Windows 8 sucks

[fred rosenberger]

What's wrong with the hammer in the win 7 photo? or is that the point.

[Pat Farrell]

IMHO, Windows 7 being a fine tool is the point. Its not perfect, and sometimes you want a ball-peen hammer or a tack hammer, but most of the time W7 is a winner. W8 is a disaster for Microsoft's installed base.

[Henry Wong]

As an owner of Windows ME machine, I can say that I learned (the hard way) to never buy a new computer unless it had a tried and tested OS. With Windows Vista, and now, Windows 8, I guess I will have to keep doing diligence on the OS when purchasing new computers.

Henry

[Jim Venolia]

As an embedded software developer, the time I spent with Windows CE taught me the shorthand, WinCE, was remarkably accurate.

Oh, you need real hard time in your embedded device? Naw, we don't do that.

Need to provide a video frame every 40 ms? No problem, unless I'm on my break. Then it could be 200 ms. And I won't tell you why. Nor when I'm on break.

Need to respond to an interrupt in a timely manner? See the line above.

Need a good estimate of memory requirements? This is typical, but YMWPV(1). A lot.

Need a good estimate of required stack? HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA

Need to use a real OS? Sorry, customer mandated the use of WinCE because Microsoft.

Management actually told the customer to take his ball and go home unless we could ditch WinCE, which he did (took his ball and went home).

1) Your Mileage Will Probably Vary.

/ this was the 2000/2001 timeframe
// it may be better now
/// prolly due to faster CPUs and cheaper RAM than any effort on MS's part tho

[Pat Farrell]

Jim Venolia wrote:Management actually told the customer to take his ball and go home unless we could ditch WinCE, which he did (took his ball and went home).

This is what a good consultant must do when the customer makes it impossible for the project to succeed. Its hard to do, as management loves the revenue, but sometimes the project is just not worth doing.

I am sure that the smart engineers working on the US' healthcare.gov site wish they had told the client "nope, can't work" rather than being called incompetent by every media outlet in the country.

[Peter Rooke]

Second day of my new Windows 8 machine - and I hate it, its horrid!!!
I'm not a big Windows fan anyway, but it tells you something about the user interface when you have to turn to the web* to find out how to shut the machine down.
Now I'm finding that some vendor (Oracle) CMD scripts to configure Weblogic don't seem to work??

Simple solution - I'm going to install Linux :-) then all the development tools on that...

* - this seems to be the how you can shut the operating system down - Windows 8 Shutdown - Alt F4 on the task bar.

[Jim Venolia]

Pete, I'd make it a dual boot machine. Took me 4-5 days to figure out how to avoid metro completely, and by then I had this thing configured to be a normal Windows box.

Biggest thing I did was install a real start button. Why Microsoft decided to hide everything I'll never know.

[Pat Farrell]

Jim Venolia wrote:Biggest thing I did was install a real start button. Why Microsoft decided to hide everything I'll never know.

That one is easy. Its a tablet touch screen OS and tablets don't have a start button.

[Robert D. Smith]

I'm gonna go against the grain here. I actually like Winblows 8.1. Sure, it has it's idiosyncrasies. I, too, had to surf the net to figure out how to shut the thing down and a few other things that should have been intuitive. And, yes, I have railed against Micro$loth hiding programs and functions that should be out in the open. What really torqed me was when my 8.1 laptap told me that it was going to reboot in four minutes and I couldn't stop it. Almost reformatted and installed Linux.

After working with it, I've become quite comfortable. I run it on both a touch screen (an HP Split 2) and a non-touch screen system (my gaming rig). I don't have any trouble switching between the two systems, although I will confess that the charms thing popping up is a bit bothersome. But I find the scrolling to be smooth, both with touch and mouse. I don't use the main screen. Every time I hit the windows button, I scroll down to the next screen and use the search function to find things, or I use the command line.

I will also admit that I would install Linux in a heart beat, but there are some windows programs that I want to run, that have some problems running under Linux. I've done the dual boot thing, but I find that to be annoying. When I'm on windows, I need something on the Linux partition, and vice-versa. I just networked everything and run multiple systems with the different OS's.

I've droned on long enough.

Robert

[Martin Vashko]

Robert D. Smith wrote:What really torqed me was when my 8.1 laptap told me that it was going to reboot in four minutes and I couldn't stop it. Almost reformatted and installed Linux.

Uh oh. I'm already out of my senses when I'm packing my notebook to go to a meeting, and the darned thing starts to install updates without asking me, and keeps on for ages. But the guys at Microsoft clearly believe I can bear some more

Long ago I've read about labs at Microsoft where they put unsuspecting test subjects and have them use their product. I believe that human right campaigners made them to quit this practice. How could a OS that cannot be turned off, or a "ribbon" (pet peeve of mine) could make it past any testing on humans?

[Steve Luke]

Martin Vajsar wrote:

Robert D. Smith wrote:What really torqed me was when my 8.1 laptap told me that it was going to reboot in four minutes and I couldn't stop it. Almost reformatted and installed Linux.

Uh oh. I'm already out of my senses when I'm packing my notebook to go to a meeting, and the darned thing starts to install updates without asking me, and keeps on for ages. But the guys at Microsoft clearly believe I can bear some more

Another fun anecdote of mine: I have Sony touch screen laptop that came with Win 8. I had it for about a week and an important update came out that ran automatically and resulted in the physical keyboard not working anymore. I had to use the touch sceen. I talked with Sony support and the solution was to fall back to factory conditions, since you couldn't uninstall the update. I did so and turned off auto updates. But that doesn't work, the update was downloaded and installed every 2 days after each factory reset. After 2 weeks I installed linux, since I couldn't count on actually saving anything on the stupid machine - it would just be lost.

I had another computer, a frankenstein I put together that also had Windows 8 on it, but no touch screen. A few months back a Windows update left that computer without a keyboard as well (it was a USB keyboard). I didn't even try to fix it. I promptly installed Linux and about 2 weeks ago finished moving all of my personal computers to Linux, using Wine and VMs for those cases where I need to run Windows apps. Not that the Linux change has been painless - I find Ubuntu 13 to be useless - for those computers I need to keep working I am using Ubuntu 12.10 and for the others I am trying out Mint now, but will rotate other flavors until one sticks.

[Pat Farrell]

Steve Luke wrote:I find Ubuntu 13 to be useless - for those computers I need to keep working I am using Ubuntu 12.10 and for the others I am trying out Mint now, but will rotate other flavors until one sticks.

Automatic update forced without user interaction is a huge security flaw. How do you know that the update came from Microsoft? I know, I know, its convenient for users, the majority of which don't care about security. But its a terrible design idea.

I have switched from Ubuntu to Linux Mint/Cinnamon. I like it a lot.

[Jim Venolia]

Robert D. Smith wrote: What really torqed me was when my 8.1 laptap told me that it was going to reboot in four minutes and I couldn't stop it.
Robert

My favorite WinXP misfeature was when you'd shut your machine off, take off on a 2 week vacation, and come back to "This program is not responding". Uh, so? I'm shutting you down. If it's not responding there's nothing I can do about it. It's been 2 bloody weeks, shut yourself off for $Diety's sake.

[Bear Bibeault]

Having one's work cut out for one.



[Courtesy: Joy of Tech]

[Jesper de Jong]

Even Paul Thurott, a well-known Windows technology publisher, has harsh critique for Windows 8: What the Heck is Happening to Windows?. Despite the fact that he wrote a book about Windows 8.