WE all get to wear silly glasses and wave in the air while staring off into imaginary space—just think of the oblivious walkers cellphones have given us. I’m sure that waving invisible objects into view and printing them will improve our computing skills and reorganize our databases without a single error. Better yet, we can 3-d print our silly waves into new artforms. Whoopee! I could only wish this were April 1—but I’m afraid they’re serious.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/21/technology/windows-10/index.html?iid=TL_Popular
Yeah, I saw that. “We need this?” he asked incredulously. Imagine an office full of cubes with this technology! 😯
“Microsoft unveiled the new Windows 10, a new Surface Hub display and holographic technology at its live Windows 10 event Wednesday in Redmond, Washington. The biggest announcement at the event was a new hologram device called HoloLens. The new head gear is a holographic computer that requires voice and hand-gesture commands for use. The computer is completely wireless and runs on Windows 10 software. Users will be able to perform basic phone functions, watch TV and design and create objects — such as spaceships — and 3-D print them.” NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
My response was not only ‘we need this???’ but ‘Oh joy, another thing that can crash!’
Didn’t they learn from their previous failed bright ideas, like WinME?
Or “Bob”?
Or “Clippy”, that kept popping up at inopportune moments. Tell it to disappear and it might, for several minutes, but it always resurrected itself. The only way to get rid of it was to do a “Custom” install and uncheck the “Assistants”.
“Clippy” annoyed the crap out of me, but I could ignore the cat, so ‘Clippy’ got changed into the cat very quickly.
So, what happened to Windowz 9?
What I’m reading is windows 8 sucked pondwater so badly, they decided to just skip 9?
Sigh, this must be from the same people who think we don’t notice that a quart of ice cream is now 1.5 pints…
It’s a variation of the Y2K bug… Windows 9 would apparently be mistake in computerese for Windows 98 or 95, or some such tripe. Anyway, they have to skip 9 altogether in the naming system because they didn’t plan ahead.
Not impressed by the glasses, yet. I suspect we’re still a ways away from anything like that being useful. But as for Windows 10 itself? Love it. I’ve been running it since the first preview, with periodic updates to that preview, and I’m very pleased. Windows 7 was a solid OS that had a very effective UI, and that allowed me to do my work from the command line. Windows 8 was a royal PITA for a keyboard person, making it almost impossible to get work done without a mouse and a LOT of clicking. Windows 8.1 improved that, especially with the 2nd update. But Windows 10 is a real pleasure to work with. We start on the desktop, we have a new version of Windows PowerShell making it easier to do what I do, and the Start Button behaves almost like it did in Windows 7, though it does look a bit different. Plus all those silly “Metro” apps can run in a window on my desktop, making a couple of them actually useful. Overall? A winner, IMO.
I’ve had a Windows 10 preview running on my machine for a few weeks. There might be other gee-whiz stuff for special machines, but right now it looks like a more usable version of Windows 8. (The Start menu is back, for one thing.)
(Without all the hardware support that a release version of the OS has, so I mostly boot into Ubuntu.)
If Jerry Pournelle were still up to “doing silly things so you don’t have to” he’d probably be running the Windows 10 preview on one of his computers. (Here’s to wishing him a full & speedy recovery.) But there’s probably someone here with a sacrificial machine that might test-drive the new OS more thoroughly than I’m doing and comment on it.
Maybe so, but you’re still “paying the freight” on all the software while it keeps making decisions on just how to do things. Does it let you take a meat axe to eliminate this and that once and for all during installation?
This is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO wrong!
What are people who want what we’ve come to know as a “standard desktop personal computer” going to do with all the vendors rushing to these things? Oh, right! I’ve got it. Linux on “old” hardware! 😉 🙂 🙂 🙂
Why, when a new OS gets rolled out, the designers seem to concentrate more on the new bells and whistles they’ve added, and ignore the functionality they’ve baked into previous versions?
marketing……ever notice when one car manufacturer has a cool add-on, pretty soon, they all do? Do you really need that built-in navigation system in the car? My handheld GPS does just fine, and costs about $4,500 less than the built-in system. But you see that the car manufacturers are putting them into even the lower priced models.
Maps work fine. Sure, you have to pull over to look at one, but it’s less likely to lead you someplace really wrong. (I’ve heard too many stories about people being seriously misdirected.)
The consensus at the moment seems to be that Windows 10 is a big improvement on Windows 8, and possibly the best version of Windows to be released so far.
HoloLens may still take a few years to reach the public in a practical form, but it has really stunning possibilities, and I think it may have a major impact on the way we use computers.
I could barely cope with the touch screen laptops… O__O
And don’t they always say that the next version is better? And then it’s not?
I am a long time user of Windows products. I always hate the newest version when it comes out and then learn how to get around the worst aspects. My only real complaint is that Microsoft tries to build in demand by making earlier functionality difficult to use unless you upgrade their way. Touchscreen is a case in point. For a desktop it is terrible, but to use Win8 properly you absolutely NEED a touchscreen. Yes I have a touchscreen tablet, but there are so many things I can’t do (such as use Access) on my tablet that I’ve actually been driven back to using my desktop machine using the very reliable Win7. I’ve never had a problem with Win7 but have had to restart my tablet with Win8 numerous times due to freezes. My one wish is that Microsoft would realize that a user interface needs to be flexible enough that the user decides whether touchscreen, touchpad, or keyboard entry with minimal mouse control is correct for their application, and then give the user the freedom to choose rather than try to dictate the hardware platform. As it is now I will stick to Win7 on my desktop until Microsoft can prove that they can construct an OS that allows me to use my current software with my current hardware without causing the Mother of All Storms in my output data.
OT: I’ve just watched the first episode of the new BBC series Wolf Hall, based on Hilary Mantel’s books. It’s the best historical drama I’ve seen for many years.
In contrast to Reign, which was mentioned here a few weeks ago, the costumes are highly authentic, and the acting is top notch. It’s not dumbed down, and you have to pay close attention to follow what’s happening. The reviews by the critics have been 5-star across the board. Some have called it “close to perfect television”.
Apparently it will be shown in the USA in April. Here’s the trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kT2lMkhldc
You can also find a few clips from episodes 1 and 2 by searching YouTube.
Oooh, that sounds exciting! I’ve read both the books and I’ll keep an eye out for the show.
I’ll be looking for this! Yay!
This one read (somewhere in the interwebs) that M$ skipped 9 because of legacy programming involving win 95/98; to avoid software conflicts.
Beat me to it!
Windows 9 was dropped because of the -ve meaning in German.
The goggles from my one brief experience are really something else – but are not mandated to be used. It’s a much better xp than I had with Rift or Google glasses
Well, I’m encouraged. The new computer, btw, will have the 8.1 ‘license’ but runs on 7; that will preserve an upgrade path to 10—should I want it.
BTW, did I mention we may have, after 2 mobo replacements of a perfectly good mobo and ditto the USB daughterboards, we THINK we may have killed the ‘dancing USBs’ problem…
The problem seems to arise when you plug a rechargeable device into a laptop USB with the bios set to turn off a USB power draw after 5 minutes, which for some reason only known to the great god Babbage…is the default. Well, like TELL us that your error message calls it a ‘power surge on USB 8’ and that it will hunt around to all the USBs in succession, each time calling for a reset as the device stops working. Brilliant bit of programming, if that’s the case. The fix, which was finally called by a senior Dell tech, was to go into the bios and tell the OS not to do that and to allow a draw even when the machine is otherwise shut down.
The new wireless tech that has all these little ‘stubbies’ set into the USB, one for a mouse, one for headset, etc, is seriously at odds with this, and I read quite a few online notes from baffled people trying to chase this bug.
Last night, with that fix in place, I had all sorts of devices in use, and the USBs didn’t start dancing.
We may have slain this dragon.
Since my laptop is almost always plugged in, it’s no problem for me.
Upgrades are cool and stuff, but how much more do we really need? (Says the woman still using WinXP…)
This woman still has a computer running Win98 and a DOS machine, Because sometimes you need those antiques. (The DOS machine has 5-to-3 floppy conversion ability. The win98 machine runs software than Win7 doesn’t like.)
Yes, I am a dinosaur.
I’d laugh but it hurts too much… my DOS box, 95, and 98 all ended up in a 15 yard dumpster a month or so ago in the house clean out. I really only kept them because I had some old college stuff on 5 and 3 inch floppies, but the under educated overly youthful young men hired by the cleaning company probably put THEM in the dumpster too.
Sigh…. Somewhere in those floppies I had a lot of history….
T rex was a dinosaur, I seem to remember. 😉
T Rex was also a performer, most famous song, “Bang a Gong”….;)
Or there’s “The King of the Mountain Cometh,” or many others.