81–90 of 247 posts
Clickbate marketing article name with little valuable substance. I tried Windows 10 in tablet mode and I found the whole experience to be disjointed. It felt out of touch with recent UX trends / advancements, the same old thing with a new skin and even more tiles. Everything I wanted to do took more 'clicks' that I was happy with and there's little-to-no consideration to power users. Am I the only one that doesn't se…
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> their browser, at least by version 3, was superior in speed and vastly superior in stability IIRC, Microsoft were using hidden APIs to accomplish this, putting Netscape at a disadvantage.
I don't recall that, not even allegations to the effect (there were such for Office competitors), plus I probably would have learned of such while working with a guy who had previous interned at Microsoft on IE of that era. More directly, I'm not aware of any public Windows APIs that handed out data that tricked your code into doing a general protection fault ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_protection_fault )…
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I've taken a liking to a lot of what Microsoft is doing. I like the open source efforts, I like the RX libraries, the hardware looks great, to my mind the Metro interface is actually better than IOS/Android. I even like Windows 10. Problem is I could never go back to the DOS command prompt. I only moved to the *nix prompt about 6-7 years ago, and I could never go back. I know I can do cygwin etc but that still feels…
Powershell really is powerful. It's just an entirely different paradigm. The unix philosophy is "Everything is a textfile and pipes" - Powershell on the other hand is "Everything is an object and calls", and it's equally powerful, albeit not as simple.
PowerShell really is (or should be) obvious to a programmer but the concept isn't as simple to explain to a sysadmin that doesn't know/understand OOP programming concepts.
Why so? As far as I understand, Microsoft still goes with the templates their hardware OEMs already have: Surface is based on a tablet template, while Surface Pro and Surface Book are supposedly based on different laptop templates and the available options are thus defined by the OEMs. This also explains why the 'Pro' versions 1 and 2 had cameras inferior to the 'non-Pro' versions.
I wish Microsoft got their act together and gave more attention to design, while they are at it. If they are saying this is a tablet that can replace my computer, let it have what those tablets that can't have: cellular module. If it has a non-removable hard drive, let me have it in the greatest available capacity, sepecially while you already offer that on a lower-priced model.
"The company was so in love with P.C.s (the hub for all things and for all time to come) that it came late to the Internet and much, much too late to mobile phones." In the early 2000s, Microsoft did try pushing tablet computers, "pocket PCs" based on Windows CE (rivals to Palm PDAs) and even had Windows Phone OS in some smartphones. That did not gain traction, because the user experience was not captivating, and the…
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I like nearly everything Microsoft is currently doing, except for their attitude towards privacy, which means that I'll be making efforts to move away from their platform out of principal.
As compared to Apples ecosystem, or Android, or? I simply don't get it. All of it is there to improve the experience for most users, and possible to turn the chatter of such that it shares next to nothing. What more could you ask for, in a system that aims to make is simple and feature rich for the average person?
As compared to most/all open-source OSes (Android being only partially open source). This includes mobile OSes.
> " All of it is there to improve the experience for most users, and possible to turn the chatter of such that it shares next to nothing. What more could you ask for, in a system that aims to make is simple and feature rich for the average person?"
Did you not see the stories about Microsoft collecting data even after the settings to disable the features in question were used?
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But what they did to destroy netscape (bundling a competing app with some other thing) is now a tactic so common that it is taken for granted. I guess what made it scary is that they really did have a strong monopoly and it looked like they might dominate forever. So its not so much the tactics that offend people, but how much power they had when wielding those tactics. Seems to me like every big tech firm now makes…
Oh, the tactics did offend people. And still do. But it was always a small number of people that cared about software freedom. The Microsoft consent decree was about restricting browser choice by shipping their own browser as default and claiming it was unremovable. By contrast, today Apple idevices not only ship with a browser but ban all competing browsers (via the ban on run-time compilation effectively banning JI…
But it was technically unremovable, in those days you could open a windows explorer and type an URL and then you suddenly have internet explorer right into your window. It was an awful design flaw that costed them lagging apart after the post IE6 era.
The other thing is that wouldn't matter if Netscape were superior. Actually, it didn't matter because that was still the case and once better browsers came up (Firefox, Chrome), Internet Explorer turned in technical debt.
So still now the whole "the browser comes as default" sounds like a whining excuse to me.
I struggle with changing my perception of Microsoft. I still characterize them by their Halloween documents and efforts to destroy Netscape. I would recommend the Surface to friends or family, which is a recent change. But I would never use Microsoft products. And not just because I'd be giving up years of Linux folk-knowledge. Childishly, when I watch a youtube video of someone far more skilled than me programming i…
I'm an MSDN subscriber, write C# all day and am sitting in front of Win8.1, writing this in IE11 with a Lumia 640 next to me. They are still utter bastards and I sleep with one eye open. Currently the tally of bad stuff is pretty high: Patent wars against competitors, forced bundling agreements, lock in despite the open specification stuff which is mostly just wrong, being fucked over on audits and licensing agreemen…
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As compared to Apples ecosystem, or Android, or? I simply don't get it. All of it is there to improve the experience for most users, and possible to turn the chatter of such that it shares next to nothing. What more could you ask for, in a system that aims to make is simple and feature rich for the average person?
> "As compared to Apples ecosystem, or Android, or?" As compared to most/all open-source OSes (Android being only partially open source). This includes mobile OSes. > " All of it is there to improve the experience for most users, and possible to turn the chatter of such that it shares next to nothing. What more could you ask for, in a system that aims to make is simple and feature rich for the average person?" Did yo…
Microsoft's offerings still seem under-designed to me, on a second look. I still can't order Surface Pro (or Surface Book) with cellular modem; only Surface 3, an older and supposedly lower end device. I can't order Surface Book with 1TB drive, only a Surface Pro 4; despite the former being a more expensive and supposedly higher end device. Why so? As far as I understand, Microsoft still goes with the templates their…
Can you order a Macbook Air with cellular modem? because that has always been the range they designed the SP for.