Windows 8.1 quietly gets released to manufacturers | Hacker News Reader

Windows 8.1 quietly gets released to manufacturers

guru8.net

54 pointsmboses51 comments

I want Windows to do well, I wish them no harm. But I feel that sadly, "8" has become another "Vista" (perception). I'm bored with any news about it and barring some really big changes there is not going to be anything left to woo me to it.

I hope the next CEO of Microsoft has some empathy for people who use their products. A little bit more care should be considered before forcing broad sweeping changes. As big and as profitable as they are, would it have killed them to have different GUI options available (classic 7 mode)?

I skipped Vista initially because there was no "UP" button for folder navigation. I had to install FileSearchEX for Windows 7. Maybe I'm in the 5% eccentric crowd.

Another Vista? Hardly.

As someone who has used Windows 8, and recently moved back to a PC with Windows 7. I think 8 is actually an improvement. Lots of little UI things that I really like (the copy dialog is much improved).

Sure, there are things that need improving. I sincerely hope I can turn off the start button in Win 8.1 rtm.

I want the underlying improvements too. I just wish the GUI changes weren't so jarring. When I say "Vista", I mean the perception, not the quality.

What GUI changes are jarring? I've been using it for 6 months and I would not go back to 7 because of the GUI changes alone. I'm starting to think I'm the only one that actually likes 8.

You aren't. I really like it but the disconnect between old style apps and the new style is jarring. The new apps and interface would be great on a tablet but feels clunky on my old laptop with a bad track pad. Also searching has been compartmentalized so to do some searches you need to type Win+w and know why you search is blank. Of course Win+r is still there so in practice its pretty easy to avoid.

FYI, Win 8.1 fixes the search thing.

Launching apps is jarring. I'd rather an on screen launcher. I wasn't the biggest fan of the start menu, but I hate flipping between the start screen and the desktop.

That was the most jarring bit for me too. I read that 8.1 allows using the desktop background for the Start Screen background so I'm hoping it'll be less jarring.

I like everything about Windows 8 except Metro.

Personally, I think MS should have kept Metro to touch devices and the regular Windows UI for desktops/laptops. There was no need to have to two merged.

I agree. Windows 8 feels much better than Windows 7. You have to keep in mind I am a Ubuntu user who loves Unity. Many people resist changes like this. The same kind of resistance is to be expected from users who actually like Windows 7.

I must add, however, I switched back to Ubuntu on the first opportunity.

I've gotten used to 8 despite the jarring issues I had with it at first. 8.1 addresses most, if not all of those issues.

Also, Alt+Up Arrow is your friend for navigating up a directory. ;-) (I find it much easier to use the keyboard shortcut than hunt for the toolbar button anyway)

Only most for me as I think there are still some metro-mode "features" that I'll encounter during use. But overall Windows 8 was awesome and only got f*cked over by the forced GUI changes that made everyone (including me) get really defensive even though you could work around them.

I have used W8 slightly less than 2 weeks on the laptof of my wife (she asked me to install linux instead). Like many, I have not liked the general UX, but what surprised me a lot is that to work around the bad UX, I have naturally started to learn the keyboard shortcuts. Many are identical in W7, but I did not need them before.

I think that W8 could be usable if we first learn all the important keyboard shortcuts.

This... I am an earlier adopter of Windows 8 and I actually love it. It feels to me like it's the first version of windows that is truly keyboard centric. Stuff like winkey +x can make you wonder how do you survived without that before.

Me too, I was pleasantly surprised that I could actually drive this version of windows with the keyboard. Which for me makes it the only version of Windows that I can bare. Energy use is better, and kernel hibernation feels good. Partitions as file system mounts finally. Better keyboard layout switching. And it feels faster.

I hate all the old Windows cruft that is still there, the split control panel between UIs (like user management), crappy add/remove programs, the fact that there don't seem to be many 64bit programs, not being able to find the network preferences easily - and that I can't get windows to play with my netgear router over DHCP (but that could be netgears fault). Huge updates that use up my allowance. And the horrible start screen etc.

Love the win+X - but detest the tiles. There's no logic or structure or hierarchy to them. Almost impossible to manage. It's obvious the GUI was NOT designed for a desktop - it's terrible.

Thank goodness for Start8 and similar products. If I could uninstall tiles to save memory, I would.

Hold ctrl and zoom out. Then right click on any group to name it. Drag tiles out of groups to make your own, drag groups around when zoomed out to organize.

There's no hierarchy but it's actually extremely usable.

Nice. Thanks for that! :)

Just for edification, the "up" functionality was to click on the folder in the navigation breadcrumb.

The breadcrumb's a lot more useful as it not only allows navigating up, but also further upwards as well as to siblings via the dropdown arrows.

I believe Windows 8.1 ships with IE11, which means now all current desktop browsers support WebGL!

http://caniuse.com/#search=webgl

Safari still requires turning WebGL on in the (also off by default) developer menu.

Any idea why this is? I think I remember seeing some WebGL security concerns back when it was first getting going, but I assume those have been mitigated by now. I guess it's just Safari being behind on implementation?

So Microsoft, I live in Bolivia; it's been quite a while now since Windows 8 has been released. Surely nearing 2014 I can _now_ purchase Windows 8 using my Paypal or Credit Card?

Edit: Nope, your updater still says my country is unsopported. :( Get with the times MS.

I think you are supposed to pirate windows 8 if you live in Bolivia.

By the way, do you know if Apple "supports" Bolivia?

Dunno, but you can download and install Ubuntu 12.04 or Fedora 19 rather easily.

Just checked my MSDN subscription - RTM is still not available there. Latest version available is still Windows 8.1 Preview. For anyone curious here's a good list of changes from 8.0 -> 8.1 right from Microsoft:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dn140266.aspx

They're not throwing RTM out to MSDN subscribers from what I hear. Not good.

My sub expires in 3 months and I will not be renewing it. We're freezing dev and moving off .Net and Windows due to shit like this, rising costs, audits and MS support being beyond fucking useless unless you're a multi million pound customer.

It'll be free to all existing Windows 8 users at some stage in October (17th I think?).

And as I've read elsewhere, will be on MSDN around the same time.

I'm curious as to what you mean by "shit like this", as that seems to be quite a broad statement without specifics.

I work for a small'ish ISV, and find the MSDN offering to be quite decent.

Also, make use of your Azure benefits while you still have those 3 months left! http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/msdn...

They're not throwing RTM out to MSDN subscribers from what I hear

Historically, Microsoft has released RTM versions to MSDN and TechNet subscribers within a couple weeks after the RTM is official.

With Windows 8.1, you can't get a U.S. based spokesperson to say whether they are continuing this policy. They all say "no comment". Just like when you ask them if Windows 8.1 was RTM'd - "No comment". You gave no citations for anything you said, but I'm guessing you're basing it on the single Microsoft employee from the Netherlands that put out a message that said MSDN/Technet would be released at general availability. That's hardly official.

We're freezing dev and moving off .Net and Windows due to shit like this

A rumor that Windows 8.1 RTM would not be available to MSDN subscribers before GA is "shit like this" that makes you move off of .NET and Windows?

audits

Need an explanation of this one. The only time I've ever heard of an MSDN subscriber getting audited was taking MSDN .iso files and keys and posting them to torrent sites for something like 5 years before they said a word to him.

MS support being beyond fucking useless unless you're a multi million pound customer.

MS development support is useless and always has been no matter how big of a customer you are. The typical chain is: find a problem, report it to MS, solve it yourself, they email you asking for additional information. Been like that for at least the last 15 years. Vendor support is useless anyway when there're much better resources like Google to find quality sites like Stackoverflow.

Just for a moment, substitute Microsoft with Apple. You could just as easily be describing either vendor. I believe most vendors offer a similar experience in these regards. If you know someone that doesn't follow this pattern, let me know. I had an Apple fault for months. Apple replaced my hardware but it didn't solve the issue. The problem started after a software update. After months of anguish and hardware change disruption, Apple fixed the software bug.. Despite most people suspecting it was software. Apple's support was crap. Microsoft's support for my disabled USB ports under Windows 8 was no better - reinstall the OS.

No we have spoken to our partner support rep. It's what they've been told as well.

There are a number of other issues as well (obviously). See another reply in this thread root from me.

We've had 2 audits. They are a reality when your licensing hits the £500k/year which ours does. they check to make sure they have screwed you out of every last bit of cash even if they know you are compliant.

$750k per year is nothing. My employer spends millions with our 19,000 employees. We probably pay $500k on MSDN Licenses.

Never been audited. I wonder why you're special?

Same experience here. Our company is experiencing a serious MSDN service degradation, far from the "Developers, Developers, Developers" mantra. They are giving us less licenses and we can't get new ones automatically. We even tried to upgrade to a more expensive plan but they refused to give us the discount we have every year for renewals.

Moving off .Net due to this? I must question if that's more of a knee-jerk reaction. VS still provides a fantastic experience, and Mono is very healthy. Certainly, moving off .Net will have a higher cost to you than migrating to Mono runtimes?

It depends how invested they are. If they already plan an extensive rewrite, they may very well change their underlying technology to someone they feel more comfortable with than .NET.

This. Our model is quite volatile due to the nature of what we do (compliance management) so we can evolve it all quickly to new platforms.

Its been PDS7, C, perl and Java before (product has been around since the late 1980s). It could be Go or Haskell one day.

Sounds fun. I always like to optimize for that. :-)

It's not just this. Developer relations have gone to shit and visual studio on large projects like ours (2mloc c#) is a liability. Oh and add the schizophrenic nature of devdiv and it's just not worth it anymore. Need we say more: SQL licensing, Silverlight, windows workflow rewrite, EF is a piece of shit, MS11-100 (demon hotfix from hell). I could go on for days. We have blown over 24 days in the last 2 years on just phone calls to Microsoft.

We threw out partnership agreement in last year (we were gold).

Not going near Mono. It's another ghetto.

To be honest, our front end is going to python and the back end to postgres. Any critical sections go to C++.

So long it's not a the grass-is-greener effect. While I'm not pleased with a lot of Microsoft's recent developments, and C# seems to be an evolutionary dead-end, it's not like other platforms are beautiful. I'm sure there are lots of shit frameworks like EF on other platforms; it's not like EF is some critical piece of .NET. Personally, F# is the number one reason I'm still on .NET, with VS being a very strong second place.

I've had critical telecom services running on Mono for many years; not sure what "ghetto" means there. Xamarin also seems to be doing quite well with their cross-platform initiatives.

I've moved SQL Server apps to Postgres (due to licensing) and back (due to maintenance/replication). On another we're moving to PG again due to licensing. Postgres is great, but holy shit MSSQL provides a huge feature surface that's very accessible (licensing aside). SSMS is a dream compared to the ghetto of PG frontends (in my limited experience).

But if you can easily dump and rewrite, I'll admit, that is fun.

Does anyone know: Will Windows 8.1 be a free upgrade for existing Windows 8 customers?

Edit: Did some googling, it will be a free upgrade (for anyone else wondering) through the Microsoft Store.

I've been reluctant to sign up to the store. As I don't want any syncing to the cloud, it's unclear to me what's stored at MSs end, and what the repurcussions are from doing so.

This seems a tactical way to get us to sign up for a store account.

Smart. You don't want to be laughed out of the shops again. :-D

Just for the rumors. Barclays using windows8 with start button for a long time. At least 6 month from now :)

With all this revelations about spying and hacking and people still use windows. Priceless! I bet Bill Gates laughing his ass off, and at same time uses Mac/Linux him self O_o

which medication are you on?

You are right.. Let me switch over to SELinux... but wait that was made by NSA themselves...

Playing around the paranoia, don't you think the NSA would have taken a minute to think, Gee we forced Microsoft and Apple to include backdoors in their OSes, maybe we should now tackle the OS that powers 90% of the web? You know maybe we could slip a backdoor in the one of the utility apps such as "htop".

Let's get serious, OpenSource is not always = Secure and Closed Source does not always = InSecure. Truecrypt is the perfect example: Open sourced but too complex to Audit, maintainers identities are unknown and offered binaries differ from manual compilation.

A good rule of thumb: Assume anything you din't write or can't audit as insecure.

Yes, worrying.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/allegations-openbsd-back...

Not sure what was confirmed on that story, but I remember reading it and thinking there wasn't much chance that I'd ever be able to audit my own system.

There's no chance at all that you completely could.

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

Ken Thompson, 1984, explains how to get a system with perfectly clean source code to compile a hacked 'login' binary every time.

"In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."

truecrypt isn't open source, its proprietary with published source.

It's been open source since 2009, they just haven't gone through the formalities of getting the license approved:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueCrypt#Licensing_and_Open_S...

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