Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Windows Everywhere finally happened

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 142 posts

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#111

Post by ChicagoDave »

joosters wrote: post #57
feelin_googley wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3070460/windows-pcs/mic...

I despise Microsoft for this. Two days ago, my dad accidentally triggered an upgrade to Windows 10. In a panic, he switched the computer off, and now it no longer boots. It's now down to me to repair the computer. Apparently, months of dismissing the pop up invitations to upgrade to Windows 10 were not enough for Microsoft, they had to go and practically force it down people's throats. And my family is paying the pri…

I manage my ex-wife's PC using TeamViewer and just regularly check updates to see what's up and to make sure MalwareBytes is running and up to date. This prevents her (and my kids) from doing "bad things".

A proactive approach is better than complaining about Microsoft, whose model has changed whether you like it or not. Windows is a service now. Not a product.

The more quickly we accept that (or switch OS's), the happier we'll be.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#112

Post by userbinator »

pjmlp wrote: post #81
taneq wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't always like this. The Windows API was fairly stable from the mid-late 90s for at least a decade. They decided to start breaking that compatibility in the name of 'progress' at around the time they started trying to squidge together their touchscreen and desktop interfaces, but this API stability used to be one of the huge drawcards of the Windows platform.

My Windows coding experience goes back to Windows 3.0 and I am looking forward to the day Win32 and Hungary notation are nothing more than plain maintenance coding, replaced by a proper type safe OO ABI like WinRT.

My past experience with others "OO-ifying" APIs (e.g. MFC) makes me think that'll just end up being worse because it tends to add a lot of complexity that gets in the way and obfuscates the flow of the code. Besides, Win32 is implicitly quite OO already and can be used from a variety of languages because it's based on C. Not everyone wants to use C++.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#113

Post by rasz_pl »

dingo_bat wrote: post #27

I don't like the Universal apps or whatever they're calling them this month. They are limited, slow, crashy and buggy. They regularly just disappear after a sleep and wake. I have been left questioning my sanity wondering if I closed Messenger. Also, they are clunky and slow. For example, switch to a desktop with a universal app open and for the duration of the desktop slide animation, the app window will be complete…

I can crash/hang newest Windows 10 build by simply quickly clicking repeatedly on radio buttons (in privacy section of all places) in SETTINGS app (a joke of a half replacement for Control Panel). Feels like a race condition.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#114

Post by oarsinsync »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #111
joosters wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise Microsoft for this. Two days ago, my dad accidentally triggered an upgrade to Windows 10. In a panic, he switched the computer off, and now it no longer boots. It's now down to me to repair the computer. Apparently, months of dismissing the pop up invitations to upgrade to Windows 10 were not enough for Microsoft, they had to go and practically force it down people's throats. And my family is paying the pri…

I manage my ex-wife's PC using TeamViewer and just regularly check updates to see what's up and to make sure MalwareBytes is running and up to date. This prevents her (and my kids) from doing "bad things". A proactive approach is better than complaining about Microsoft, whose model has changed whether you like it or not. Windows is a service now. Not a product. The more quickly we accept that (or switch OS's), the ha…

Not really fair to blame the end-user / victim, who bought a product. Requiring business-level IT policies and monitoring on home/consumer IT products isn't really viable for the vast majority.

Windows 10 might be a service, but previous versions were products.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#116

Post by andy9775 »

simonh wrote: post #90

> Apple and Google will probably do something similar with their various operating systems, but Microsoft has managed it first. I thought all of Apple's OS variants these days were based on the Darwin kernel and variously intersecting sets of the same unix components and APIs. Every now and then I see someone complaining that a new Apple device contains 'an entirely new OS' like Apple TV OS, but isn't that just a var…

I'm only speculating, but I believe that Darwin is much more bare or stripped down compared to universal Windows. I believe that the author was refering to being able to run iOS apps on OSX and vice versa.

This IMO is not very smart. Each platform, mobile or desktop, has a different purpose and requires different things. So to make a universal OSX or iOS it means that either you make a significant amount of compromises which don't benefit either platform and each suffers. Or you build everything into the core and it ends up being a complete and buggy mess with a bloated install size.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#117

Post by GrumpyYoungMan »

userbinator wrote: post #17
Maarten88 wrote: post #9

Operation successful, patient dead... It's kind of tragic that much of this effort may never pay off: in the process of merging platforms and restructuring API's (that started with Vista and is still going) Microsoft lost the connection to many of its developers, who went to build Web, iOS and Android apps. WPF, Silverlight, WinRT, XAML, UWP: there were too many changes, rewrites and deprecations. Windows Phone, bril…

As a long-time Win32 programmer (over a decade), I can safely say that the vast majority of existing applications still remain (for the time being) forward-compatible. Here's some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOj-bAZBhnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRfn4M5DXTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqFWuNmWbHk The reasons people hold off on "upgrading" Windows versions is not mainly because of compatibility…

> the increased data-collection intrusiveness

The irony of this common complaint is that most people voicing it carry iPhones or Android phones, which are heavily instrumented to collect data by the operating system provider, the hardware manufacturer, and the carrier. Unlike a desktop PC, it knows where you are at all times because of its onboard sensors and has access the content of any communication you make with others.

(Note that even using custom OS images doesn't necessarily disable all telemetry since all smartphones run a separate OS to manage radio functions. See http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_syste... for details.)

Most of the collected data is, of course, benign. Just like the data collected by Windows 10.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#118

Post by dboreham »

LionessLover wrote: post #72
joosters wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise Microsoft for this. Two days ago, my dad accidentally triggered an upgrade to Windows 10. In a panic, he switched the computer off, and now it no longer boots. It's now down to me to repair the computer. Apparently, months of dismissing the pop up invitations to upgrade to Windows 10 were not enough for Microsoft, they had to go and practically force it down people's throats. And my family is paying the pri…

I'm just curious because I really don't know more than my own sample-of-1 experience: Don't you have to agree to "Terms and conditions" before the Windows 10 installation actually starts? I actually re-enabled the Windows 10 upgrade warnings on my Windows 7 desktop, because I intend to upgrade in the last week of the upgrade being free. My desktop (Dell XPS 8500 from 2012) is not supported with Windows 10 (the first…

It can install silently without user approval -- this happened to my wife's laptop over the weekend. Luckily it is a fairly recent Windows8 HP machine and still works (unlike the three different Windows7 machines of mine that ended up unusable post-upgrade).

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#119

Post by joosters »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #111
joosters wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise Microsoft for this. Two days ago, my dad accidentally triggered an upgrade to Windows 10. In a panic, he switched the computer off, and now it no longer boots. It's now down to me to repair the computer. Apparently, months of dismissing the pop up invitations to upgrade to Windows 10 were not enough for Microsoft, they had to go and practically force it down people's throats. And my family is paying the pri…

I manage my ex-wife's PC using TeamViewer and just regularly check updates to see what's up and to make sure MalwareBytes is running and up to date. This prevents her (and my kids) from doing "bad things". A proactive approach is better than complaining about Microsoft, whose model has changed whether you like it or not. Windows is a service now. Not a product. The more quickly we accept that (or switch OS's), the ha…

Does TeamViewer prevent someone from desperately powering off a machine because they don't know to stop an update? I can't see how your advice would have helped here.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#120

Post by GrumpyYoungMan »

bad_user wrote: post #44
dragontamer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Maybe I'm in the minority but my phone and my desktop OS have vastly different use cases and I'd expect apps running on each of them to be different. But why should they be programmed different? You can create XAML forms that are optimized for each platform. But why would you want to rewrite your code to adapt to the different GUIs? Won't it just be easier, as a developer, to…

Your assumptions hold for OS X and iOS even though they are not the same OS and never claimed to be. > Won't it just be easier, as a developer, to create a singular platform with two XAML (one for small screens, one for large screens) that share the same codebase? In theory yes, in practice changing the UI isn't the only problem. The problem is that a phone is much more limited, both in hardware and in what it is all…

>The problem is that a phone is much more limited, both in hardware and in what it is allowed to do.

The full version of MS Office is capable of running quite well on those inexpensive Atom tablets with only 2 GB of RAM. That's about as much hardware capability as the average smartphone has already and peripherals can be handled by a docking station.

Granted, apps will need to show different UIs and adjust power consumption depending on whether they're in mobile or desktop mode but convergence is really just about here.

Post reply on HN