aceperry

Ouch!

In my experience, most users don't have surface or windows tablets. And they came from XP or 7. As far as I can tell, they use windows 8 as seriously as when they used xp and 7.

You can dismiss the vast majority of people who have that experience, but that would be ignoring the reality for most people. Fortunately for Microsoft, MS has decided to listen to the huge amount of complaints and get rid of the problematic interface.

I've always wondered what the win8/8.1 supporters would have MS do about the situation. Tell the vast majority of "unserious" users to suck it up, shut up, and use Win8? No change is necessary, you just have to get serious about using it? I'm asking because I don't understand the point of view of win8 supporters.

BTW, I really do think that there are MS fanbois out there. Not trying to be insulting or anything, just something that seems to be a new trend. Peace.

It's good to see that consumers are beginning to question who owns and controls data that is collected from them. I sometimes think that the "big data" revolution is worse than anything the NSA is doing.

"I have never met anyone who truly likes windows"

Interestingly, I've seen a small group of Windows fanbois arise within the last couple of years. Very much like the Apple fanbois; just as irrational and quick to take offense at any criticism of MS and Windows.

But I agree with you that most people I know also tolerate windows. Some are even happy with it because they can do things with a computer that has windows.

That was until Windows 8 came out. I was surprised by the amount of hate windows 8 received, and it was well deserved IMHO. But then I was also surprised by the few people who didn't hate Windows 8, some even liked it. The fanbois.

BB10, yes. WP, not so much. It may be better than the older Windows mobile, but not really in the same class as iOS and Android.

Really. I liked the hardware and BB10 very much. They had lots of unique and innovative features which would've made Blackberrys a viable 3rd OS.

The only Tizen phone out in the wild has had some bad reviews. I think Samsung is committed to Tizen for at least a couple more years, mainly as a foil to Google Android, as Samsung has stated repeatedly.

Yeah, sounds bad. The constantly changing API is just too much to keep up with.

"Google has done a good job trying to starve WP users of their services"

I don't think Google has done anymore than MS to cripple WP. With WP, you can use Bing maps, Outlook, skype, cortana and all of the other MS apps that MS fanbois love. Only thing is, the implementation of their own services isn't as good as Google's services. A friend of mine is a MS fanboi, and he was shocked at how bad WP was.

I don't think WP lacks core functionality. It's the best looking phone OS today IMHO. But the design limits you to using only a few apps before it gets unwieldy. It's suitable for the casual smartphone user, not the power user.

I'm amazed that anyone going from an iphone would find the Windows phone to be acceptable. I would agree that the price/performance is pretty good for the low end Lumias. I have the 530 which I got for only $35, half off during the last Christmas season. I would not have paid full price for that phone though. Windows phones actually lost marketshare during 2014, so they had a fire sale at the end of the year.

Part of the problem with the app situation is due to MS themselves. They've treated the independent developer as a second class citizen, compared to large corporations. Large companies get access to undocumented apis and much more consideration and technical support than indie devs. It's easy to see that indie devs are second class citizens in the MS app space.

MS has changed that screwed up situation to a new store model. IIRC, it's now only $20/year I think, and that includes the ability to produce apps all across the windows landscape, desktop, xbox, etc. Originally, they copied the Apple store model, charged $100 like Apple. The policies were also pretty similiar to Apple's policies.

That's pretty funny. It seems that Google and most Android devs don't really like what the OEMs are doing. From one googler's explanation, the OEM really believes that they're offering something that users are asking for or wanting. I have been impressed with some manufacturers that put pure Android on their phones though. Hopefully those phones become more popular and creates a trend.

I guess that I mean, it doesn't offer half cooked buggy software. :-) Well, at least it works about as good as Windows stuff. This is from many years past, so that's the experience that I've had. But as other commenters stated, and I didn't know, the unstable branch is much more current than I would've expected.

I was thinking, hmm... Shouldn't this have been done in javascript? To keep up with the times that is. :-)

Sounds like great advice to me. I'm looking at different stacks and approaches now and coming to the same conclusion about using a single technology to reduce the context switching and simplify everything. The idea of taking time to write software for maintenance sounds great to me.

I haven't touched Debian in a long time, and I didn't know that unstable was a rolling release. Thanks for the info, I might look into it someday.

Not sure what you mean by where my info went wrong, but my friend worked at a MS datacenter a few years ago, so I don't know what has changed. At the time, almost all of the techs working at the DC were contractors, not MSFT employees. They were severely understaffed and getting cut back constantly. There were a few different companies doing the contracting as well, and all of them were under the threat of losing out to a lower bid company. The competent techs were getting outnumbered by incompetent techs. That and the fact that MS couldn't even renew basic registrations and certificates didn't surprise me with my poor experience with Azure.

Again, this was a couple of years ago. Also, I attended an event that MS held to show off Azure, and a large percentage of participants couldn't spin up an instance within 10 minutes, some of them didn't even start up. The MS people running the event had a direct line to some techs in the datacenter, but they still couldn't solve the problems. I talked with some MS partners/users who told me that Azure was terrible in their experience and even some MS execs admitted as much in private conversation. It sounds like Azure has improved since then, but I really have to wonder how much improvement has occured.

It's funny to hear the the name Debian associated with the label "modern." I don't mean to diss Debian, it's a solid distro and has a lot going for it, but it is seriously behind all of the cutting edge distros that I'm used to.

Personally, I enjoy new technologies and systems in linux. I used to run Gentoo and other distros that constantly brought out cutting edge software. And I'm used to somewhat alpha/beta quality software that mostly works. And because it works well compared to my experience with windows software, so I wasn't too bothered.

Maybe it's because my background is in hardware, but all of the new software had always taken awhile for me to grasp and appreciate. But in the linux community, I've always been able to find info and solve problems that I've come across and learn about the system. Windows problems usually can be solved because large masses of people tried so many things, but I wouldn't get any enlightenment about computers or software when fixing Windows problems. Maybe my world view has been skewed by comparing linux to windows, but I've always felt that I'm able to learn and understand more with linux vs Windows.

Funny, I think it was 60 minutes which had a story about Cuba that mentioned there was no internet in the country. Reporters seem to get a lot of facts wrong.

Wow, this is one of the first computer games that I played. It was running on an HP minicomputer connected to a teletype device with a paper printout.

My thoughts exactly. I'm amazed that I can download the file, but at least I get to see if any of my passwords are there.

I read that they didn't renew some certificate which needs to be renewed periodically. I also remember something like that happening with hotmail many years ago, where they forgot to renew their domain registration, and all of hotmail went off the net.

I had a friend who worked as a contractor for one of Microsoft's data centers a few years ago, and the stories he told me about how they run their datacenters was frightening. It sounded like management was out of touch and didn't really have a grasp on what was needed to keep everything running well.

Those stories leave me questioning Microsoft's basic competence in the cloud. While I'm glad to hear that they're improving their service, I just don't see them as being in the same class as AWS, Google, or even some of their smaller competitors such as DO. I would be wary of depending on Azure for anything critical.

"the Azure Websites offering will provide a lower cost for run while allowing easier scale out, management, and tie-ins with other Azure services"

How do you figure that? Pricing on cloud services can be tough to compare so I really question anyone who presents blanket statements like that.

Microsoft has been really trying to entice devs for the last few years. My experience with their cloud service has been terrible, although I haven't used it in a couple of years. It was seriously bad then, and some of their recent missteps haven't done much to change my mind. But MS is definitely trying, so I wonder if Google or AWS will respond to this latest move.

You can instantiate ubuntu servers on azure.

Bunnie's blog serves as an important record of the tech manufacturing world today.

I was looking at the correct link but it didn't have the part number for the opto-isolator. This is a pretty clever circuit. I'm not sure how cheap the finished product would be, especially if used for three phase high voltage circuits.

LOL, so cool. I prefer to read HN in a browser though.