Wapsi Square Forum

There's a lot more to my annoyance with it...

I hate to admit this but there are days I preferred Win98 to the present versions. But the drastic changes in the interface for Win 8 are damned annoying. Making it like a cell phones apps was a poor decision on their part. I can see if it was exclusive for a touch screen only interface system, but it is designed for a standard keyboard run PC.

W10 at least senses what device you're using it on and throws up the appropriate interface - i understand they demonstrated it running on a Surface with its keyboard attached, and then took the keyboard off, and it automatically switched from a keyboard-centric interface to a touch screen one.

AnotherFairportfan wrote:W10 at least senses what device you're using it on and throws up the appropriate interface - i understand they demonstrated it running on a Surface with its keyboard attached, and then took the keyboard off, and it automatically switched from a keyboard-centric interface to a touch screen one.

key word there was "DEMONSTRATED"... i'll be waiting until the actual product ships before making that judgement call as to whether or not i WANT to upgrade... and if i DO, it'll be a jump from Vista to 10 (or maybe even 11)... so, meh... "we'll see, i guess" is the only thing i can say.

Dave wrote:For a while, I had my Mac IIfx set to shut down using a sound clip from the finale of the opera "Faust", where the protagonist is dragged down to Hell to pay his side of the bargain he made with the Devil. It was a wonderful, descending tenor wail... "AAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggggh!"... then *click* and the lights all go out.

I replaced most of my laptop's sounds with Warcraft lines.
Start Up: Knight - "Ready to serve, my Lord!"
Shut Down: Footman - "I DO have work to do!"
Minimize: Peasant - "I'm not listening!"
Low Battery: Mage - "Don't anger me!"
Critical Battery: Mage - "I warned you!!" [BZZZZAP]

...and so forth.

AnotherFairportfan wrote:Ya know, having moused over that link, i ain't gonna click it.

Well, I clicked it, and my sig is again vindicated.

AnotherFairportfan wrote:Ya know, having moused over that link, i ain't gonna click it.

I am shocked... shocked! that you would think I might ever post a link to something that wasn't 100% above-board, clean, wholesome, on-topic, and pun-free!

Typeminer wrote: Well, I clicked it, and my sig is again vindicated.

Indeed! It's been suggested that brewing was as essential to the spread of Western civilization, as hot tea was to Eastern (both ways of providing relatively safe-to-drink liquids, in an era of poor sanitation and easily-spread-by-polluted-water diseases).

Only a couple weeks ago I started using one computer that operates on Windows 8. On the surface at least, it's not that different from Windows 7 (there may be all sorts of hidden differences in how the two systems work, but I don't really know about most of that sort of thing). There are differences in where some of the buttons and such that you interface with are located, but those differences seem to be mainly cosmetic. Most of the nuisance factor comes from simply trying to find where things have been moved to, but that's not really any different than the same problem that a first-time user of any computer system has.

The part that annoys me is the interface itself. Rather than most actions being determined by clicking the mouse buttons or hitting buttons on the keyboard, now a lot of actions are initiated by how you move the cursor. I find it to be extremely annoying when I'm trying to move the cursor by means of an awkward little touchpad, and all sorts of menus and things pop up all over the screen because the cursor happened to pass over some particular area of the screen. One time I had the cursor freeze in place on my desktop screen, and trying to move it did nothing other than make all of the icons on my desktop grow larger or smaller. I couldn't get it to stop doing that, and had to shut down and restart the computer to get it working as a normal cursor again. I'm still not sure how or why it did that.

I understand that Microsoft wants to be able to make one operating system to rule all-. . .I mean, to function on all devices, rather than different systems for different devices, but sometimes trying to make one thing that does all things results in one thing that doesn't really do anything all that well. Maybe on Windows 9 or 10 or whatever they can put in a user-selected option on whether to function as a traditional computer, as a touch-screen phone, as an Etch-A-Sketch, or whatever.

Personally, I think that the Windows 95 that I started with worked just fine for me, and I would have been happy to stay with that if it had remained compatible with later programs. Heck, the Lotus office suite program that I used with Win95 was simpler, more reliable, more flexible, and had more useful options than any office suite I've had to use since.

Uhm, there is a major difference between Win 8 and 7: the tiles and startup screen. If you don't do all sorts of finagling at the start, the tiles come up every time you turn the computer on/wake it from sleep.

jwhouk wrote:Uhm, there is a major difference between Win 8 and 7: the tiles and startup screen. If you don't do all sorts of finagling at the start, the tiles come up every time you turn the computer on/wake it from sleep.

Tiles?

Oh - is THAT what they call the Ugly Square Useless Things?

jwhouk wrote:Uhm, there is a major difference between Win 8 and 7: the tiles and startup screen. If you don't do all sorts of finagling at the start, the tiles come up every time you turn the computer on/wake it from sleep.

I don't really consider that to be much of a change, really. On the computer that I use, you can simply click on one tile and have it change to a traditional desktop, and then the tiles screen only appears when I go down to a corner and click on an icon (maybe that's not typical for Windows 8?). It's not that functionally dissimilar to having to pull up the taskbar and look through menus on it.

No, it is not typical. Win8 comes with the Tiles as the default setting. You have to do some ministrations to get the desktop to appear by default.

Okay. This is not obscene or pornographic, but i'd say it definitely is NSFW - a special glove designed for (right-=handed) men's self-gratification.
 
Just remember - what has been seen cannot be unseen.

...I can't believe "heart" is THIRD PLACE. Just....what the hell, people?

MerchManDan wrote:...I can't believe "heart" is THIRD PLACE. Just....what the hell, people?

"Nobody has ever gone broke as a result of underestimating the (intelligence|taste|commonsense) of the American people."

Aaaaand now Windows 8 has decided to enlarge all of the fonts on every page of the Wapsi forum, but only on the Wapsi forum. It's at the point where it's actually difficult to read because it's all too oversized. I wonder how to undo this. . .or if it can even be undone. . .

I believe CTRL+0 will do the trick.

Or Ctrl + roll the mouse-wheel down.

(But, given your description, it isn't Windows 8, it's your web browser.)

My silly idea for why they named it Windows 10 is they they haven't called it Windows 10, they have called it Windows 10.



or, as the joke goes: there are 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't
(in binary "10" = "2")

It's not Windows 'Ten', It's Windows 'Two' (aka, Windows the next generation )

Considering that Microsoft named the successor to the XBox 360 the Xbox One .... ok, my idea is still silly


Other reasons, I've heard for them jumping the Windows 9 name

> They don't want it to be the butt of "Windows NO!" jokes [9 = nein]

or, just as silly as my idea, but oddly a lot more likely? (maybe)

> legacy code in software (and hardware?).

Apparently, when software (and hardware?) looks at what Operating System (OS) is installed on a computer, they don't always look to closely and that some confused the name 'Windows 9', with 'Windows 95' and/or 'Windows 98'

I'm not quite sure how truthful that story is, but considering that software/hardware are still coded by humans, that kind of makes sense to me a possible(probable?) problem.

Warrl wrote:(But, given your description, it isn't Windows 8, it's your web browser.)

In a way, yes, but seeing as how this has only happened to me twice, and that both times were within a week and when using Windows 8, I think that the immediate cause of the problem is the new interface between the user and the web browser through Windows 8. I hadn't changed web browsers, and it's even the same mouse as I've had for a long time.

Anyway, the problem was fixed (for now). Thanks.

Grantwhy wrote:Other reasons, I've heard for them jumping the Windows 9 name

> They don't want it to be the butt of "Windows NO!" jokes [9 = nein]

or, just as silly as my idea, but oddly a lot more likely? (maybe)

> legacy code in software (and hardware?).

Apparently, when software (and hardware?) looks at what Operating System (OS) is installed on a computer, they don't always look to closely and that some confused the name 'Windows 9', with 'Windows 95' and/or 'Windows 98'

I'm not quite sure how truthful that story is, but considering that software/hardware are still coded by humans, that kind of makes sense to me a possible(probable?) problem.

Some other possibilities are suggested by another organisation that loves to number the products in its inventory: the military. Taking the US Air Force as one example, because it's fairly high-profile:

The F-15 and F-16 fighters are very common and well-known jets. The F-18 is another (though it's officially the F/A-18). But what about the F-17? Where is it? The F-17 actually was developed, but then the design was modified and upgraded so much that they decided that it now qualified as a whole new aircraft, and so they gave it the -18 designation instead. So maybe Windows 10 is Windows 9, but they added so much more to it after initial development that they figure it isn't really Windows 9 anymore.

After the F/A-18, we seem to jump suddenly to the F-22. What happened to -19 though -21?

The F-21 does exist, but hardly anybody is aware of its existence because there were only a few of them and they were used for very specialised and limited purposes. Perhaps Windows 9, too, is going to be out there in use somewhere, but it will be used only by a few people for very narrow special purposes. Microsoft might not be advertising it, because rather than spending money on an advertising campaign they figure that it's better to simply contact potential users by more direct methods.

The F-20 also was designed and created, but then the military decided that there wasn't actually any need for it and so it was never put into production. Perhaps Windows 9 has suffered a similar fate.

Or it could be like the F-19: nobody knows anything about the F-19. Don't ask about the F-19, or else the MiB will come visit you.

. . .Excuse me while I go out and ask loudly about the F-19 for a while.