Tech Discussion Thread: Long live the Calculator Master Race

[Ainin]

WP has overtaken iOS in Italy and is catching up rapidly in other major markets in Europe.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/11/0 ... romcat=all

Excellent.

[Shnercropolis]

OS X Mavericks

No, it's called Mac OS. It's just that for some reason, Apple stopped making new versions and started updating Mac OS 10.

Actually, its OS X. It stopped being Mac OS X after 10.7, starting with 10.8 (OS X Mountain Lion) they removed the word "Mac" from its name.

Lol.
Well, they're still in OS 10 for some reason.

[Aeken]

Aaaand it's over. http://www.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-5761064 ... ooks-grim/

[Cill Airne]

OS X Mavericks


Actually, its OS X. It stopped being Mac OS X after 10.7, starting with 10.8 (OS X Mountain Lion) they removed the word "Mac" from its name.

Lol.
Well, they're still in OS 10 for some reason.

Because of the style of the OS. For example, if you look at Mac OS X Cheetah compared to Mac OS 9 the general style is quite a bit different. Each successor to OS X Cheetah has simply been refining the way the OS looks, when/should Apple completely change the way OS looks, we'll be on OS 11 .

[Jogentagana]

Computer and phone - Windows.

[Divair]

Computer and phone - Windows.

What Windows phone do you have?

[Empire of Vlissingen]

Windows 7.

[Ainin]

Aaaand it's over. http://www.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-5761064 ... ooks-grim/

The short-sellers must be gleaming with joy right now.

[Aeken]

Aaaand it's over. http://www.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-5761064 ... ooks-grim/

The short-sellers must be gleaming with joy right now.

They certainly must.

[Ainin]

Holy shit 32 GB of RAM

[Breadknife]

Windows 7

windows seems to be a good-bad-good situation
95: meh
98: meh
xp:
vista:
7:
8:

9, will likely be good, like every other MS OS

You forgot to insert ME (probably ), or, if you'd switched to the NT thread already, 2K (not bad, but despite the fact that I use it at home, still, not designed for home use).

From personal experience:

Everything leading up to Win3.1/WFWG3.11: I largely found unnecessary (DOS was good enough for me, back then, with perhaps a little fiddling with EMM386 stuff etc), but at least the Win3s solved problems from the Win2s, etc

W95: Good. (I admit I was unsure, originally, whether I'd go for 95 or 3.1 on a machine I got around the time of the handover. I chose well. And DOS was still available, in a usable form)

W98: Barely improved, IMO, pretty much W95Plus that was double-plussed. And I didn't see the advantage to this (or the 98) pluspacked.

W98SE: Introduced USB support, pretty much properly. Probably the greatest boon.

ME/2K: The first was terrible (98PlusPlus with idiotic "idiotproofing") and the latter was good for what it did but I wouldn't have recommend it for the home user at all, only for business use (much as I was using it...)

XP: was (and still is) good enough for most things I wanted to do (although I dislike the "rounded button tendencies" in aesthetics, that still continues apace in future versions). Oh and, by this time in the windows family tree, DOS's improved ability (Command Extensions, Environment Variable Substitution and Delayed Environment Variable Expansion tweaks) saved me a load of time and effort with batch-file programming (although still not approaching the raw power of shell-scripting under one *nix flavour or another).

Vista: I'm with the consensus. Too much "you don't know how to do things, let me Wizard that for you" in so many ways, plus the stupid "Are you sure you wish to run this?" bolted-on mechanism introduced as a sop towards the inherent root-level security of the *nix OSes, but badly done for all that.

7: An improvement on Vista (not hard), but still not perfect in the UAC department and tendency to hide things behind wizards, unless you know what you're doing. I do use it, it's not the paradigm of an OS that I like. I used to like the option of the Active Desktop back in the Win9x era, but it seems to be the way the masses are being led by force, and I like a nice clean desktop, not hovering and dockable/undockable sidebars, toolbars, etc, etc... I know you can get rid of them, but the assumption that you want them by default... urgh...

8 (& 8.1): Ignoring Metro (please!), as the obvious continuation of the Active Desktop meme to its full-screen conclusion, I find the alternative desktop at least understandable (Start Button absence/needs-deliberate-adding aside) and it's cleaned up a number of things inherited from the last two versions, but not enough to persuade me to use it more.

9: Do not have high hopes for it (although I suspect it'll be better than 8, unless it's hobbled by embedded cloud-connectivity features)) but I shall keep an eye on all reports before dismissing it.

[Jetan]

Windows 7

windows seems to be a good-bad-good situation
95: meh
98: meh
xp:
vista:
7:
8:

9, will likely be good, like every other MS OS

You forgot to insert ME (probably ), or, if you'd switched to the NT thread already, 2K (not bad, but despite the fact that I use it at home, still, not designed for home use).

From personal experience:

Everything leading up to Win3.1/WFWG3.11: I largely found unnecessary (DOS was good enough for me, back then, with perhaps a little fiddling with EMM386 stuff etc), but at least the Win3s solved problems from the Win2s, etc

W95: Good. (I admit I was unsure, originally, whether I'd go for 95 or 3.1 on a machine I got around the time of the handover. I chose well. And DOS was still available, in a usable form)

W98: Barely improved, IMO, pretty much W95Plus that was double-plussed. And I didn't see the advantage to this (or the 98) pluspacked.

W98SE: Introduced USB support, pretty much properly. Probably the greatest boon.

ME/2K: The first was terrible (98PlusPlus with idiotic "idiotproofing") and the latter was good for what it did but I wouldn't have recommend it for the home user at all, only for business use (much as I was using it...)

XP: was (and still is) good enough for most things I wanted to do (although I dislike the "rounded button tendencies" in aesthetics, that still continues apace in future versions). Oh and, by this time in the windows family tree, DOS's improved ability (Command Extensions, Environment Variable Substitution and Delayed Environment Variable Expansion tweaks) saved me a load of time and effort with batch-file programming (although still not approaching the raw power of shell-scripting under one *nix flavour or another).

Vista: I'm with the consensus. Too much "you don't know how to do things, let me Wizard that for you" in so many ways, plus the stupid "Are you sure you wish to run this?" bolted-on mechanism introduced as a sop towards the inherent root-level security of the *nix OSes, but badly done for all that.

7: An improvement on Vista (not hard), but still not perfect in the UAC department and tendency to hide things behind wizards, unless you know what you're doing. I do use it, it's not the paradigm of an OS that I like. I used to like the option of the Active Desktop back in the Win9x era, but it seems to be the way the masses are being led by force, and I like a nice clean desktop, not hovering and dockable/undockable sidebars, toolbars, etc, etc... I know you can get rid of them, but the assumption that you want them by default... urgh...

8 (& 8.1): Ignoring Metro (please!), as the obvious continuation of the Active Desktop meme to its full-screen conclusion, I find the alternative desktop at least understandable (Start Button absence/needs-deliberate-adding aside) and it's cleaned up a number of things inherited from the last two versions, but not enough to persuade me to use it more.

9: Do not have high hopes for it (although I suspect it'll be better than 8, unless it's hobbled by embedded cloud-connectivity features)) but I shall keep an eye on all reports before dismissing it.

Oh ME... That was one gigantic clusterfuck indeed. The only OS I know of that had to be reinstalled every two months to keep working.

[Romano-Germanic Empire]

Windows 7. The last good Windows OS before Microsoft realized 8 was a bad idea to begin with on PCs and use Windows 9 as a "sorry world" product.

There's nothing wrong with 8...

Especially not 8.1

If you don't have a touchscreen Windows 8 is the worst thing ever.

[Divair]

There's nothing wrong with 8...

Especially not 8.1

If you don't have a touchscreen Windows 8 is the worst thing ever.

Nonsense.

[Aeken]

There's nothing wrong with 8...

Especially not 8.1

If you don't have a touchscreen Windows 8 is the worst thing ever.

Not necessarily.

[Divair]

Nokia working on 2nd tablet
http://www.wpcentral.com/nokia-reported ... -rt-tablet

More details on WP growth
http://www.wpcentral.com/windows-phone- ... hone-italy

[Afalia]

I'm scared to reveal that I use a mac. Last time I did I was summarily executed by the NS community. But damn it I like my mac.

[Ainin]

There's nothing wrong with 8...

Especially not 8.1

If you don't have a touchscreen Windows 8 is the worst thing ever.

No it's not.

[Ainin]

Nokia working on 2nd tablet
http://www.wpcentral.com/nokia-reported ... -rt-tablet

More details on WP growth
http://www.wpcentral.com/windows-phone- ... hone-italy

Dat tablet...

It looks kind of like a Yoga.

[Soled]

I use windows 7 on both of my computers. Thinking of trying something else like linux thou.

[Aeken]

I'm curious if RT will ever be popular.

[Ainin]

I'm curious if RT will ever be popular.

They're probably just going to end up merging it into Windows Phone.

[Wind in the Willows]

Windows 7, Windows Vista and Ubuntu. Occasionally Windows XP.

[Wind in the Willows]

I'm scared to reveal that I use a mac. Last time I did I was summarily executed by the NS community. But damn it I like my mac.

Macs are alright, but I prefer Windows and Linux though.

[Jogentagana]

Computer and phone - Windows.

What Windows phone do you have?

Nokia Lumia