Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29 • Hacker News Board

Re: Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29

#211

Post by MichaelGG » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 8:22 PM UTC

ladzoppelin wrote: post #210

MichaelGG wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current Win10 builds are not even close to having the polish iPhone 1 had. There's all sorts of inconsistencies and screwed up stuff. Hell, just clicking on search settings doesn't even work (in true JS style even; it just does nothing, no error, no response). OTOH, coming from Win8, where it's so much worse, Win10 is an improvement. After running I for months, a friend asked what was new. "Well they undid the Me…

Anybody who thinks Windows 7 is better than Windows 8.1 needs to get a new monitor or their eyes checked. Also if you update to the latest Windows 10 build, released this weekend, it fixes the search/start menu launch stuff. I am running 8.1 and Windows 10 in a virtual plus several users are already running 10. Blurry fonts are the app makers problem, just like Apple.

Uh blurry apps include all the Metro stuff, IE/Sparta, etc. It's because MS is abandoning pixel snapping in lieu of "more accurate" subpixel positioning. This approach only works well on high DPI or large fonts. It sucks compared to normal ClearType at smaller (Users are gonna be hard pressed to list the advantages of 20 over 7. Console windows suck less. Start menu is back. Task manager is better. Lots of under-the-hood stuff, sure. But day to day? I've been using Win10 for months and can't think of anything. (Virtual desktops, maybe... Their implementation seems clunky compared to others I've used.)

Unless you're into metro apps and like the junk ridden store, what's the killer app? What's the huge win in upgrading?

Re: Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29

#212

Post by yuhong » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 10:14 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #207

userbinator wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is still on XP after having tried all the newer Windows versions (and forced to use some), I don't think it's worth relearning everything and finding out that a lot of the functionality that you used to rely on is now either completely missing or terribly dumbed-down. All the little irritations add up. We've probably long passed the point of "sufficient for the average user" in terms of OS features, as…

> I'd sooner switch completely to Linux I do local IT. Word of mouth side job stuff. Its nice to remind myself why Windows is shit down in the trenches sometimes, and its a lot easier to manually uninstall a half dozen viruses and edit out registry rootkits for an hour after a week of coding. I normally bill pretty standard in home support freelancer rates, $60 an hour with a minimum $80 to come. If I ever find a com…

How often do you see XP SP2 vs SP3?

Re: Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29

#213

Post by lholden » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 10:14 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #197

ninjaoxygen wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is their chosen strategy though, that as of Windows 10 there will no longer be full major Windows versions. Instead it will be an ongoing rolling release of incremental changes. From a developer perspective, this sounds like a support nightmare given the number of potential configurations that could end up out there with no clear way of identifying them.

Instead it will be an ongoing rolling release of incremental changes. I genuinely don't understand this move by Microsoft. Of all the things you want to be stable and reliable over time, your basic OS and platform software has to be at the top of the list. While dumping any responsibility to support software older than the latest release has obvious appeal for developers, evergreen software has mostly proven to be me…

Businesses have had the ability to manage update deployments for a while now. Big Win10 feature changes will likely come in a service pack form or similar, with security fixes and minor updates using the same model they always have.

A business will typically test and verify updates before pushing then out to their employees.

Businesses which allow its users to perform updates directly from Microsoft already face the issues you describe. (Many updates can and have caused issues. Especially the occasional broken patch that gets rolled back shortly after release).

I can certainly see this being an issue for support companies. On the other hand, they will likely still have some form of versioning to base their support on. "Sir, please do XXX. You should see something saying Windows 10 Service Pack and then a number. Can you please tell me what that number is?"

Re: Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29

#214

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 11:18 PM UTC

lholden wrote: post #213

Silhouette wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead it will be an ongoing rolling release of incremental changes. I genuinely don't understand this move by Microsoft. Of all the things you want to be stable and reliable over time, your basic OS and platform software has to be at the top of the list. While dumping any responsibility to support software older than the latest release has obvious appeal for developers, evergreen software has mostly proven to be me…

Businesses have had the ability to manage update deployments for a while now. Big Win10 feature changes will likely come in a service pack form or similar, with security fixes and minor updates using the same model they always have. A business will typically test and verify updates before pushing then out to their employees. Businesses which allow its users to perform updates directly from Microsoft already face the…

Businesses have had the ability to manage update deployments for a while now.

Sure, but someone still has to test each update as it applies to each critical system or widely used standard PC configuration before giving the OK to roll it out across the organisation. If MS moved to releasing non-essential updates in an ad-hoc fashion, it seems inevitable that the result would be either a scheduling and resource management headache for corporate IT departments or (perhaps more likely) a general policy of not deploying non-essential updates at all by default in large organisations because the hassle of keeping up isn't justified. Corporate IT have enough to worry about already without someone potentially moving the goalposts on a daily basis.

Re: Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29

#215

Post by zanny » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 11:24 PM UTC

yuhong wrote: post #212

zanny wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd sooner switch completely to Linux I do local IT. Word of mouth side job stuff. Its nice to remind myself why Windows is shit down in the trenches sometimes, and its a lot easier to manually uninstall a half dozen viruses and edit out registry rootkits for an hour after a week of coding. I normally bill pretty standard in home support freelancer rates, $60 an hour with a minimum $80 to come. If I ever find a com…

How often do you see XP SP2 vs SP3?

Windows updater did a good job automatically updating SP2 to 3. I've found a few SP2 (and a few SP1) machines that had Windows Updater disabled... but the other thing is that hardware hit a sort of plateau point around the Athlon 64 x2 era where the hardware got "fast enough" to make you not want to throw the monitor out the window at how slow it is. Not application load time slow, mouse lag, app freezing and churning and graphical glitches from paging on too little memory.

That and mechanical hard drives saw a lot of longevity revolutions in the early 2000s. Last generation IDE and any SATA disk in my experience seem to handle many, many more power on cycles than older models. This was even before SMART, so I can't even test some of these disks for how error prone they are.

I'd say 95% of XP machines I've touched are SP3, and I've dealt with over a hundred of em. Even a few small businesses I've pressured to switch off XP were at least running SP3. IE6 is a much more prevalent issue on those older machines, where end users would ignore the popups and prompts from home pages and websites about how their browser is literally satan.

Re: Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29

#216

Post by vosper » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 11:37 PM UTC

pjob wrote: post #209

vosper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running the Windows 10 Technical Preview on a 2013 MacBook Air, solely for gaming. So far I've only played Halflife 2, and it's much better than under OSX. I had to force it to run windowed, rather than true full screen, because full screen had some issues. I don't notice the tiny window bar once I've started playing. The Technical Preview is free and easy to setup with Bootcamp, so you may as well give it a shot…

Try adding "-noborder" to your launch options. (Right click on the game in your steam library > Properties > Set launch options...) see https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Command_Line_Option... for more options (I recommend "-novid -window -noborder -high -threads ")

Cool - thank you!

Re: Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29

#217

Post by userbinator » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 11:40 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #207

userbinator wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is still on XP after having tried all the newer Windows versions (and forced to use some), I don't think it's worth relearning everything and finding out that a lot of the functionality that you used to rely on is now either completely missing or terribly dumbed-down. All the little irritations add up. We've probably long passed the point of "sufficient for the average user" in terms of OS features, as…

> I'd sooner switch completely to Linux I do local IT. Word of mouth side job stuff. Its nice to remind myself why Windows is shit down in the trenches sometimes, and its a lot easier to manually uninstall a half dozen viruses and edit out registry rootkits for an hour after a week of coding. I normally bill pretty standard in home support freelancer rates, $60 an hour with a minimum $80 to come. If I ever find a com…

Stupid users manage to infect themselves no matter what OS they're running. If you do IT you will see the worst of it.

XP is only "insecure" if you're the kind of person who would download and run random executables without any real thought, or use IE on default settings.

The "treat the user like an idiot" "security" of newer Windows is precisely why I'm still using XP. I don't need a nanny of an OS. I rarely need to install new software anyway.

In fact I'd say that malware is increasingly going to target features found only in newer OSs... when the WMF exploit (remember that?) was going around, I was still using 98SE, which was completely unaffected by the exploit code since it used NT-specific features and attackers were targeting those OSs at the time. A lot of the rootkit-y stuff won't even run on 9x because of that.

Re: Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29

#218

Post by userbinator » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 11:49 PM UTC

yuhong wrote: post #204

userbinator wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is still on XP after having tried all the newer Windows versions (and forced to use some), I don't think it's worth relearning everything and finding out that a lot of the functionality that you used to rely on is now either completely missing or terribly dumbed-down. All the little irritations add up. We've probably long passed the point of "sufficient for the average user" in terms of OS features, as…

examples?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win...

(There's no article I can find for Windows 10 yet.)

Re: Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29

#219

Post by yuhong » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 1:06 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #218

yuhong wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

examples?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win... (There's no article I can find for Windows 10 yet.)

What are the most important ones?

Re: Hello World: Windows 10 Available on July 29

#220

Post by yuhong » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 1:06 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #217

zanny wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd sooner switch completely to Linux I do local IT. Word of mouth side job stuff. Its nice to remind myself why Windows is shit down in the trenches sometimes, and its a lot easier to manually uninstall a half dozen viruses and edit out registry rootkits for an hour after a week of coding. I normally bill pretty standard in home support freelancer rates, $60 an hour with a minimum $80 to come. If I ever find a com…

Stupid users manage to infect themselves no matter what OS they're running. If you do IT you will see the worst of it. XP is only "insecure" if you're the kind of person who would download and run random executables without any real thought, or use IE on default settings. The "treat the user like an idiot" "security" of newer Windows is precisely why I'm still using XP. I don't need a nanny of an OS. I rarely need to…

UAC can be set to always automatically elevate without any prompt even in Win10 (disabling UAC completely would kill Metro apps). I prefer the "Always Prompt" configuration myself and it is unfortunate it was ignored when Win8's task manager was designed for example. Win9x was not affected by the WMF SetAbortProc escape problem at all unless you are printing (I think the escapes were simply ignored). Linux is better on older machines because it gets security updates and has ASLR and other exploit mitigations etc (though not all are useful without NX) and it happened to be free.