Windows is getting disgusting

[james_s]

I played around with it for a bit, but since I hate to talk to computers, how is it easier to use Cortana than to just type what I want to search for? Enlighten us please, what can Cortana do that is so fantastic and how is it useful to me? I work in a cubicle farm so we couldn't talk to our computers during the day even if we wanted to, it would be far too distracting. Perhaps with what I use my computer for the new features simply do not offer anything that benefits me? Have you considered that not everyone's needs are the same as yours? No, I probably don't use a fraction of the new Windows 10 "features" because I don't need them. I don't use mobile apps on my PC, I have a smartphone for that. I don't use Onedrive, it's against company policy to store proprietary data on external systems. I don't use Edge, I have a real browser that supports Adblock and has for years. I don't use the live tiles, I want a flexible start menu where I can organize all the software into folders in the order I see fit. I don't want a search bar in the task bar, I use that space to pin frequently used programs and keep track of what's running. You probably don't use a fraction of the features either, so you find Cortana useful, great, I don't. I'm sure there are features I find useful that you don't care about. I'm perfectly capable of using new features if they benefit my workflow but it would have to be a very great benefit for me to tolerate the fugly touch-optimized UI that comes in 10, along with the forced updates that mean MS can screw with my settings any time they want. I mean if I had a dollar for every time my work laptop has reverted back to Edge as the pdf reader, that just makes my blood boil every time that happens. I'm the user, I expect software to adapt to *my* needs, not the other way around.

[slicendice]

Any Windows version can be bent to the users will, including 10. Learn to use Windows and you will find out. It's just a matter of enough will power.

OneDrive does not have to be connected to anything or it does not have to be connected to Microsoft Azure. But it can. It can also be connected to your own private "cloud".

If your company has configured Windows properly, as it should be for proper workflow, none of your settings would revert after an upgrade of edition, including application defaults like Edge and also security settings or other things that has been preconfigured properly.

If Universal Windows Platform is such an annoyance, then the Enterprise edition of Windows is the way to go. Has all the "mobile" apps disabled by default. Even Cortana stays quiet.

I use most Windows features that comes with it. Even features that are not visible by default, but can be found buried within the folder structure of Windows. I even use the Linux sub-system that exists in latest Windows. Has a lot of powerful BASH tools, and Linux users know what those tools are and what they are useful for.

At first I thought Windows 10 and even 8 was ridiculous. But after I took the time to really understand Windows, I realized it's on the right track and it's moving forward exactly as it should.

With Windows today, whatever I was working on, on my computer, I can keep working on using my mobile, if I have to run. And once I get to my destination, I can use that local computer to continue working on the stuff edited on the mobile. There is a lot of stuff that can be shared in real time between any device. This is the MS vision, and I start to love it more and more every day, despite a lot of bugs still in the latest features.

EDIT: OH, almost forgot...Edge supports AdBlock. No problems. And soon it will support every plugin that works on Chrome. This is because the plugin architecture and API are the same on both browsers.

[james_s]

Sure, I can customize it to my liking if I try hard enough, but the effort is far less to simply use Win7 instead or even Linux. I'm going to take the path of least resistance. Why should I have to summon immense will power to bend the OS to fit my needs when other systems are available that already do almost exactly what I want with very few changes?

Yes in an ideal world the company computers would be better configured and we would have the Enterprise version but let me know when you find a company that has everything set up just right, and IT guys who have enough time and patience to figure out precisely how each person works and set up an optimal configuration for each individual. That ideal world is pure fantasy, I've worked at a number of different companies and none of them were anything like that. Maybe you should call up our CEO and IT guys and tell them how it's done.

If you can make continuum work for yourself then great, but it's useless to me. I don't do productivity on my phone, it's a small device that fits in my pocket, I use it for texting, phone calls, GPS navigation, check emails and occasionally looking up something online and that's about it. A phone that is big enough to comfortably edit a document, spreadsheet or anything like that is going to be much more bulky than I want a phone to be. Good luck writing code or designing a PCB layout on a phone. I get the MS vision but it's a fool's errand. A very niche set of circumstances that will be convenient for a small fraction of the ~1.5% of smartphone users who have a Windows phone but useless for most people. People who want to do work on a portable device have laptops. Out of everybody I know there are 3 people who have Windows phones, one of those is a current MS employee and the other two are former MS employees. The platform is dead on the vine, it would have vanished years ago if not for the fact that it is buoyed by other MS products and services.

[slicendice]

Did I say I have a Windows Phone? Assumptions!

I see now that the problem is the attitude, not the OS. We have nothing more to discuss regarding this matter.

The problem with most companies is that the guys in charge don't have a clue about how a system should be configured, and in most cases the IT departments hands are tied because of this fact. I have worked in big enough global companies (not MS) to know this. In most cases the left hand does not have a clue what the right hand is doing, the head does not have a clue or don't wanna listen to what the left and the right hand should be doing and because of this all is out of sync.

The head of the IT department should have at least 2-5 valid IT certificates (has to be renewed) in order to be a proficient enough decision maker regarding the IT infrastructure and how it should be run. Most companies don't pay attention to these details and all workers suffer. Certificates don't come easily and most IT "specialist" would most likely fail the first time.

[suicidaleggroll]

I see now that the problem is the attitude, not the OS. We have nothing more to discuss regarding this matter.

Your OS is a tool that is supposed to make your life easier and your work more efficient.  Forcing the user to jump through hoops in order to disable spyware, revert settings that are changed without notice or permission, and re-order their work style in order to operate how the OS wants them to operate, is not the right way to accomplish that.  Of course all of this will probably fall on deaf ears, since apparently anybody who disagrees with how MS does things has an "attitude problem"...

[rrinker]

 I was with you up to the claim on certs. SOME certs actually require knowledge of the products - particularly the Citrix ones where you actually do a lab practicum. This is how it SHOULD be But others, like the Microsoft certs? Those are utter and complete  0 experience, but 5 certs, vs 10+ years experience working with the products and no certs? If you've bought in to the Microsoft kool-aid, you'd toss the resume of the second one. But I have many experiences over a (so far) 29 year career that will show why that would be foolish. Direct case in point, I have been installing and configuring Microsoft email solutions since Microsoft Mail, before Exchange. Hundreds of successful implementations, I went to take the Microsoft Exchange certification exam. ANd failed. Their tests have no bearing on real world examples, and you must memorize EVERYTHING since unliek the real world you are not allowed any of the tools you normally have access to. Back in the day, Novell did it right. The tests were complex enough that you needed to know the material, as you would never complete enough to pass if you had t look up every question. But you were allowed to bring books and reference material along to the exam.
 I have also experienced multi times when I am called in to fix a problem and the client contact, who has every cube wall papered with certifications, disparages me for not having any certs, yet they are unable t solve the problem themselves. ANd working for a Microsoft partner, we have to maintain various certifications to maintain that partner status. In addition, new rules require the point person for each discipline to be a different person - ie one person can't pass 4 different tests and count as one of the people for all 4 tracks. WHy not? Just to make you spend MORE money on taking their exams. It's an out and out scam, at lest the Microsoft ones.

[james_s]

I'm not going to say certs are a bad thing, but there is certainly a type of person who anyone who works at a large-ish company will run into sooner or later, who excels at earning various certs but when it comes to practical application of skills they are useless. I distinctly remember interviewing more than one candidate who had a PhD in EE and an impressive looking resume but when I actually talked to them they did not impress me at all, lacking even some fairly basic problem solving skills. Some others with relatively modest education ended up being far more impressive at actually doing useful work. Also I've earned various certs over the years and recently threw out a few of my certificates when I realized I have not touched the stuff in several years and have no recollection of what I learned. A lot of these things are "use it or lose it", a wall of certs says nothing about the knowledge or skills one currently possesses.

[nctnico]

When it comes to PDF-Reader, I use SumatraPDF since a few years.

Can you disable anti-aliasing in this? Foxit is unusable to me because the anti-aliasing which makes anything completely unreadable to me cannot be disabled.

[ovnr]

Any Windows version can be bent to the users will, including 10. Learn to use Windows and you will find out. It's just a matter of enough will power.

If you require "enough willpower" to get to grips with an OS, the OS is not doing its job. It's supposed to stay in the background and Just Work. Not require hours of un-fucking every time MS decides to "enhance" it further.

[tronde]

If Universal Windows Platform is such an annoyance, then the Enterprise edition of Windows is the way to go.

Where can small companies buy enterprise?

[rdl]

When it comes to PDF-Reader, I use SumatraPDF since a few years.

Can you disable anti-aliasing in this? Foxit is unusable to me because the anti-aliasing which makes anything completely unreadable to me cannot be disabled.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "anti-aliasing", but it wouldn't be much trouble to test it out yourself. SumatraPDF is only about a 6 MB download, and only needs to be unzipped to run (does not require any special "installation" and doesn't write to registry).

[Howardlong]

Certifications aren't everything, but they do give you visibility of product features that you'd otherwise not be aware of, or would only pick up by chance.

What they don't give you are analytical skills. You can have certs coming out of every orifice but it doesn't mean you know how to efficiently troubleshoot, or architect solutions to fit into your typical environments full of legacy technology, or teach you how to be a reasonable human being. There is a lot more to life than certs.

As an example, at a place where I do a bit of consulting recently let someone go who, on paper, is incredibly well appointed including a Cambridge degree along with a string of certs. He was disruptive but in a bad way. While he was very good at coming up with random solutions, they only fitted his blinkered utopian world, they were mostly useless when it came to integrating with existing infrastructure, process and operations. Not a week would go by without some new point solution based on products that no-one had any experience of. He'd work fine in a greenfield startup where this kind of disruption is de rigeur, but not in the world of big corp enterprise.

What was worse was that he called himself a data architect. I remember the day he sent me a long email where he pulled rank and called himself that, I nearly fell off my chair! A case of Peter Principal if ever there was one.

[slicendice]

If Universal Windows Platform is such an annoyance, then the Enterprise edition of Windows is the way to go.

Where can small companies buy enterprise?

From Microsoft. Contact a Microsoft representative and off you go.

[slicendice]

Certifications aren't everything, but they do give you visibility of product features that you'd otherwise not be aware of, or would only pick up by chance.

What they don't give you are analytical skills. You can have certs coming out of every orifice but it doesn't mean you know how to efficiently troubleshoot, or architect solutions to fit into your typical environments full of legacy technology, or teach you how to be a reasonable human being. There is a lot more to life than certs.

As an example, at a place where I do a bit of consulting recently let someone go who, on paper, is incredibly well appointed including a Cambridge degree along with a string of certs. He was disruptive but in a bad way. While he was very good at coming up with random solutions, they only fitted his blinkered utopian world, they were mostly useless when it came to integrating with existing infrastructure, process and operations. Not a week would go by without some new point solution based on products that no-one had any experience of. He'd work fine in a greenfield startup where this kind of disruption is de rigeur, but not in the world of big corp enterprise.

What was worse was that he called himself a data architect. I remember the day he sent me a long email where he pulled rank and called himself that, I nearly fell off my chair! A case of Peter Principal if ever there was one.

Exactly! A piece of paper does not change who we are, but it gives a good indication of what we know, or at least should know. What it does not tell is if we can solve the problems given to us, based on the knowledge we have. :-)

[slicendice]

@rrinker

Either you understand Windows and it's solutions or you don't. A certification is a good measurement of how much you understand of it. If it's too difficult to pass a certification exam without a bunch of books to assist, then maybe Windows management is not your thing. Windows, is not complicated, once you understand the core functionality it should be fairly simple to pass any certification exam. But you have to understand the system as a whole, not just a small part of it or you will fail.

Almost anybody could pass an exam with a step by step guide on how to do things, but what's the point? How much does that person really know and understand? I'd say, pretty much nothing.

Having a lot of experience does not make you a good IT-specialist. Especially if you have been doing it all wrong the whole time. You need both correct methods and experience in order to be called a specialist.

EDIT: All this applies to Windows, Linux, OS X and any other OS there is, including the software that comes with it.

[rrinker]

 I can assure you I have not been "doing this wrong" for 29 years. It has nothing to do with the understanding of the material - the questions are specifically designed to make the exam more difficult that just knowing the material. Again - do it as a practicum, like Citrix and Cisco do, and you REALLY have an idea of the candidate knows the material or not. Multiple choice tests where it's 100% wrong if it says "pick all" and you get 2 out of the 3 do nothing but generate revenue.
 Half my down time, I'm helping the guy 2 cubes down try to solve customer problems. He has passed the Windows Server and the Exchange exam series. He has pretty close to 0 troubleshooting ability, unless the exact error messages results in a Google hit for the one and only solution. Usually things are much more complex than that. I'll suggest a course of action and he is usually responds with "I think I read about that somewhere" The way he works is the Microsoft Exam way - every little thing in isolation, no big picture look at the whole system. A fault in one system can easily just be a symptom of the real problem in a (seemingly) unrelated system - one needs to look at the whole system if the most basic troubleshooting fails to resolve the problem.
 My 29 years is post degree. While in college I worked in the computer shop, and also as my summer job for a couple of years. And 'playing' with computers and electronics - that goes even firther back in my childhood. Another thing is all these new guys have passed the latest version exam, so they see what might be problems in the current version of the product, but not every customer has the latest version yet - and when there are such massive changes such as between Exchange 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2013 (2016 didn't change much), they are easily lost without the practical experience. Again, the "Microsoft Way" on the exams assumes a nice clean latest versions of everything environment - which is almost NEVER the case, even the completely new system I just finished setting up, they run a critical line of business app where the app vendor will not support running the database on anything newer that SQL Server 2008. That sort of thing always annoys me, especially when you look in the database and there are no stored procedures which could be using code that is deprecated in newer versions. Nope, just your basic collection of data tables. And if you try it, it will work just fine on SQL 2014, or maybe even 2016. However, the software vendor will then blame any and all problems on the fact that you are using too new a version. Instead of unsupported end of life stuff... uggh.

[DimitriP]

a good IT-specialist

Talking about a loaded phrase!!!

"good"
"IT"
"specialist"


"Good" to a) yourself,  b) your employer or c) the "customer" or in what proportion?

"IT" .  Every  individual or company has it's own definition of what they will "handle" as part of their "IT services" usually skewed towards b above
Example: "Per our contact we only support networked printers" for example." Spoken by a two man "IT services" "company".

"Specialist": Well...this can easily negate the above two depending on the specialty.
Tehre are lots of "It specialists" out there  and if you went by their "specialty" you'd need a whole heard of them to "handle" everything.

In general, it's a lot easier for someone to walk into a situation, tear up everything, and replace it with fresh new stuff. 
Replacing switches and rewiring the building only to find out during the "teardown" there were two intermittent RJ-45 jacks feeding two of the switches. But hey, the customer already paid for the new switches and the rewiring so what's the problem? ... right..... ?

But I'll stop ranting now before I start letting you know how I really feel  ....

[slicendice]

Don't let me get started on many Software and Database usage.

All I am going to say is:

Jeeez, they don't have a clue how to properly design a database and how to use it. A lot of freaking software hacks in the application and the DB is half built and does not even resemble a real Relational Data Base. This is not just MSSQL, but is the same for all DB solutions out there. No wonder there may or may not be incompabilities. A properly built database should be able to port to next version without a glitch and the software should run just fine after the upgrade.

Note, not all applications with DBs are bad, though it may sound like I think that. :-D

What comes to certs, the application and OS foundation has not changed much for the last 10-15 years. Just a few new feature and a few removed feature. Those MS certs are made difficult on purpose. It's a really good thing, because one small mistake during your setup could break the whole system. So a few mistakes in the exam causes you to fail. It's a good thing. We don't want people to administer out important stuff with half knowledge. A business values the money and the uptime. A lot of downtime is very expensive. For example, the previous company I worked for, for each downtime hour because a configuration error in the software, the company lost about $250,000 in revenue. It took them 5 days to find and fix the problem. That is 5 x 24 x $250000 = $30 000 000 lost money.

[CraigHB]

SumatraPDF is only about a 6 MB download, and only needs to be unzipped to run (does not require any special "installation" and doesn't write to registry).

I'm using an old version of Foxit, have been for some time.  I don't like what they did with the newer versions.  Portable applications are great (ones that don't need an installation).  I've always liked programs like that and it's good to see them becoming more popular.  So I'll have to take note of that Sumatra reader if I have to ditch my old version of Foxit for some reason.

I don't like Adobe products much.  The ones I've come across have caused me problems over the years.  I was very happy to ditch their PDF reader.  I've ditched their Flash player and haven't missed it much.  A few web sites here and there still use that awful thing, but it's generally not a problem.  There's a few big companies like Adobe that put out crap software, but usually it's easy avoid their products.  That's not so much the case with PC operating systems.

[CraigHB]

Any Windows version can be bent to the users will, including 10. Learn to use Windows and you will find out. It's just a matter of enough will power.

Sure, I can customize it to my liking if I try hard enough, but the effort is far less to simply use Win7 instead or even Linux. I'm going to take the path of least resistance. Why should I have to summon immense will power to bend the OS to fit my needs when other systems are available that already do almost exactly what I want with very few changes?

One thing positive I have to say about MS is they've always provided an ability to tweak Windows to your liking, though it may be rather involved to do so.  It would be nice if I could just load the OS and use it without the need to go mucking around in the internals.  That's never been the case with Windows.  Every new version requires more and more of that nonsense.  It took a good amount of work to get Win7 working the way I like.  Win10 is going to be an even bigger job.  That sort of defeats the point.  Ideally it should be a small matter.

[eugenenine]

One thing positive I have to say about MS is they've always provided an ability to tweak Windows to your liking,

Thats not really a positive thing about windows because you can tweak any OS to your liking (well Apple stuff thats debatable).  Open source OS's will have an advantage there.

[madires]

Any Windows version can be bent to the users will, including 10. Learn to use Windows and you will find out. It's just a matter of enough will power.

I prefer an OS which keeps its privacy settings and doesn't reset them to user-unfriendly defaults after some update again, again and again. There are tools for mitigating that issue, but if I need a tool for that kind of stuff it feels simply wrong. And the latest developments regarding data protection for data transfered from the EU to the US and data stored by US companies are indicating that trouble is ahead. I'm talking about Trump's EO about the handling of data of non-US people by 3-letter agencies and a new court decision about data stored outside the US (Google vs. FBI). The EU asked for a clarification of the EO already, because the EO could render the new agreement about data transfers obsolete. The impact would be that no data may be transfered from the EU to the US anymore. And the other topic (data stored outside the US by US companies) is very important too. If US law enforcement can access data stored in the EU directly, it would become illegal for EU companies (and citizens?) to use any cloud/email/whatever service of an US company. Both issues wll also have a huge impact on Microsoft. Besides that, with Win10 MS is very likely violating two German laws, which needs further investigation. I've written about that a few pages earlier.

[Cerebus]

From Microsoft. Contact a Microsoft representative and off you go.

Remember to take a long spoon...

[james_s]

From Microsoft. Contact a Microsoft representative and off you go.

Remember to take a long spoon...

As if the average employee has any say on the matter. My employer is too cheap to go for the enterprise version so we have Win10 Pro on our Windows boxes. It's not my choice, it's not the choice of the IT guy at my location, but it's what we have. In the real world this sort of thing happens and regardless of my opinion on the matter, it is what it is.

[Howardlong]

One big problem with applications with strong RDBMS dependancy is that typically programmers don't have great SQL skills, and find the SQL part a chore compared to hacking their Java and C#. Problems are often around query efficiency, getting the balance right between set based and procedural programming, understanding isolation levels, transactional integrity and avoiding application turning.

This is one reason why NoSql* databases have become popular. In some cases you don't need all the locking done for you, like Twitter or Facebook for example, but for financial applications or eCommerce where the results must be repeatable and precise, you'd be nuts to do it with a NoSql solution.

There was a wonderful Embedded FM a year or so ago with a lady of a similar vintage to me discussed how she'd realised the need to have database programmers as a different hire to a Java or C# programmer. Until I'd heard that show I just thought Joe Average programmers were lazy and crap with RDBMSs, but now I realise that for many it's such a fundamentally different thought process and discipline you need to segregate the two areas if you're to avoid nasty surprises.

*NoSql databases are not new, I was programming Pick based databases in the late 80s which have many of the fundamental facets of today's new fangled NoSql solutions.