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Re: [LUG] OT: Windows XP

 

On 14/02/14 22:45, Simon Avery wrote:

> You *get* it.
> 
> MIcrosoft didn't with 8.
> 
> Metro was a huge mistake, another example of marketing arrogance
> thinking it can change the world without considering the  most important
> thing: users.  It's not the first time MS have mis-judged a market
> drastically, but they've got it right more times than not. I can't
> recall when they got it /quite/ as badly wrong as this, even Vista was
> usable in comparison.
> 
> Nobody should rely on having to download something else to make an OS
> usable, much less something from a random site that's in no way endorsed
> by the OS creators.
> 
> It's 2014. We've had computers for a long time and most people are
> familiar and adaptable - but similarly, computers are tools and the OS
> merely a way of accessing that tool. It should never get in the way of
> expectations.
> 
> Bad Apple - love you to bits - but you occasionally suffer from "I know
> this, I can do it, so it's not a problem." :)


Ha! Guilty as charged!

But I have been sadly misunderstood (probably because I didn't explain
myself clearly) I'm afraid - I have every sympathy with completely
novice computer users, from Grannies to not-interested significant
others to members of staff who really just don't care about the IT and
want to get on with their work. I deal with a LOT of these people daily,
and their frustrations ultimately become my frustrations so I have a
very vested interest in software not being such a giant pain in the arse.

Also, I'd like to go on the record as considering Metro (on a PC, at
least) to be pointless, stupid, crap, hateful, ill conceived and
incredibly poorly implemented. When I first saw Metro on an early
release alpha of Server 2012 I was left literally speechless. I'm also
not really a fan of Microsoft in general, although I obviously
appreciate the technical merits of at least some of their software
products a great deal more than some (most?) of the list members, hardly
surprising given that it's a LUG.

But I wasn't talking about those completely naive end-users, I'm talking
about people who should know better, people who do have some actual IT
savvy. From reviewers to bloggers, techies to hobbyists, teenage gamers
used to tweaking their systems, 70 year old greybeard UNIX hackers, the
lot. And these are the ones who do all the complaining - after all,
those completely naive end users don't even have the ability to get on
the internet or a mailing list and start forcefully bitching in the
first place!

For a concrete example, lots of people on this list have a serious hate
case on for Win8/8.1 and it's always the damn Metro false flag that goes
up first. Anyone on this list isn't a computer novice, and they should
damn well know that two seconds on google, if they even need that,
completely disables Metro and makes it an entire non-issue. Yet *every
single damn person* capable of voicing an opinion on the matter keeps
perpetuating the same tired old nonsense. I'll reiterate: anyone smart
enough and computer savvy enough to understand what they're actually
complaining about so bitterly in regards to Win8.1 could have just fixed
the issue in less time than it took to type half their first sentence of
vitriol. I have no patience for these morons.

In the enterprise, it's a non-issue again: end users will never see
Metro because the admins fix everything on their servers first and roll
out the usual old-fashioned MS style desktop from System Centre as
usual. Linux still has nothing that even remotely approaches the
awesomeness of Microsoft's AD and related user/computer management
frameworks - only Samba is close, and that of course is just a
reimplementation of the same technology!

As a final point, I currently have a work assigned laptop: it's a ~£1000
Dell Ultrabook running Win8.1 Pro with a whole bunch of Microsoft tools
on it - everything from SQL Server to Visual Studio and a whole bunch of
server admin tools, pretty standard stuff. Anyway more interestingly
it's got a 1920x1200 matte IPS touchscreen which I thought I would never
use but it's actually pretty cool. Sometimes it just makes sense to
reach out and tap the screen, or pinch/squeeze for zoom, etc. I did a
code review with with a SQL DBA the other day and with both of us sat in
front of one laptop we found ourselves naturally using the touchscreen a
lot more than I would have expected. Neither of us would use a
touchscreen normally, or for any kind of our normal work, but Metro with
it's big icons and touchscreen APIs actually kind of makes sense in
certain, very specific situations.

Unfortunately, having quite serious OCD about things like smeared
screens, until someone figures out how to protectively coat glass
against finger prints I will never use one on anything that isn't my
phone or a tablet, so Metro is still dead on arrival.

Regards


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