ads either, but full screen 30 second fuckyoucan'tskip ads.
What the best way to figure out the app stores? I figured I've try to download the free Microsoft games for some quick Gamerscore points, but I can't find any sorting options.
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
So whereas previously you could type Start->type a few letters of filename->Enter and it'd be loaded now you have to type Start->type filename->Tab->Down three times->Enter->-Tab once more->Enter again.
Progress
Oh and of course previously your files would update on your screen as you typed your name so after a few characters you'd have the right one, now it doesn't as nothing shows on screen until you've tabbed but you can't tab until you start typing.
Press Windows + FSo whereas previously you could type Start->type a few letters of filename->Enter and it'd be loaded now you have to type Start->type filename->Tab->Down three times->Enter->-Tab once more->Enter again.
Progress
Oh and of course previously your files would update on your screen as you typed your name so after a few characters you'd have the right one, now it doesn't as nothing shows on screen until you've tabbed but you can't tab until you start typing.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Ta.
Starting to get pissed off now that working multitasking with proper applications (not apps) and load anything at all and the default for every single thing until you change it seems to be that it loads fucking full screen. Its pathetic, I'm working off a full machine not a piddly tablet.
Download and try and load a .jpg file ... it opens in a full screen app. Play a music track ... full screen app. Load a video ... guess what its another full screen app.
Gah, why!? Windows 7 had some nifty improvements (snapping to the side etc) to help with multitasking ... Windows 8 does not seem designed for multitasking at all! Got to undo everything to get it back to being able to work efficiently. The software to load files using proper applications not full screen apps that don't multitask well is there, but not set to default so each time you load a new file type for the first time you've got to quit it again, force it to reload using the right type. Its not a simple case of selecting working from desktop from the home screen and it using desktop-applications automatically as would make the obvious bit of sense.
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