1. Fix the file system. The company promised it would develop a database-style file system that would allow for easy and super-fast searches for keywords within the structure of the file. This means it should quickly retrieve every .doc file containing the words "Android OS." The biggest problem with such a file system would be the indexing costs. It is likely that a gigabyte of storage fully indexed as a real database would take 2GB or more in overhead. So what? Terabytes are cheaper than ever. You can always make this sort of file system an option if necessary for the cheapskate who thinks paying more than $300 for a PC is spending too much money.
2. Fix the Networking. How did the Microsoft networking subsystems deteriorate with Windows 7 and above? I have a legacy NAS from Cisco that no OS since Vista can access on my network. There are a few supposed patches that kind of work. Why do I need to patch anything? What's the reason these legacy devices cannot be used anymore? They don't work because nobody wants to write the code to make sure they still work.
3. Bring back the distraction games. What happened to some of the classic games that came with the OS? I'm talking specifically about Spider Solitaire. Where is it? Whatever happened to Pinball, for that matter?
4. Scale everything. This full-screen idiocy must go. I have complained bitterly about the stupidity of full-screen programs from their early pre-Windows 8 conceptualization. Full-screen programs harken back to DOS. Having a bunch of these running and switching from one to the other is nothing more than DOS task switching from 1985. Check the calendar, people. Why isn't everyone in the tech community squawking about this incessantly? Besides praising this lunacy, now some users are giddy about the new "half full screen" mode. It makes you wonder where everyone with a brain went.
5. And finally, put back the real Start menu. Microsoft can simply go buy the Classic Shell code and use that if it wants a good implementation. The reason for the Start menu was for convenience, nothing more. Taking it away was like that "Ribbon" interface—it's a way to impede an efficient use of the product. Why do this? Why encumber the user? Everything just takes longer than it should.
Windows 9 will be the end of the road for Microsoft if it keeps digging the same hole to nowhere. Everything the company does now seems to be part of some unspoken weird or secret theory stemming from smartphone UIs. It is all so inappropriate for the desktop computer. Microsoft is simply ruining the industry with this tactic, as we see with PC sales. My suggestions above, if implemented properly, would stem the decline.
I think they could avoid the Start Menu. What do you want from the start menu? The ability to launch and search for programs. Launch is on the Metro screen now - that's covered. A full-screen start menu like the Metro desktop is fine - the start-menu kept growing absurdly anyways.
I think Metro could be made to work if you made sure it was operable with a mouse - that is, no auto-hiding, no gestures. Give me a single, consistent always-visible taskbar instead of schizophrenia and that "charms" crap, and on-screen always-visible buttons to launch an app-search-bar or to hit up the
I can see the logic of moving away from the old days of letting windows overlap (including the start-menu) - this served no purpose. Why would I want to partially obscure another window? But having more than one window visible at once isn't optional. Give me the means to slice up the desktop like the old Photoshop cut tool.
The Metro UI could be adapted to play nice with the desktop, but they have to admit that it's a desktop and desktops have different needs from touchschreens. Unifying this mess isn't out-of-reach if they are willing to compromise on unifying all the details.
>I think Metro could be made to work if you made sure it was operable with a mouse - that is, no auto-hiding, no gestures. Give me a single, consistent always-visible taskbar instead of schizophrenia and that "charms" crap, and on-screen always-visible buttons to launch an app-search-bar or to hit up the
I can live with this on the desktop, but what's particularly insane is they went with this same interface for Server 2012.
Fortunately, I got out of dealing with Windows Server before then, but I hear no end of complaining from friends that still do about how infuriating trying to invoke corner-based gestures through an RDC window is.
I just generally despise gesture based interaction, but Metro makes some sense on Windows Server. Strip away the gestures and leave just the tiles could be one way to go on the server. Normally you just login to do a quick modification and having the server tools right on the tile desktop makes it pretty easy to find.
I don't consider corner-based gestures to satisfy my requirement of "operable with a mouse".
That's my point. Move away from gestures and auto-hiding crap and metro would be workable for the desktop. It's perfectly reasonable to auto-hide stuff on a 7" screen and have it always-visible on a 23" screen, or at least give it a button instead of a gesture.
Give me that kind of thing and Metro is workable instead of "omg revert this crap".
1. Yeah WinFS would be nice but it seems to be out of reach still from a development point of view. Perhaps if it were a totally new file system and not having to maintain some kind of backwards compatibility with NTFS? Who knows I am not a file system developer but I do know Microsoft put some serious development work into WinFS back in the pre-Vista days and it was just too difficult.
2. God yes! Why the hell did they get rid of the connection center they had in Vista and 7 and turn it into a god damn side bar thing!?! Networking is painful on 8.
3. I miss the games too. It is bullshit that Microsoft made them ad-based Modern apps.
4. It is depressing to see how far things went backwards with these shitty fullscreen apps in Windows 8. They are nice on a tablet yes but on a desktop or laptop?! Horrible.
5. My biggest issue with the start screen is that they removed features that were present in the start menu. If the start screen were a full replacement to the start menu it wouldn't be such of an issue but how it is at the moment isn't nice for anything other than just launching an application. I don't agree with the ribbon comments. I find the ribbon to be fantastic and always have. I love Office with the ribbon and hate having to use LibreOffice with all the options lost in menus and sub-menus. The ribbon makes so much more sense and is far more user friendly and is one of the best UI features to come from Microsoft in years.
About #1, it just takes something like Beagle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_%28software%29) integrated with the file explorer, MS does not even need to touch the filesystem. But I never tought it was that usefull, and I can't get all the hype around the concept.
About #3, yep, XP's pinball is just great, I'd expect the number of good games to go up in newer releases, not down.
>I have a legacy NAS from Cisco that no OS since Vista can access on my network.
My guess is that is a security/encryption setting issue with your NAS. Windows won't send a login request to a server that uses weak standards unless you change registry settings. This is done for your protection.
It's like complaining that you can't get leaded gasoline anymore. Complaints like that make this dude come off like a short-sighted, self-centered idiot.
That specific example might be, but Microsoft seem to have been in denial about some adverse side effects of the networking changes in Windows 7 since about five minutes after the launch.
I've seen an office with a hybrid network where numerous machines running XP, OS X and Linux all talked to each other quite happily, at the expected network speeds over wireless and wired connections, all working as you'd expect. However, most of the the Windows 7 machines (both desktops and laptops, from a variety of vendors) transferred data at a fraction of the speed the network could support for no apparent reason.
At some point, you have to accept that the obvious common factor is your new operating system and you've broken something, but MS never have.
Being that I run mixed Linux/Win7 networks with SMB filesharing and don't have speed transfer problems, it seems to be a sysadmin problem.
Update your NIC drivers and make sure your processor can handle encrypted sessions at full speed. If you want to downgrade to NTLM you are free to edit the registry keys to do so. The rest of us don't want our passwords and traffic easily crackable.
Thanks for the advice, but the company in question did a lot of work in the networking field, so it is highly unlikely that the poor performance was caused by either a lack of competence on the part of their sysadmins or simple oversights like not updating drivers. Various third party software running on the Windows 7 machines seemed to achieve the expected throughput just fine too, so the finger was definitely pointing to something in Windows being the culprit.
(Really obvious example: An rsync-based tool used to copy files to a central server prior to backing up would do so at roughly the expected speed from all of the Win7 PCs, but dragging and dropping the same files between the same machines in Windows Explorer would take an order of magnitude longer. Just to be clear, I'm talking about testing with new files where rsync would also have to transfer them in their entirety here, not a speed up because of the rsync algorithm itself.)
1. Fix the file system. The company promised it would develop a database-style file system that would allow for easy and super-fast searches for keywords within the structure of the file. This means it should quickly retrieve every .doc file containing the words "Android OS." The biggest problem with such a file system would be the indexing costs. It is likely that a gigabyte of storage fully indexed as a real database would take 2GB or more in overhead. So what? Terabytes are cheaper than ever. You can always make this sort of file system an option if necessary for the cheapskate who thinks paying more than $300 for a PC is spending too much money.
2. Fix the Networking. How did the Microsoft networking subsystems deteriorate with Windows 7 and above? I have a legacy NAS from Cisco that no OS since Vista can access on my network. There are a few supposed patches that kind of work. Why do I need to patch anything? What's the reason these legacy devices cannot be used anymore? They don't work because nobody wants to write the code to make sure they still work.
3. Bring back the distraction games. What happened to some of the classic games that came with the OS? I'm talking specifically about Spider Solitaire. Where is it? Whatever happened to Pinball, for that matter?
4. Scale everything. This full-screen idiocy must go. I have complained bitterly about the stupidity of full-screen programs from their early pre-Windows 8 conceptualization. Full-screen programs harken back to DOS. Having a bunch of these running and switching from one to the other is nothing more than DOS task switching from 1985. Check the calendar, people. Why isn't everyone in the tech community squawking about this incessantly? Besides praising this lunacy, now some users are giddy about the new "half full screen" mode. It makes you wonder where everyone with a brain went.
5. And finally, put back the real Start menu. Microsoft can simply go buy the Classic Shell code and use that if it wants a good implementation. The reason for the Start menu was for convenience, nothing more. Taking it away was like that "Ribbon" interface—it's a way to impede an efficient use of the product. Why do this? Why encumber the user? Everything just takes longer than it should.
Windows 9 will be the end of the road for Microsoft if it keeps digging the same hole to nowhere. Everything the company does now seems to be part of some unspoken weird or secret theory stemming from smartphone UIs. It is all so inappropriate for the desktop computer. Microsoft is simply ruining the industry with this tactic, as we see with PC sales. My suggestions above, if implemented properly, would stem the decline.