This general line of thought about Microsoft's design goals led me to realize something about Windows 10 that I actually hadn't before. I've been worried about forced updates in regards to breaking something in my system or installing malwarish features that I'd prefer didn't exist, but I think there might be a bigger issue.
When Windows 8 came out, a ton of people hated it. As a result, they didn't pay for upgrades, sought out Windows 7 even on new systems, and even when they updated they went to a bunch of effort to hide all of the changes that Windows 8 made. To get some of those users back to using the latest version of their operating system, Microsoft had to offer Windows 10 as a free upgrade, and change the interface to make it more like the one that people wanted. Consumers spoke with their wallets, and Microsoft was forced to respond.
Now imagine that it's 2020 or so. At some point the continuous updates to Windows 10 have rendered it into an entirely usable operating system, and most users have switched over to it. Windows 8 is difficult to find, and Windows 7 isn't even receiving patches any more. Everything is going well, but then Microsoft's executives decide that the operating system doesn't fit their needs any more. Smart glasses have become popular and Microsoft wants to convince the users of Windows on PCs and tablets to start using Windows on their glasses as well. They decide that in order to familiarize their userbase with Microsoft's glasses interface, they're going to completely reorganize the next version of the GUI in such a way that it works well on smart glasses but makes no sense whatsoever on a PC or tablet.
A decade ago, users would have refused to upgrade to that version, and Microsoft would end up eventually having to release a new version that removed most of the interface annoyances and replaced them with slightly suckier versions of the previous interface elements. But now, everyone is running Windows 10. The final version of Windows, that they'll never need to replace, that is always kept up to date. They have no ability to not have that interface foisted on them. Switching to Windows 8 might be possible, but keys will be hard to find, the end of updates will be approaching, and the default interface of Windows 8 is also terrible. If Linux hasn't taken way off by then, which it probably won't have, then the majority of users will just be stuck with the new version of the interface, and have to hope that it will still let them hack their way into something like they had before. They can talk about how much they hate the new interface all that they want, but they won't have the ability to boycott it like they did for Windows 8, and so it's unclear whether Microsoft will actually care.
In adopting Windows 10, you need to trust that Microsoft won't eventually decide to do something that completely screws it up. They don't have a good track record.
I used to be able to avoid that by using operating systems made by Microsoft instead of Apple, though. I miss those days.
Well, I guess I still kind of have those days. Windows 7 has a bunch of years left in it, and Windows 8 is a reasonable approximation of good enough after that.
Among other things you can now have tiles 4 wide in the start menu
Why is there even a limit for this? There was no limit in Windows 8, that I can remember. One of my pet peeves on Windows 10, is that I can't get the Start screen to look as nice as it did on Windows 8. I don't care about it on my PC, but on my tablet it's an annoyance.
darren66 on
Wii U sucks, but my NNID is da66en. Steam is route66. 3DS is 2938-8099-8160.
Neo Geo Big Red owners club.
2009 PAX Puzzle Quest Champion
I have beat Rygar on the NES and many of you have not.
Wii U sucks, but my NNID is da66en. Steam is route66. 3DS is 2938-8099-8160.
Neo Geo Big Red owners club.
2009 PAX Puzzle Quest Champion
I have beat Rygar on the NES and many of you have not.
Among other things you can now have tiles 4 wide in the start menu
Why is there even a limit for this? There was no limit in Windows 8, that I can remember. One of my pet peeves on Windows 10, is that I can't get the Start screen to look as nice as it did on Windows 8. I don't care about it on my PC, but on my tablet it's an annoyance.
No, you can make the tiled part have multiple columns, but you can now configure it to fit 4 medium tiles, or 2 wide ones, per column, previously it was only 3 medium tiles.
Among other things you can now have tiles 4 wide in the start menu
Why is there even a limit for this? There was no limit in Windows 8, that I can remember. One of my pet peeves on Windows 10, is that I can't get the Start screen to look as nice as it did on Windows 8. I don't care about it on my PC, but on my tablet it's an annoyance.
My theory is that this would require the start menu to have a dynamically adjusting width, and they had enough trouble with getting a dynamically adjusting width to work that they set everything to fixed and moved on to fix other things instead.
Among other things you can now have tiles 4 wide in the start menu
Why is there even a limit for this? There was no limit in Windows 8, that I can remember. One of my pet peeves on Windows 10, is that I can't get the Start screen to look as nice as it did on Windows 8. I don't care about it on my PC, but on my tablet it's an annoyance.
No, you can make the tiled part have multiple columns, but you can now configure it to fit 4 medium tiles, or 2 wide ones, per column, previously it was only 3 medium tiles.
I totally understood what you said the first time, apparently you didn't understand my response. My response was why is there a limit the number of tiles in a column in Windows 10 when there wasn't one in Windows 8.
Wii U sucks, but my NNID is da66en. Steam is route66. 3DS is 2938-8099-8160.
Neo Geo Big Red owners club.
2009 PAX Puzzle Quest Champion
I have beat Rygar on the NES and many of you have not.
My computer is turning on on its own since the Windows 10 update. I've disabled my wifi adapter frmo waking the computer and changed all the power plans to not wake to update but I don't know what else I need to be trying.
There was in Windows 8. They just went top to bottom, left to right. It was a single column that wrapped to the side.
This response and 3 tile (or 4 tile in the update) limit annoyed me so much that I booted up into Windows 8.1 to check. In Windows 8.1 the tile limit is 8 wide. While it's not unlimited (like I thought it was), it's substantially better than the Windows 10 downgraded limit.
Wii U sucks, but my NNID is da66en. Steam is route66. 3DS is 2938-8099-8160.
Neo Geo Big Red owners club.
2009 PAX Puzzle Quest Champion
I have beat Rygar on the NES and many of you have not.
There was in Windows 8. They just went top to bottom, left to right. It was a single column that wrapped to the side.
This response and 3 tile (or 4 tile in the update) limit annoyed me so much that I booted up into Windows 8.1 to check. In Windows 8.1 the tile limit is 8 wide. While it's not unlimited (like I thought it was), it's substantially better than the Windows 10 downgraded limit.
I'm running 8.1 on this work computer right now. The limit for a column is actually 2 medium tiles, but again if you have a column that spans longer than the vertical height of the monitor it will wrap the column to the right. so the tile that is to the right of the top tiles is actually "below" the tile on the bottom as far as Windows is concerned. Windows 8.x simply scrolls horizontally instead of vertically. Super easy to tell this on a tablet or device where you can rotate the screen to portrait.
There was in Windows 8. They just went top to bottom, left to right. It was a single column that wrapped to the side.
This response and 3 tile (or 4 tile in the update) limit annoyed me so much that I booted up into Windows 8.1 to check. In Windows 8.1 the tile limit is 8 wide. While it's not unlimited (like I thought it was), it's substantially better than the Windows 10 downgraded limit.
I'm running 8.1 on this work computer right now. The limit for a column is actually 2 medium tiles, but again if you have a column that spans longer than the vertical height of the monitor it will wrap the column to the right. so the tile that is to the right of the top tiles is actually "below" the tile on the bottom as far as Windows is concerned. Windows 8.x simply scrolls horizontally instead of vertically. Super easy to tell this on a tablet or device where you can rotate the screen to portrait.
Don't care about that. I already said I'm running on a PC so I'm scrolling horizontally - and thus my complaints.
Wii U sucks, but my NNID is da66en. Steam is route66. 3DS is 2938-8099-8160.
Neo Geo Big Red owners club.
2009 PAX Puzzle Quest Champion
I have beat Rygar on the NES and many of you have not.
I don't even think I'll like Cortana, but MS wins points for my objection on principle to it being online only.
Does allowing local accounts let it work offline, or does it still have to phone home to parse the question you just asked it?
I don't see any way that it works without an internet connection, just like Google Now or Siri.
The argument I've always heard for GN/Siri needing internet is that a smartphone is not powerful enough to do speech recognition is a reasonable amount of time. That isn't really a problem for most PCs these days.
I mean, obviously it needs a connection for a web search or whatever, but I'm not sure why it would have to phone home if I'm asking it to search for a local file or open an application.
Okay, maybe I can ask this here. My laptop has decided that it no longer has an operating system. I upgraded to Windows 10 a while back. The internet is suggesting that it got stuck in a loop trying to install/remove/install/etc. a bad forced update. That I might have turned the computer off during without knowing.
Anyway, I can't even try anything because it just says I have no operating system. I don't have a Windows 10 disc obviously. I don't think anything came with the laptop itself, and I'm not sure that would help, since I went from 7 to 10. Thankfully it has a compact little backup OS where I can at least get to Chrome to Google things and ask questions here.
My computer at work also has Windows 10. Is there some way to get what I need from it, maybe stick on a USB drive, and take it back home?
I can do literally nothing at all on the computer right now. But if that's something I might be able to try at work, I will give it a shot. Just point me at a link. As long as it doesn't screw up the work computer, obviously...
Go to settings-->Storage and click on your system drive. After it is done scanning click on Temporary items. the last option there lets you delete the previous version of windows.
I just got back on my PC after some time away and having forgot about my previous issue, and then some time passed before I opened this thread back up and remembered my problem I was having. This worked perfectly, so thank you!
That should work assuming you can get it on another PC and have a thumb drive. Throw it on there, plug it into the laptop and reinstall 10.
DLed the thing on that page, ran the program, put it on a flash drive. Even checked to make sure the thing was emptied out and replace with all the new stuff it wanted. Plug it in at home, turn on computer...USB thing's light flashes to show it's reading it, still says no operating system detected. Am I missing something?
Just had to hold down CAD and change the boot order to USB first, obviously...and the command line shows my C drive as totally empty, so I guess there is nothing to save.
Edit: Up and running...hard drive empty, but at least it's working. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
I don't even think I'll like Cortana, but MS wins points for my objection on principle to it being online only.
Does allowing local accounts let it work offline, or does it still have to phone home to parse the question you just asked it?
I don't see any way that it works without an internet connection, just like Google Now or Siri.
The argument I've always heard for GN/Siri needing internet is that a smartphone is not powerful enough to do speech recognition is a reasonable amount of time. That isn't really a problem for most PCs these days.
I mean, obviously it needs a connection for a web search or whatever, but I'm not sure why it would have to phone home if I'm asking it to search for a local file or open an application.
You also don't even need to use speech recognition, you can just type in the box.
The fact that a Cortana profile that isn't online might not be able to correctly learn from your previous actions could be an issue, though, as evidenced by the fact that the first few dozen typed requests made to Cortana are pretty much guaranteed to fail regardless of how clear you make them. Without having an opportunity to learn your style of typing, Cortana is pretty much useless.
I was hoping someone would call me on my sarcasm there.
From what I saw with my brief time with it, and validated with what others say, Cortana is kind of bad about figuring things that you type if you don't follow a syntax it knows, and it has a limited variety of things that it can actually do. Unless you state one of those things correctly, you just get a pass-through to a web search. I don't think any sort of training can change this, though it might get better at remembering nouns that fit within its syntactic structure. Can anyone who actually uses Cortana comment on this?
Ugh it's still waking up, not every night but most. I tried the CMD to see what woke it up but it says nothing so I assume that only works for things waking it from Sleep rather than completely turned off.
There's nothing in the BIOS I can see that would be doing this so it must be something Windows 10 related sinc eit only started after installing it. But damned if I can tell what it is. Any advice?
There's no reason it can't do that offline, though.
Not if it doesn't have any way to actually check and figure out what you're trying to tell it.
It can infer some of this from context. If the next thing you do after a failed Cortana request is add an event to your calendar with text that is within reasonable error of the failed request, that's a hint.
Like, I'd expect that it'll be doing more or less the same thing that a remote server would be doing, just with a much smaller data set to start off with.
Dragon Naturally Speaking can learn from mistakes offline. No reason Cortana can't do it also.
Did the free upgrade from Win 7 to Win 10 today. Went without a hitch. Took less than an hour. Had to dig through all the menus and turn off all the fancy pants stuff I don't want but no biggie. All my apps work and everything. Very slick looking. Next thing I'm gonna create installation media in case I ever want to clean install.
Posts
When Windows 8 came out, a ton of people hated it. As a result, they didn't pay for upgrades, sought out Windows 7 even on new systems, and even when they updated they went to a bunch of effort to hide all of the changes that Windows 8 made. To get some of those users back to using the latest version of their operating system, Microsoft had to offer Windows 10 as a free upgrade, and change the interface to make it more like the one that people wanted. Consumers spoke with their wallets, and Microsoft was forced to respond.
Now imagine that it's 2020 or so. At some point the continuous updates to Windows 10 have rendered it into an entirely usable operating system, and most users have switched over to it. Windows 8 is difficult to find, and Windows 7 isn't even receiving patches any more. Everything is going well, but then Microsoft's executives decide that the operating system doesn't fit their needs any more. Smart glasses have become popular and Microsoft wants to convince the users of Windows on PCs and tablets to start using Windows on their glasses as well. They decide that in order to familiarize their userbase with Microsoft's glasses interface, they're going to completely reorganize the next version of the GUI in such a way that it works well on smart glasses but makes no sense whatsoever on a PC or tablet.
A decade ago, users would have refused to upgrade to that version, and Microsoft would end up eventually having to release a new version that removed most of the interface annoyances and replaced them with slightly suckier versions of the previous interface elements. But now, everyone is running Windows 10. The final version of Windows, that they'll never need to replace, that is always kept up to date. They have no ability to not have that interface foisted on them. Switching to Windows 8 might be possible, but keys will be hard to find, the end of updates will be approaching, and the default interface of Windows 8 is also terrible. If Linux hasn't taken way off by then, which it probably won't have, then the majority of users will just be stuck with the new version of the interface, and have to hope that it will still let them hack their way into something like they had before. They can talk about how much they hate the new interface all that they want, but they won't have the ability to boycott it like they did for Windows 8, and so it's unclear whether Microsoft will actually care.
In adopting Windows 10, you need to trust that Microsoft won't eventually decide to do something that completely screws it up. They don't have a good track record.
what's the recourse when twitter or facebook or whatever change their layout and you don't like it
when apple crams more default apps you don't want onto iOS
your options are keep using it
or don't
the era of installing something on a box and that's what it is forever is over
Well, I guess I still kind of have those days. Windows 7 has a bunch of years left in it, and Windows 8 is a reasonable approximation of good enough after that.
Why is there even a limit for this? There was no limit in Windows 8, that I can remember. One of my pet peeves on Windows 10, is that I can't get the Start screen to look as nice as it did on Windows 8. I don't care about it on my PC, but on my tablet it's an annoyance.
Neo Geo Big Red owners club.
2009 PAX Puzzle Quest Champion
I have beat Rygar on the NES and many of you have not.
Neo Geo Big Red owners club.
2009 PAX Puzzle Quest Champion
I have beat Rygar on the NES and many of you have not.
No, you can make the tiled part have multiple columns, but you can now configure it to fit 4 medium tiles, or 2 wide ones, per column, previously it was only 3 medium tiles.
My theory is that this would require the start menu to have a dynamically adjusting width, and they had enough trouble with getting a dynamically adjusting width to work that they set everything to fixed and moved on to fix other things instead.
I totally understood what you said the first time, apparently you didn't understand my response. My response was why is there a limit the number of tiles in a column in Windows 10 when there wasn't one in Windows 8.
Neo Geo Big Red owners club.
2009 PAX Puzzle Quest Champion
I have beat Rygar on the NES and many of you have not.
This response and 3 tile (or 4 tile in the update) limit annoyed me so much that I booted up into Windows 8.1 to check. In Windows 8.1 the tile limit is 8 wide. While it's not unlimited (like I thought it was), it's substantially better than the Windows 10 downgraded limit.
Neo Geo Big Red owners club.
2009 PAX Puzzle Quest Champion
I have beat Rygar on the NES and many of you have not.
I'm running 8.1 on this work computer right now. The limit for a column is actually 2 medium tiles, but again if you have a column that spans longer than the vertical height of the monitor it will wrap the column to the right. so the tile that is to the right of the top tiles is actually "below" the tile on the bottom as far as Windows is concerned. Windows 8.x simply scrolls horizontally instead of vertically. Super easy to tell this on a tablet or device where you can rotate the screen to portrait.
Don't care about that. I already said I'm running on a PC so I'm scrolling horizontally - and thus my complaints.
Neo Geo Big Red owners club.
2009 PAX Puzzle Quest Champion
I have beat Rygar on the NES and many of you have not.
Does allowing local accounts let it work offline, or does it still have to phone home to parse the question you just asked it?
I don't see any way that it works without an internet connection, just like Google Now or Siri.
The argument I've always heard for GN/Siri needing internet is that a smartphone is not powerful enough to do speech recognition is a reasonable amount of time. That isn't really a problem for most PCs these days.
I mean, obviously it needs a connection for a web search or whatever, but I'm not sure why it would have to phone home if I'm asking it to search for a local file or open an application.
Anyway, I can't even try anything because it just says I have no operating system. I don't have a Windows 10 disc obviously. I don't think anything came with the laptop itself, and I'm not sure that would help, since I went from 7 to 10. Thankfully it has a compact little backup OS where I can at least get to Chrome to Google things and ask questions here.
My computer at work also has Windows 10. Is there some way to get what I need from it, maybe stick on a USB drive, and take it back home?
That should work assuming you can get it on another PC and have a thumb drive. Throw it on there, plug it into the laptop and reinstall 10.
I just got back on my PC after some time away and having forgot about my previous issue, and then some time passed before I opened this thread back up and remembered my problem I was having. This worked perfectly, so thank you!
ALL MY GBs ARE FREE!!!
DLed the thing on that page, ran the program, put it on a flash drive. Even checked to make sure the thing was emptied out and replace with all the new stuff it wanted. Plug it in at home, turn on computer...USB thing's light flashes to show it's reading it, still says no operating system detected. Am I missing something?
Just had to hold down CAD and change the boot order to USB first, obviously...and the command line shows my C drive as totally empty, so I guess there is nothing to save.
Edit: Up and running...hard drive empty, but at least it's working. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
You also don't even need to use speech recognition, you can just type in the box.
The fact that a Cortana profile that isn't online might not be able to correctly learn from your previous actions could be an issue, though, as evidenced by the fact that the first few dozen typed requests made to Cortana are pretty much guaranteed to fail regardless of how clear you make them. Without having an opportunity to learn your style of typing, Cortana is pretty much useless.
Not if it doesn't have any way to actually check and figure out what you're trying to tell it.
From what I saw with my brief time with it, and validated with what others say, Cortana is kind of bad about figuring things that you type if you don't follow a syntax it knows, and it has a limited variety of things that it can actually do. Unless you state one of those things correctly, you just get a pass-through to a web search. I don't think any sort of training can change this, though it might get better at remembering nouns that fit within its syntactic structure. Can anyone who actually uses Cortana comment on this?
There's nothing in the BIOS I can see that would be doing this so it must be something Windows 10 related sinc eit only started after installing it. But damned if I can tell what it is. Any advice?
It can infer some of this from context. If the next thing you do after a failed Cortana request is add an event to your calendar with text that is within reasonable error of the failed request, that's a hint.
Like, I'd expect that it'll be doing more or less the same thing that a remote server would be doing, just with a much smaller data set to start off with.
Dragon Naturally Speaking can learn from mistakes offline. No reason Cortana can't do it also.