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Work environment: Windows 7 Enterprise
Home environment: Windows 8.1
I like the 'Start' button Windows 7, but, being in a corporate environment, we get patches pushed when someone else decides and the laptop will restart after a defined period. No, I can't shut it off.
So, the auto-restart isn't an issue - I'm going to get auto-restart either way.
On Windows 8.1, we have an account for my wife and myself; a separate account for our daughter. I like being able to use parental controls to limit what she sees and limit the amount of time she can be on the computer.
For a home machine, I haven't found anything issues to complain about.\
Is the layout different? Yes, but the layout was different going from a green screen in college to Windows 3, and then again on Windows 95... Change is constant.
Tim
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Tim Carmichael wrote: Change is constant.
True. It would be nice if we'd only commit those changes that are actually improvements, cause quite often they are just that - changes.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Right, change for change's sake is user-hostile.
Let me pick which changes to activate!
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You're awesome!!! We need to get that valuable knowledge out to the voters before November, 2016!! I mean seriously, if you're just voting for change, all you are doing is rolling the dice. And if you already live in the best country in the world (based on who is trying to get in and who is trying to get out  ), you probably wouldn't want TOO much to change randomly.
hatfok
King Yiddum's Castle
Pegasus Galaxy
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Tim Carmichael wrote: Is the layout different? Yes, but the layout was different going from a green screen in college to Windows 3, and then again on Windows 95... Change is constant.
Ah, but it doesn't have to be. It's a balancing act, between progress (change is good!) and what is already good and familiar (change is bad!)
I see it as kind of like the progression of cooking (speaking from personal experience here...)
DOS and earlier were kind of like PB&J sandwiches. Basic, but kept you fed.
Windows 3/3.1 etc were like microwave ramen. Slightly more difficult to make, but still, kept you fed.
Windows 95 was a step up to grilled cheese. Getting better, but still, not all that great.
Windows 98 was adding ham to that grilled cheese.
Windows 2000 was pairing cream of tomato soup with that grilled ham and cheese.
Windows ME was back to ramen.
Windows XP was a medium sirloin with a loaded baked potato. Close, but not quite there yet.
Windows 7 was a perfectly cooked rare filet mignon with a loaded baked potato and asparagus with hollandaise. Perfection.
Now Windows 8... That is like you took a look at that beautiful meal that was Windows 7... And got greedy. You said 'I want more. I can do better.' But what you ended up with was an over-seasoned, over-cooked, filet, a potato with flavors that don't pair well, and hollandaise with a consistency that more closely resembles cold butter, than maple syrup. All because you couldn't leave well enough alone. Now your wife is upset with you because you ruined her favorite meal, and you had to order pizza.
Progress only comes from experimentation, and we certainly learn more from our failures than our successes. Still, you have to learn when to leave well enough alone. Microsoft has been in business long enough now that they should have already learned that lesson.
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I note that you forgot Vista.
I bet you'll forget Win 8 even quicker.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Vista: Bleah! Did you have to remind me of that disaster? 
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Y'know what's really funny?
I still have a Vista PC in use, mainly as a file server, but I still sometimes sit at it.
I think I'm one of the nine people in the world who didn't have a problem with Vista -- the only thing I objected to was the "wow factor", but the first time I booted the PC, it asked me if I wanted the "wow factor" cr@p, I said "NO!", and it never bothered me about it again.
It was lovely and fast, with all that memory that was added to handle the "wow" being freed up.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I've still got a laptop running Vista mainly being used as a media device. I agree, I didn't have a problem with Vista, other than the fact it was over hyped and didn't add anything to XP. As for Win 8.1, I've got 2 PCs and a tablet running it and I really only have 2 dislikes
1) No start menu
2) The hover in the lower right you have to do to get the settings to show up
Other than that it's not that bad and the wife and kids are able to use it effectively. I'm still running Win 7 on my PC but, like with Vista, I didn't have a compelling reason to upgrade to 8.1. I will be upgrading it to Win 10, mostly cause it's a free upgrade.
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Guess I'm one of the few people that use third party menu apps in Windows... Had Classic Shell running since switched from XP to Win 7.
Never actually noticed the lack of menu in Win 8.
Classic Shell had 15 million downloads according to SourceForge. Probably about 1% of the Win 8.x users checked it out. Maybe someone should have mentioned going to third party apps in their tirades against Win 8.x on all the IT media.
The idea that you can change to a third party app if you don't like the base app is why lots of us use Firefox or Chrome. So why not a menu app?
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Vista is the most beautiful Windows ever. It is not as polished in the details as XP was, but compared to W7... well, W7 has the chunky taskbar, baby steps to touch, has the single panel borders in Windows Explorer while they can be resized with mouse. It has icons changed to text - cost cutting, time constraint, touch support - who knows?
Vista had the same poised Start menu - just leave the mouse over All programs while looking for a frequently used program...
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Oh right, Vista. That would be like you bought a sirloin, but they'd mislabeled it and it was really a flank steak. Surprise! Fat and gristle!
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Vista was not forgotten, as it was in effect an unpolished version of Windows 7, so with that analogy I would consider it the cooking process. Literally under the hood they are identical, but because it's still cooking it doesn't have the same flavours.
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That's a very good analogy.
How would you react if you went to a restaurant, and they gave you uncooked and part-cooked ingredients, then charged you the full price?
You'd never go back there, right?
If it weren't for the fact that Windows is pre-installed on 99.9999% of home PCs, they would lose a huge chunk of the home PC market.
If more people had to choose and install their operating systems, more people would make different choices. But Windows has that huge audience captive, and no-one treats a captive audience with respect.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Or you could think of it as s chef trying to come up with a new item menu, it takes a few rounds of trial and error before you get the recipe right. That's what Vista was, the trial and error. A little to much chili. The chef experiments a bit more, and he came up with Win 7, with just the right amount of kick to it. Every chef requires guinea pigs to try out his new creations.
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But no professional chef serves a dish that he knows to be bad.
Why are you making excuses for them? Especially to me, one of the nine people who liked Vista.
For me, they should simply have put no effort at all into the "wow!" thing, and spent more on fixing broken stuff, but I didn't have any major gripes with it (except the "wow!" thing, of course).
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I'm not making excuses for anyone. A professional chef will toy around with things til they are to his liking and then he will use guinea pigs to see if other people like it. It's the same deal, and it applies to anything software related, just because people on the inside like it does not mean people on the outside will. My original reply was because listed various flavours of Windows over the years to various food stuff and someone piped in that they "forgot" Vista, but I don't think they did. As I said, Vista and Win 7 are identical under the hood, I was using the analogy someone else stated about the various flavours of Windows over the years, going from Ramen noodles to a nicely cooked fillet mignon. Quite literally Win 7 IS Vista, just cooked differently to give it wider appeal.
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Member 4724084 wrote: A professional chef will toy around with things til they are to his liking and then he will use guinea pigs to see if other people like it.
But if I pay full price for an OS, I am not paying to be a guinea pig; I am paying for a completed, working product.
If they want me to beta test, we can arrange for a method for them to pay me for my time.
Mind you, if they had to pay everyone for the time wasted by Win 8 and the ribbon, they'd be bankrupt before they got a tenth of the way through the list.
And you could say that win 10 is just the latest in a line of re-corned-beef-hashes of Win '95; the list of equivalences isn't short.
Vista was a small branch into a different direction; Win 8 is a huge branch into a different direction. Both branches broke a perfectly stable tree.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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It was a complete working product, but it was not to the liking of the general public so the cooking method was changed. That's the point I am making. Vista was a complete working product, people had issues with the amount of intrusive security, so the source code was tweaked to make those security tasks less intrusive, it is no different than taking a rack of ribs, and broiling them rather than BBQing them. Vista and Win 7 is the exact same product, just cooked differently.
Using your tree analogy, the trunk is MSFT, each branch is a different variant of Windows. Some branches become forked into smaller branches, others do not. Vista is a branch in the tree, win 7 was forked off Vista. Win 8.x is a new branch and Win 10 is forked off that branch, it is literally no different than going from 3 to 3.1.
True, when people see a new branch they have trepidations, wether it can hold the weight etc, but when people realise the branch is stable and can hold the weight they will inevitably climb onto it and see the view is better from higher up.
Honestly, I personally cannot see what the big deal regarding win 8, it was not a learning curve, the keyboard/mouse functionality is no different to any other variant of windows, the start screen is just a giant full screen start menu with slightly more functionality, that you are presented with on boot. This makes sense because the first thing people did after booting a windows machine was double click on a shortcut or go to the start menu.
I really don't understand why people are griping that the process is one keystroke/mouse click shorter. If you don't like the 'metro' version of applications then unpin them and pin the desktop variants, it's a simplified variant of removing items from a win 7 start menu and creating shortcuts to others.
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Member 4724084 wrote: Vista was a complete working product
Atcherley, they admitted that it wasn't.
Member 4724084 wrote: people had issues with the amount of intrusive security
Not I. Have you ever used unix (or linux)? You have to enter your username and password every couple of minutes, as a developer (I've never used either as a user).
Member 4724084 wrote: Vista and Win 7 is the exact same product
So was Win '95, going by that reasoning.
In fact, I'd say that the vast majority of everything in Windows 10 was there in Windows 3.1.1.
It's also pretty much the same in OSX, Unix, and every flavour of Linux, not to mention Android, iOS, OS/2, etc.
The available hardware is the available hardware, and that is the main delimiter of the functionality of an OS, because the only point of having an OS is to provide access to the hardware.
So, using your cookery view on the OS, every version of every operating system is simply a variation of a single recipe.
That view is way too simplistic; I'm not going to adopt it, no matter how many times you repeat it, so you may as well quit repeating it.
Member 4724084 wrote: Honestly, I personally cannot see what the big deal regarding win 8
It is an operating system designed for devices that one holds in one hand, primarily for communications and taking photographs.
If your development machine is a device that you hold in one hand, primarily for communications and taking photographs, then you must be a pretty weird developer.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: Atcherley, they admitted that it wasn't.
Citation please.
Mark_Wallace wrote: So was Win '95, going by that reasoning.
In fact, I'd say that the vast majority of everything in Windows 10 was there in Windows 3.1.1.
No, while they all do the same thing, they do it differently. To qualify as the same thing the code base has to be identical. I am not the one who came up with the food analogy, I just extended it to include Vista when the original poster of the food analogy left it off the list.
Mark_Wallace wrote: It is an operating system designed for devices that one holds in one hand, primarily for communications and taking photographs.
If your development machine is a device that you hold in one hand, primarily for communications and taking photographs, then you must be a pretty weird developer.
No it is not, it was designed as an operating system that can be used anywhere on any device. Similarly to iOS, it doesn't matter of it's an iPhone or an iPad or even some variants of the iPod, it is the exact same operating system. MSFT just extended the idea to include desktops and laptops as well.
Win 10 takes the integration one step further by allowing you to carry jobs from one machine to the next without having to save your work somewhere and shift the files to some other machine. if I am editing a document on my laptop and I want to swap to a desktop I will be able to do that. It was even mentioned in the CodeProject daily news. The article didn't specify how to swap from one to the other on the fly, but it's an interesting idea, and one that I have no doubt people will gripe about.
My development machine is a desktop, I use win 8.x on it with not one single issue. If you don't like "metro" apps then uninstall them and use the desktop variants instead, which is exactly what I did. So again, I cannot see what the big deal is regarding win 8.x, other than people being lazy.
P.S. I take the weird developer comment as a compliment, so thank you 
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Member 4724084 wrote: No, while they all do the same thing, they do it differently.
Not so differently as you seem to think.
How many ways are there to print a pixel on the screen?
How many ways are there to read a character from memory?
How many ways are there to connect to a wifi access point?
Hint: There's one way for each.
The "base code" -- the commands sent to the hardware -- are absolutely identical for each item of hardware, no matter what device the hardware is a part of.
Saying that Windows 3 and Windows 999 use the same machine code is a waste of breath. They have no choice but to use the same machine code, because the one and only machine code is what makes computers work, for every version of every operating system from everyone who makes operating systems.
Everything else is window dressing -- no pun intended (for once in my life).
Do you think that having taskbars or menus built with ever-so-slightly different third- or fourth-generation code makes operating systems incredibly unique?
Look more closely at the machine. When you write code, you are putting together sets of instructions to be sent to the hardware, nothing more, nothing less.
Sure, you can vary the commands to a very small degree, and vary the order in which they're sent to a higher degree -- you can modify the recipe, as you put it -- but that doesn't change your root ingredients, which are the same ingredients that everyone has to use.
Nothing in Windows is unique to Windows. Their task bars and menus are printed on the screen using exactly the same "base code" as everyone else's.
I dunno. Kids these days...
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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How many ways to print a pixel on a monitor? 3, one for CRT, one for LCD, one for Plasma.
How many ways to read a character from RAM? Depends on the RAM architecture.
How many ways are there to connect to a wifi access point? Ok you got me on that one.
There is more than one type of Machine code, so your statement that there is only one that makes computers work is entirely false. The machine code that is used is dependant entirely on the architecture.
Software, including base code such as is found in kernels, is ever changing with each iteration, eventually you have something that has little to no resemblance to the original. This also happens as new more efficient algorithms are discovered to perform any given task, as those new algorithms are implemented, less and less of the original code remains.
As hardware undergoes an iteration, so to does the code that runs on that hardware, again after x iterations you have little to nothing left of the original. Also the code that runs on a binary computer is substantially different to code that runs on a ternary computer. By your definition it is the same thing, in practice it is not, radically so.
Any variant of windows you can name prints a task bar/menu on the VDU in a different manner than Mac OS system 6, again by your definition they are the same thing. In practice they are not.
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I don't like answers that come from wikipedia.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Mark_Wallace wrote: I don't like answers that come from wikipedia.
Neither do I, exactly why I don't use it.
To use one of your phrases "Kids these days..."
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