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Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions


JorgeA

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whoa, that picture give me hope, that sombody would sue M$ for its metro,

just like apple sue-ing various desktop manager vendor, because their product were somewhat similar to apple's.

Interesting angle!

I wonder if that may be (part of) the reason that MS bought all those patents from AOL last week.

--JorgeA

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More love for Windows 8 from the community:

Metro is retarded.

I won't spend a dime on this pathetic excuse for an operating system much less let my overpowered hardware get the chance to laugh at it

RT? really? Maybe MS should defend that by stating what it means. RT=Real Turd? Really Trying? Random Touch?
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I also don't understand the name RT.

For new apps, the focus for Windows RT is development on the new Windows runtime, or WinRT, which we unveiled in September and forms the foundation of a new generation of cloud-enabled, touch-enabled, web-connected apps of all kinds.

:)

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Well the news of these 3 versions are still leaving one out. 8 Enterprise version is different than 8 or 8 Pro. I would expect 8 Enterprise to be just like 8 Pro but use VLK/MAK, and HOPE (yeah right) it lets to disable Metro. Because as I've said before, MS is taking the entire market focus to the retail side and ignoring all the engineers and developers (and maybe stock traders) that won't have anything to do with Metro. So we all will just stick with XP, Vista or 7, or worse case end up (for them) going to *nix based OS. It isn't the same as corporations sticking with old version OS because of compatibility reasons, this time it is usability reasons.

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Metro is retarded

...and that's most likely what RT stands for.

RT=Real Turd?

Or that, yes. Or possibly Ridiculous Tablet? Refurbished Trash? Regret This? Or Return-it-to The-store? I dunno.

and HOPE (yeah right) it lets to disable Metro

But then there would be an edition that would be worth buying, and if people have the freedom of choosing whether or not to use Metro then nobody will use it. Sure, that would mean a even more certain failure for Metro (just how much higher than 100% can you go really?), but at least it wouldn't be an outright failure for Win 8 as a whole. Seemingly they don't mind the Windows brand to be associated with several major failures and losing market share in what's essentially their "only trick" (desktops), so long as they have that small, tiny chance at selling some tablets. It's quite a gamble and the odds & outcome both look really bad to me.

It looks like we have another 4 years or so of hearing "Windows sucks", "LOL Vista Metro", "I'm switching to [other OS]", "Downgrade rights" and "help me upgrading from Win8 to Win7". It's going to suck, especially so soon after the Vista fiasco. Users and developers alike are starting to doubt of the platform's future and to strongly consider alternatives. That's all Ballmer & Sonofski are succeeding at.

So we all will just stick with XP, Vista or 7, or worse case end up (for them) going to *nix based OS

It's funny how that seems so obvious to everyone but Ballmer and Sinofski. At this point we can only hope that the shareholders will do like RIM's shareholders did. It's about time they get some competent management.

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based on how their Windows Mobile/Windows Phone/Zune/Zune HD/Kin devices are selling. Or not selling rather. Zune, Zune HD and Kin were killed outright, and the phones are well below 1% of the smartphone market share by most website statistics reports. And it's not like it's some new product either: Windows Mobile (now rebranded to Windows Phone) would be 12 years old right now

Talking about that -- their mobile devices not selling: Microsoft Windows Phone Marketing Manager leaves after 5 months in the job.

If it doesn't sell, it just might be because people don't want of it, or that they're simply not good enough. I very much see their tablets sharing the same fate. I mean, it's basically WinCE (another product that consumers don't buy) with Metro on top, or the Windows Phone OS on a large phone that can't make calls... Windows, but without Windows apps or anything else that makes it worth using.

Oh, and Media Center is now an addon, and not available for what would have been called the "home" edition, but just for the pro edition now? That's going to sell great! :rolleyes:

Edit: seemingly one of my kids' schools is lending iPads next year. And you can now "borrow" ebooks from our city's public libraries (with DRM/expiry) if you have an iPad. Add too that all the apps and the fantastic hardware and you have a winner, even if the price tag is pretty high.

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If it doesn't sell, it just might be because people don't want of it, or that they're simply not good enough. I very much see their tablets sharing the same fate. I mean, it's basically WinCE (another product that consumers don't buy) with Metro on top.

Yup. They're late to the game and (apparently) bringing little that's new to the table.

One aspect that I'm surprised hasn't been given more attention, is the esthetic angle. Look at the picture of that Nokia Windows phone with those crude, flat tiles. Given a choice of looking at that every day vs. the beautiful floating 3D-effect buttons you see on other devices, which one would you pick?

Oh, and Media Center is now an addon, and not available for what would have been called the "home" edition, but just for the pro edition now? That's going to sell great! :rolleyes:

An incomprehensible decision, unless the idea is to squeeze more $$$ out of those who really want Media Center. Folks over on the A.V. / Home Theater forums are not happy about it.

Media Center in the CP is reportedly unchanged from Windows 7. It would take significant improvements (such as elimination of a couple of notable flaws) for me to shell out for 8MC as an add-on.

--JorgeA

Edited by JorgeA
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Folks over on the A.V. / Home Theater forums are not happy about it.

Honestly, I don't think too many people will even notice it's not there. Almost nobody uses it, and for a couple main reasons:

1) it's a pretty terrible video/audio player:

-it supports no popular subtitle formats

-it makes it a pain to play .mkv files

-it can't seek into FLAC audio files

etc

2) outside of the USA media center is just about useless as a DVR:

-CableCARD doesn't exist outside the USA

-ATSC feeds are USA-only, besides a handful of channels in Canada and WMC disables ATSC support if your country is set to Canada. So you have to hack at the registry to even enable that then.

-DVB support (what most of the world is using) is pretty darn awful, if not completely useless specifically for DVB-S (then again Vista didn't support DVB-S cards at all, back when I still had a use for it)

So the best thing most of us can do with it is record 480i stuff with an analog TV tuner, from the output of your decoder (changing channels with an IR blaster) in horrible quality. It's no wonder people just buy the HD PVR from their cableco or satellite provider instead.

So nothing of value was lost IMO. I've tried it several times from XP to Win7 and it's always been a huge let down.

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CoffeeFiend,

Wow, it does sound like WMC is pretty pointless outside of the U.S. I'd wondered if the MC experience might be better in countries that don't have this CableCARD craziness.

We do use it at home (it's saving us $16/month in DVR fees) to watch and record cable TV. (DVDs and Blu-rays we play through the dedicated Blu-ray player, we don't rip discs as it's mostly Netflix for us there.) For our purposes we're pretty happy with Media Center, except for the inability to capture the live TV buffer, and a strange bug where if you have a multituner setup (like the Ceton InfiniTV 4) and want to record successive programs on the same channel, it will use the same tuner for the second show, so you end up watching the start of the second show at the end of the first recording.

If MS were to fix these two issues in the Win8 MC add-on, that alone might make it worth our while to get the new OS (for that one PC only).

Meanwhile, I just have to pass along this commentary on the "touch-centered" Windows 8:

After running the 64 bit Consumer Review version of Win8 on my Intel i5 quad core system, there's only a single one finger gesture that comes to mind.

:whistle:

The rest of that writer's comment, you will no doubt relate to well!

--JorgeA

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I'd wondered if the MC experience might be better in countries that don't have this CableCARD craziness

LOL. I thought CableCARD was the one and only reason some people used WMC in the first place. I mean, if I took that and ATSC feeds away, what are you left with? Yeah, analog 480i capturing... Great. Why not use a VCR while we're at it? CableCARD is what makes it bearable for the tiny part of the world where it's used.

it's mostly Netflix for us

I wish. Canadian Netflix doesn't have 10% of the content of their USA counterpart but still costs the same. And since we have low bandwidth (usage) caps on our internet connections it's not much of an option either. At $4.50+taxes/GB over 50GB it could get really expensive very quickly! I mean, just watching one movie in full quality over my cap just once (2h movie @ 4.8mbit video) would cost me $23 extra (you might as well buy the Blu-Ray movie instead). Cablecos and telcos (like Bell which is our main satellite TV provider) saw some competition, and figured they'd crush it by making sure you can't use their competitors' online services by making it too expensive. Bell even tried to push for 25GB limits recently, and most "basic" broadband plans are capped at 5GB/month or lower. That 5GB/month plan is $40/mo if you don't have cable TV with them, or it's $56/mo for the 50GB plan (plus sales tax of course). Welcome to Canada!

After running the 64 bit Consumer Review version of Win8 on my Intel i5 quad core system, there's only a single one finger gesture that comes to mind.

:lol: Actual laughter was produced.

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I'd wondered if the MC experience might be better in countries that don't have this CableCARD craziness

LOL. I thought CableCARD was the one and only reason some people used WMC in the first place. I mean, if I took that and ATSC feeds away, what are you left with? Yeah, analog 480i capturing... Great. Why not use a VCR while we're at it? CableCARD is what makes it bearable for the tiny part of the world where it's used.

Hmm, I wonder if the regulations and/or WMC functionality are different in Canada, or outside the U.S. generally. Before we got the CableCARD (and convinced my wife to go along), I tested the WMC system for several months, watching and recording over-the-air programming exclusively. We were able to record and view high-def programming, no problem. Things got much more complicated when the CableCARD was added to the mix (and we don't have any premium channels).

it's mostly Netflix for us

I wish. Canadian Netflix doesn't have 10% of the content of their USA counterpart but still costs the same. And since we have low bandwidth (usage) caps on our internet connections it's not much of an option either. At $4.50+taxes/GB over 50GB it could get really expensive very quickly! I mean, just watching one movie in full quality over my cap just once (2h movie @ 4.8mbit video) would cost me $23 extra (you might as well buy the Blu-Ray movie instead). Cablecos and telcos (like Bell which is our main satellite TV provider) saw some competition, and figured they'd crush it by making sure you can't use their competitors' online services by making it too expensive. Bell even tried to push for 25GB limits recently, and most "basic" broadband plans are capped at 5GB/month or lower. That 5GB/month plan is $40/mo if you don't have cable TV with them, or it's $56/mo for the 50GB plan (plus sales tax of course). Welcome to Canada!

Sheez!

But actually, there could be a silver lining to data caps: they might (inadvertently) slow down the devolution of our powerful PCs into dumb Internet terminals, by limiting the appeal of cloud services.

We tried Netflix streaming on our HTPC, and found the experience clunky and inferior to actual discs. Many movies were simply not available for streaming. For those movies we did get to stream, anytime we wanted to review something that happened before, it would reload the whole d*mn movie. Plus, it was a challenge to control the tiny cursor on the screen from across the family room. And we have DSL, so the picture quality was comparable to SD/VCRs -- HD was out of the question. We could pay more for a higher speed service, but then that would have to be factored into the per-movie rental cost, and it's just not worth it to us, we don't rent that many movies that we can't get on cable.

So in terms of rentals it's Blu-rays and DVDs for us: we can FF and rewind to our heart's content, subtitles are almost always available, usually we get to enjoy special features (interviews, bloopers) that streaming doesn't offer, and even regular DVDs look better on the Blu-ray player than on the DVD player.

--JorgeA

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watching and recording over-the-air programming exclusively

That's ATSC feeds, or OTA ATSC feeds. Whatever you wanna call them. ATSC is the standard used to transmit over-the-air in all of North America. Microsoft disabled that feature for us Canadians, even though we use the exact same broadcasting standards (we're supposed to be fully switched to digital by now too). Nice of them, isn't it? We have to resort to rather elaborate tricks for it to work at all, and there's no program guide for my local channels either. I wonder what other countries Microsoft has been locked from having OTA reception besides us. So yes, if I took that away from you *and* CableCARD, now you'd know what it's like in other countries ;) I believe you now fully understand why most of us don't use it. OTA ATSC feeds work fine in basically all programs except media center (and they typically record in more "standard" formats too)

limiting the appeal of cloud services

They already weren't appealing, now add all the various online hosts going offline with no warning (or being sued), azure crashing on leap days, high prices, trusting another company (and their govt & authorities) with the safety and privacy of your documents... Thanks but no thanks. Funnily, that's another area where MS is failing pretty darn hard: their Azure cloud services.

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The rest of that writer's comment, you will no doubt relate to well!

Its no secret that the consumer market is trending away from everyone having a desktop in the home. This is reflected by the successes of Mac, tablets and notebooks being ever more popular. As even older people get computers, they are going for what is simple and Windows just isn't simple. The trend away from desktops was forcast a few years ago and is definately on track. I agree that Windows needs to be in that market space, but Microsoft would do better to make Windows 8 a transitional product. One that keeps the standard desktop that we are all used to, but has full capabilities to be used in a device. As noted, while the market is ready for moving to the simpler type of computer, the hardware isn't widely available, known or the price isn't right.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Microsoft is jumping the shark, but maybe is trying to move too fast. Concerning the RT issues with the different builds, that's really ARM's problem. Somehow they have been able to keep multiple different CPUs in their product line viable that aren't 100% compatible with each other. That's definately one thing that is different than the PC world, architectures aren't as streamlined in those devices, but it is definately a younger market than computing.

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