Windows 8

Steve Mann wrote on 9/15/2011, 12:18 PM

OK, I downloaded the pre-beta .iso from Microsoft, and installed Windows 8 on a 2.15GHz Athlon PC. Fresh install, not an upgrade.

The good: Installation was fast, and it boots fast.

The bad: Everything else.
First, it preloads a lot of crapware.
Second, since everything is animated (a-la- iPad), it is painfully slow. Opening Explorer took almost three seconds while the animated explorer window "flys" to the screen.

The Start Menu is now the desktop. Cute icons for a lot of games that I'll never play. Internet Explorer doesn't work, maybe I'll download FireFox on another PC and try running that.

I had planned to compare the Rendertest on the same hardware, just swapping out the boot disk from Win 7 (32-bit) to Win 8, but right now I think that would be a waste of my time.

Then, I spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to shut-down the computer. There's no icon. There's no right-click on the Start button. clicking on the Start button just brings up a screen full of cute icons. I am about ready to pull the plug when I get the idea - this is an iPad wanna-be, so I did what I do on the iPad and press the power button. Sure enough, Windows goes into a shut-down.

Folks, windows 8 is going to be a disaster. Microsoft wants so much to be like Apple that I think they are going down the same rabbit hole with Windows O/S as Apple did with the "upgrade" to FCP-X.

This is an OS for a tablet or phone. But with a mouse on a desktop - it's just horrible. There's nothing here for professional use - everything is reduced to cutesy touch-pad icons. I predict that there will be few, if any corporate IT departments making a move to Windows 8.

My opinion - I'll keep playing with it (an apt term since the UI is so game-like) and try installing FireFox and Vegas. More to come.

(I'm sure glad that I have a spare PC for this kind of crap).

Steve

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Comments

craftech wrote on 9/16/2011, 7:15 AM

Despite the fact that Microsoft developed Windows 8specifically for PC tablets in order to compete with Apple's dominance there will be those who will criticize the Windows 8 critics for "not embracing the future" even if the OS is horrible. I never understood that mentality.

To date, the most reliable and most compatible OS from Microsoft (IMO) have been:

1. Windows 98SE

2. Windows XP Pro

John

DataMeister wrote on 9/16/2011, 7:31 AM

"> Pixel, it should be, but in reality I'm very much afraid it'll be more like XP to Vista."

The one big difference this time around is Steven Sinofsky who has done a much better job of thinking through real use scenarios than anyone coming before him and then fixing most of the problems before a product ships .

Steve Mann wrote on 9/16/2011, 9:21 AM

"Real men work from the command line prompt.

Wimps...

My first PC had toggle switches.

paul_w wrote on 9/16/2011, 9:31 AM

@Steve, thats fabulous! my first 'computer' was a Sinclair MK14, with its DIY pcb and programmed in 6502 machine code [edit* my mistake, it was an 8060 cpu, it was a long time ago!! ]. Windoze 8 ? - PAH!

MK14

Paul. :)

Steve Mann wrote on 9/16/2011, 9:37 AM

I also had a couple of the 6502 Sinclairs, but I couldn't find a photo of it. I'm also not sure I would have called it a computer either. Today we would call it an embedded controller. But, it taught me machine-level coding and got me into a job designing an 8088-based instrument controller. About the time that Silicon was discovered in Santa Clara County.

paul_w wrote on 9/16/2011, 9:55 AM

They do say Bill Gates was a great programmer. I remember looking at his really early DOS source code that was released on the net and some of the code (because of memory constraints) was so condensed and made to fit in a tiny amount of memory, very clever and tight coding ...... WHAT HAPPENED? lol.

oh, my .NET environment needs updating, oh and since when does a display driver now take 144MB to download???? (nividia, today). times have changed...

Paul.
[edit] think it was the commodore PET Microsoft Basic he did actually.

amendegw wrote on 9/16/2011, 10:04 AM

"My first PC had toggle switches"Okay, I think I can go you one better. Back in 1967 (or thereabouts) I took a course called "Analog Computing in Chemical Engineering". Digital computing? Who needs no stinkin' 1's and 0's?

I did a Google image search and this is the closest I could come up with.

Difference is - according to my dim memory, I recall being able to plug in various capacitors, resistors, etc. You woutd set your rheostat to particular input voltage and write down the analog meter readings over time (as I recall??).

Any old abacus users in these forums? [chuckle]

...Jerry

btw: A Sinclair was the first computer I actually owned. A TRS-80 Model III was the first computer I owned that I could actually do something useful on.

paul_w wrote on 9/16/2011, 10:24 AM

wharr, quite jelous Jerry, I always wanted a TRS80 but could never afford one. Nice analogue box you had there, looks like a Moog!.
But I did have one of these, Casio AL-1000 prog calculator. Inside it was CRAMMED with components, all transistors, no chips at all. And magnetic core storage! nixi tubes in any colour you like, as long as it was orange :)

AL-1000

Paul. [now feeling quite old]

amendegw wrote on 9/16/2011, 11:17 AM

paul w said: "They do say Bill Gates was a great programmer. I remember looking at his really early DOS source code that was released on the net and some of the code (because of memory constraints) was so condensed and made to fit in a tiny amount of memory, very clever and tight coding ...... WHAT HAPPENED? lol.Yeah, programming used to be fun. It was a challenge to write tight/elegant code. Now, the challenge is to figure out what is in the class library.

...Jerry

MarkWWW wrote on 9/16/2011, 12:53 PM

Octal? Luxury..

When I was young we just had ones and zeros. And sometimes we didn't even have ones. ;-)

Mark

deusx wrote on 9/16/2011, 1:01 PM

>>>They do say Bill Gates was a great programmer. I remember looking at his really early DOS source code that was released on the net and some of the code (because of memory constraints) was so condensed and made to fit in a tiny amount of memory, very clever and tight coding ...... WHAT HAPPENED? lol.<<<

Whaaaat????? Is this one of those history changing deals like Reagan was a great president. I was alive in the 80s and Reagan was retarded and Bill Gates bought DOS from some guy in Seattle. He had no clue when it came to programming or anything else. Just a guy who was in the right place at the right time and knew the right people who know the right people at IBM. That's all.

JJKizak wrote on 9/16/2011, 1:46 PM

Gates did figure out how to connect the printer to the computer. And yes, Reagan raised taxes 3 times.
JJK

paul_w wrote on 9/16/2011, 1:47 PM

@deusx, yes a quick search found this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_write_code/http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_write_code/[/link]

Hard to believe i know!

Paul.

dibbkd wrote on 9/16/2011, 8:28 PM

If you want to check out Windows 8 without ruining a perfectly good computer, simply install VirtualBox and run it as a VM.

Works fine like that and you can do whatever you want to it without worrying about messing up your "real" computer.

John_Cline wrote on 9/16/2011, 9:09 PM

"He had no clue when it came to programming or anything else."

deusx, with all due respect, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Unlike anyone else here on this forum (except maybe John Meyer), I actually knew Bill Gates and spent many, many hours writing code with him back in the Altair days right here in Albuquerque where the personal computer was invented. He was (and very likely, still is) a programming genius. He was NOT just in the right place at the right time.

deusx wrote on 9/16/2011, 9:28 PM

There are a billion guys in India and China today that can code, so what? You have to be smart enough to apply that to something practical. Gates did not. He bought the OS that made him famous, he didn't code it, that's all I need to know.

musicvid10 wrote on 9/16/2011, 9:35 PM

John Cline is quite correct, this from a friend who also worked with Gates in the early days before joining the ground floor team at Sun.
Gates was called a programming god.

PeterDuke wrote on 9/17/2011, 2:44 AM

"some of the code (because of memory constraints) was so condensed and made to fit in a tiny amount of memory"

I disassembled the binary loader (paper tape) for the Data General 1200 minicomputer, and found that the programmer had used an instruction word (16 bits) as a data constant, all to save one word of code. Very naughty.

The 1200 also had a set of 16 switches and 16 lights so that you could enter the bootstrap loader, which loaded the binary loader, which loaded the real program, or you could patch a program if you wanted. Memory was magnetic core (32 kilo-words max.).

Kevin R wrote on 9/17/2011, 5:42 AM

Ah! The good old days when code didn't look like "the People of Walmart" -- fat and slow.

My favorite x86 optimization has always been to replace "mov ax,0" with "xor ax,ax" (both instructions set the ax register to zero, the latter being a two byte instruction instead of three).

The coolest trick I ever wrote was using multiplication to perform a divide (divide is much slower). I needed to divide a 32-bit counter by 86,400 (seconds in a day) to get # of days since the counter started. Mind you, this is a 32-bit by 17-bit divide operation, and performing this on the 8-bit 8031 processor is daunting. Instead, I devised a clever scheme to accomplish the same thing using a 16-bit by 16-bit multiply (MUCH EASIER):

I truncated the 32-bit counter to 16-bits, multiplied this by the 16-bit number 49,710 (which happens to be the reciprocal of 86,400 * 2^32), then truncated the result to 16-bits. If you followed that, you recognize that truncating 16-bits twice is the same as dividing by 2^32. Thus, the result is a multiplication by 1/86,400 (save as division by 86,400)!!!

Because of the truncations, the result MIGHT be off by 1, but a couple easy tests on the original 32-bit value can detect this and add 1. This hack saved an inordinate amount of code an was orders of magnitude faster!

Man, I miss those days.

Byron K wrote on 9/17/2011, 1:55 PM

Posted by: Kevin R; Date:9/17/2011 12:42:38 AM
Man, I miss those days.

Assembly is still very much alive and well in the programmable micro processor world. (:
http://www.mstracey.btinternet.co.uk/pictutorial/picmain.htm

I have programed simple switching and status LED programs on the micro processor in C but Assembly code, as you mentioned, is more efficient and smaller. Assembly is not dead! (:

Chienworks wrote on 9/17/2011, 3:28 PM

Ahhh, i remember with longing all my 6502 and 65816 programming days. I could churn out nifty graphics routines on that old 1MHz 8 bit cpu that ran faster than some of the compiled stuff i write on 3GHz 64 bit processors now. Applesoft basic was excruciatingly slow, but recode the same task in optimized assembly language and it could run 1,000 to 10,000 times faster.

I still have the ol' Apple //gs in a box somewhere. I keep thinking about getting it out again just for laughs. I think i last used it more than 15 years ago.

I haven't done any x86 assembly language in at least 12 years.

Steve Mann wrote on 9/17/2011, 4:31 PM

"My favorite x86 optimization has always been to replace "mov ax,0" with "xor ax,ax" (both instructions set the ax register to zero, the latter being a two byte instruction instead of three)."

I remember scanning the binary code to look for any repeating patterns. I had to fit the program into a 27512 EEProm and the output from the linker was a few bytes too long.

Looking back at those days, I remember when programming was really fun.

The only person I know who still writes in machine code is Steve Gibson. His software (Gibson research) runs in any x86 hardware and is light-speed fast.

John_Cline wrote on 9/17/2011, 4:53 PM

"You have to be smart enough to apply that to something practical. Gates did not. He bought the OS that made him famous, he didn't code it, that's all I need to know."

You have an opinion and you are entitled to that, however, your opinion is not supported by the facts. Bill Gates was already quite successful selling BASIC interpreters to all the computer manufacturers that were popping up all over the place. IBM was under pressure to release a personal computer of their own and the IBM task force assembled to develop the PC decided that critical components of the machine, including the operating system, would come from outside vendors. This radical break from company tradition of in-house development was the key decision that made the IBM PC an industry standard. It was done mainly out of necessity to save time. IBM first went to Bill Gates who had agreed to provide a BASIC interpreter and several other programs as well as work on the PC's BIOS. Bill suggested that they go to Gary Kildall, owner of Digital Research and the author of CP/M for the OS. For various reasons which have never been completely clear, they failed to reach an agreement with Gary Kildall and went back to Bill Gates. IBM asked him to find a suitable OS for their new machine and a few weeks later Bill proposed using the CP/M clone 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products (SCP.) Microsoft first licensed, then purchased 86-DOS from SCP, which was modified for the IBM PC by Microsoft employee Bob O'Rear with assistance from SCP employee Tim Paterson.

By the way, it was Paul Allen who negotiated the deal with SCP, not Gates. Also, it was IBM that wanted Microsoft to retain ownership of whatever software it developed and that decision allowed Microsoft to make a boatload of money selling operating systems to the PC clone manufacturers.

paul_w wrote on 9/18/2011, 11:51 AM

@John_Cline Thats a very interesting factual story John, and maybe the history books should be re-written in terms how people percieve Bill Gates. I suspect people actually want to dislike Bill Gates for reasons of wealth, fame and market dominance. But this is really not the truth as you pointed out so clearly there. I always knew he was a brilliant coder, but i learned a few things about the history of the matter reading your post.
Now then, lets all hope some of that coding passion and raw abilty somehow trickles down into Windows 8. Forgive me for being a sceptic here, but i dont think so. Its probably more massive and bloated then ever. Guess thats the reality of operating systems these days. Bring back HEX!! lol.
Paul.