There was a book out a while back called "If it works, break it!" or something along those lines. Sheer idiocy, but crap like that sells, and I suspect Microsoft key execs are following it.
As a big corporation, surviving wild success is actually something to worry about. That position may be different than being hungry and genuinely trying to succeed, but I don't personally buy that an organization has to do utterly stupid things to ensure their future success.
You just explained it all. We all know that 90%(99%?) of Microsoft's (mis-)direction is Apple Envy.
Maybe they are trying to emulate Apple to the insane extreme: Keep intentionally loosing market share (apple did not do this part, they just had low market share) until the lights are almost completely out (breaking it)...then drag(beg) BG out of retirement (like SJ) and he'll fix it all and turn M$ back into a powerhouse.
Make the company "hungry" again...so it becomes lean, mean and innovative once again. Then BG (the visionary) swoops back in, makes something completely new and better; then M$ will reign supreme once again.
I'd personally like to see Bill Gates return but arguably the stress killed the other guy dragged out of retirement, so Bill may not be all that willing...
-Noel
Author of the "How to Configure the 'To Work' Options" series of Windows books. Not feeling enough love to do one for Windows 10.
Here is a primer for any new forum members wondering about what all the fuss about Aero Glass is about.
•Windows Aero is the premium visual experience of Windows Vista and Windows 7. It features a translucent glass design with subtle window animations and new window colors.
•Aero’s distinctive visual style combines the appearance of lightweight, translucent windows with powerful graphic advances. With Aero, you can enjoy visually appealing effects and appearance and also benefit from better access to your programs.
•Translucent glass windows create depth on the desktop
•One of Aero’s more visually obvious features is glass window borders, which let you focus on the contents of your open windows.
•Window behavior has also been redesigned, with subtle animations accompanying the minimizing, maximizing, and repositioning of windows to appear more smooth and effortless.
•Tint your windows using the provided colors, or mix your own custom color
•You can even fine-tune the color and appearance of windows, the Start menu, and the taskbar by tinting your translucent windows. Select one of the provided colors, or create your own custom color using the color mixer.
•Part of the Windows Aero experience is Windows Flip 3D, which is a way to arrange your open windows in a three-dimensional stack that you can quickly flip through without having to click the taskbar.
•Aero also includes taskbar previews for your open windows. When you point to a taskbar button, you'll see a thumbnail-sized preview of the window, whether the content of the window is a document, a photo, or even a running video.
•Even the method of pressing ALT+TAB for switching windows has been giving an update. Instead of simple icons, you can see live previews of the windows for each open program.
•But most PC hardware produced since 2006, including the integrated graphics chipsets common in laptops, is powerful enough to display the Aero interface.
•First, the display is more reliable and seamless, with none of the weird tearing effects that can mar the other interfaces. Second, by offloading the display from the system microprocessor to the GPU, Windows Aero frees the microprocessor to perform other tasks, leading to better overall performance.
•Additionally, window controls on Aero windows visually appear to "light up" when you mouse over them, one of several subtle effects that makes this interface more desirable.
•The level of translucency used by Aero is configurable via the Window Color and Appearance control panel, as is the color of these elements. Microsoft provides several default colors, such as Graphite, Blue, Teal, and Red, but you can also manually configure on-screen colors using a color mixer. A color intensity control and a way to turn off translucency (which is identified as "Enable transparency") are also provided for further fine-tuning.
•Frankly, the non-Aero UIs in Windows Vista are so unattractive compared to Aero that most users will simply want to leave Aero running when using battery power, even if there is a performance hit. However, those who would like to disable Aero on battery power should know that the Power Saver power management profile does disable Aero by default when the system is running on battery power.
Fun fact: Aero was originally an acronym, though Microsoft has since dropped that meaning. And what was that acronym, you ask? Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open.
Post by Locutus deBorg on Nov 5, 2015 12:27:08 GMT -6
> I think that one of the things that promotes these flawed ideas, is Windows 7 itself.
for the record, XP does the same thing, and vista does the same thing
the last item, "allow visual styles..." is the item that causes windows to display the theme other than classic
it's several of the other items that can be resource hogs specifically the animations which require multiple screen redraws for the animation to "happen" this is a resource suck and a waste of time
animations were invented for one reason, to make faster graphics cards appear slower
the old ISA graphics of a long time ago had slow redraw rates, thus maximizing a window on an 80386 running win 3.10 actually looked slightly like an animation because of how slow the redraw was
so under the guise of flash bang they make resource hogging animations to slow down the graphics cards
I find the lack of configuration options disturbing !
I felt a great disturbance in the force.. as if millions of win 7 systems suddenly cried out in terror.
Nice info, Chuck. Thanks for posting it. It's important to notice that the glassy appearance of the window chrome is just one SMALL part of an overall theme. There is much more to it.
Locutus, I don't think all the animations had nefarious motives. For a system that's got graphics power to spare (pretty much anything made after 2005), animations help people realize what's happening.
Animations that "light up" controls when you hover over them help discoverability. Animations that show a minimized window being "sent to" the Taskbar let newbies know where to look to restore the application. Buttons that have the appearance of something sticking up from the screen that you can press. Scroll bar thumbs that have 3 little lines in them so that you can recognize what they are at a glance. The list goes on and on - a theme is no small thing!
Beyond the obvious (glass effects), there was an overall multi-dimensional sense and integration to the Windows 7 Aero theme. Skeuomorphism and visual effects were there working together - done well in most cases - to help users perceive "what's what" on the screen. Could it have been done better? Yes. Could it be worse? Win 10.
ALL the "power draining" composition and animation is STILL THERE. The rectangular, plain, flat, STUPID visual elements on a Win 10 stock desktop are done ON FUCKING PURPOSE by people in Microsoft with an agenda - an agenda to make YOU and I accept mediocrity, and herald in a new (false) era of "continuous improvement".
The "new", haphazard Modern "design" (and I use that term loosely - the Modern shit can't with a straight face be called a "design") reduces usability and thus functionality, plain an simple (pun intended).
Who said that lighter, almost invisible drop shadows are better? Better for what? Better for whom? Fuckhead fanboys who would fit into the Idiocracy crowd watching "Rehabilitation"? Someone was paid to make up those simple, stupid, too-light shadows, along with all the rest of the graphics.
Who wouldn't, right now today, say that a resurrection of a Windows Aero theme with all the nuances and richness of that in Win 7 wasn't an improvement? Thing is, they can't.
Consider this: That Microsoft utterly DROPPED the consistency that new applications follow a theme, we have haphazard, disjointed Apps (and no doubt future desktop applications) where the usability just sucks. Apps and applications are programmed without regard to elegance or usability. And there's no easy way of getting it back. Once the discipline is gone, everything will continue to be dumbed-down, and without a resurrection of the concept of a consistent theme, will require complete rewrites and will never be consistent. Microsoft didn't just make a theme for Windows 10 that sucks, they broke the fucking future.
There was a time in history when people who broke the future would be hanged, shot, stoned, etc.
Post by Locutus deBorg on Nov 5, 2015 13:28:21 GMT -6
There's an experiment that I do on every machine I get my hands on
- leave all the default animations in place - open a program with a lot of window elements, buttons etc.
- now repeatedly as fast as possible, click the program's taskbar icon for minimize and restore! since the beginning until present I can crash any graphics card drivers by doing this with animations enabled
I have brought down high end gaming systems with this procedure using the task manager or media player etc. as the program to be rapid fire minimized / restored
it's called buffer overflow when it appears to stop responding continue rapid fire clicking until the whole system comes down
disable window animations and boom no more crashes turn off only the last item "allow visual styles..." which converts to the classic theme and the crash still happens with the animations enabled
Turn off all the other extraneous animations like taskbar button slide and window up / down animations and no more graphics crashes
the button hover highlight doesn't take any noticeable resources and actually cannot be turned off my win 7 systems here are running with everything turned off except show window contents while dragging and the mouse over > hover still produces button highlight eg. Firefox tabs will "light" on hover, Taskbar pinned items that are not running will "light" and "raise / pop up" on hover Taskbar pinned items that are running as background tasks will are already raised up and will "light" on hover
these type of animations are beneficial and useful and not resource hogging
however, window up / down, menu delay and fade, taskbar button slide, etc. are the resource hogs / time wasters and have been since win95
I find the lack of configuration options disturbing !
I felt a great disturbance in the force.. as if millions of win 7 systems suddenly cried out in terror.
My research tells me that battery life is the reason MS pulled Aero. It doesn't explain however, why they just didn't turn it off by default on phones and slabs.
i just dont see how. first off glass didnt consume much more battery than without it. sure a tiny amount but nothing notable. secondly you have to look at usage patterns for those devices. on average phones and tablets spend more than 50% of their on time with the screen off. thereby not consuming any power from gfx. If glass consumes more battery life it couldnt be by anything more than a few minutes. Nothing worth scrapping the entire thing over. while i dont discount the battery life theory as i do believe it was a deciding factor i think the uniform appearance across devices was the biggest factor. the additional 3-5 minutes of extra runtime was just a happy bonus.
There's an experiment that I do on every machine I get my hands on
- leave all the default animations in place - open a program with a lot of window elements, buttons etc.
- now repeatedly as fast as possible, click the program's taskbar icon for minimize and restore! since the beginning until present I can crash any graphics card drivers by doing this with animations enabled
Not seeing any stability problems with that experiment here, Locutus. How long should you expect to have to do it? Using several different applications (one at a time) I clicked continuously and saw the minimize/restore animation for about 5 minutes. No problems. This Win 8.1 system has been booted up 5+ days since I rebooted after installing a firewall software update. CPU usage ran around 4% and GPU usage around 10% all during the activity, and temperatures didn't change appreciably.
Very few people in the world know how to set up a stable computer system.
depends on the system the OS etc. I've noticed it can take longer on some
winders ape doesn't seem to have as much graphics intensity as 7, Vista, and XP
XP with Luna theme and all animations on a Core2Quad 2.33GHz, 4GB DDR2 800MHz Intel socket 775 based MB, and Intel GMA (graphics) = near instant crash on that test takes a bit longer with an actual PCI-e graphics card and depends on the card the more RAM on the Card the longer it takes eg. a pair of 512MB SLI or Crossfire linked cards might take a good while to finally flood the buffer also depends on the resolution
any single core CPU = almost instant crash no matter what the graphics card XP on a P-IV socket 478 = 100% CPU in a matter of seconds with animations enabled for the test
this machine I'm using here right now Samsung NP525 Win 7 Ultimate x64 RTM to SP1 AMD K10 Athlon-II P360 dual core, 2.4GHz 4GB DDR3 PC3-8500 (2x2GB SODIMM) dual channel mode weird integrated Dual Graphics - AMD Mobility Radeon 4250 HD 512MB - AMD Mobility Radeon 5470 HD 256MB runs on the 4250 on battery and the 5470 on wall power
right now on wall power, using an empty notepad window for the test with all animations disabled, classic theme running an additional 3% - 10% CPU usage during the rapid fire click test and 6 - 12% increased CPU usage with the notepad window full of text
also I've noticed USB rats differ from PS/2 for this some USB Rats actually can't keep up with my click speed let's just say that I can rapid fire that button faster than an AR-15 or Uzi can pop caps in full auto mode
I find the lack of configuration options disturbing !
I felt a great disturbance in the force.. as if millions of win 7 systems suddenly cried out in terror.
FYI, in my commercial products we've decided to re-implement the common controls, since the theme supplied by Microsoft no longer supplies a look and feel that is up to our quality standards, and it's basically turning into a "whatever you want it to look like" world. Since there's no incentive to follow Microsoft's disjointed theme "design", why not make it better?
We're still going to offer a "system theme" choice, for those who for some unknown reason LIKE Microsoft's current, ugly theme.
Win 10 system theme. Note the ugly, difficult to use controls:
By contrast, several captures showing our theme, which offers configurability of a range of brightnesses:
We're also completing a proper implementation of display scaling, which Microsoft's controls do NOT do properly. And what you don't see here is that we're also going to offer user selection of the roundness of the corners as well.
You can imagine I'd rather be working on the content of the software, not the look and feel. But this is the bind Microsoft has put us in. This is what's needed to maintain usability and elegance.
<Rick> Good video. It's almost hard to believe that at one time Windows 98 was the resource hog, but even then, it still ran circles around what Windows 10 can do on today's modern hardware and look a heck of alot better doing it.
May 25, 2021 22:55:12 GMT -6
<Rick> As stated elsewhere, So much for the launch of Windows 11, "The Great Crash." Myself, I had a hard time getting into the site listed above, when I did get in, the video was partly done and then it crashed. There has been many other reports of crashing.
Jun 24, 2021 9:52:33 GMT -6
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<Rick> I see Microsoft has been very quick to pull down reports of site crashing regarding the Launch of Windows 11 on the Microsoft Insiders forum.
Jun 24, 2021 9:57:31 GMT -6
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<Rick> The rebroadcast is working okay.
Jun 24, 2021 11:00:25 GMT -6
<Rick> With reports of people being able to install the dev-edition of Windows 11 on machines not meeting spec, I thought I would give it a what-the-heck try. Lucky me, I'm caught in the downloading, doesn't meet spec, clearing, re-downloading loop on my machine!
Jul 2, 2021 7:08:46 GMT -6
<Rick> I've recently purchased a license for ArcaOS from www.arcanoae.com/ to play with. First impressions, it's still OS/2, but it now has a Linux twist to it.
Jul 2, 2021 7:32:53 GMT -6
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<dozrguy> laptop shit out and am stuck buying a new one. os win11 as fucked as win10 was?
Oct 2, 2021 12:56:10 GMT -6
<Rick> Let's see ..., my impression of Windows 11 is that it is a spruced up version of Windows 10 requiring a 64-bit processor plus a piece of security hardware that is less than 4 years old in order for it to run.
Oct 4, 2021 18:25:49 GMT -6
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<Rick> On the plus side, Microsoft is supposed to be supporting Windows 10 for some time to come for those of us still using systems with I7 or older processors.
Oct 4, 2021 18:44:35 GMT -6
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<dozrguy> i tried installing win10 om the 'shitout' pc this morning usung media creation. EPIC FAIL! went into an endless bootloop. win7 reinstalled just fine
Oct 21, 2021 11:23:38 GMT -6
<dozrguy> STILL so much bullshit and so little time for the kiddie ideas from the hill. My new laptop (MSI GE 11-UH461) would be an awesome "10" machine but because of Winblows I can only give it a "2"......wasted $3500
Oct 27, 2021 9:36:47 GMT -6
<Rick> Hello. Just checking in.
Mar 17, 2022 10:46:54 GMT -6
<isidroco> Each new w10 update adds >100000 useless files to \Windows\Servicing\LCU\Package_for_RollupFix... folders. Even in a SSD takes time to delete that stuff. In each version they manage to worsen stuff.
Mar 27, 2022 16:14:51 GMT -6
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<dozerguy> still traffic here?
Oct 9, 2022 17:32:44 GMT -6
<Rick> No, there does not seem to be very much traffic these days. I still check in from time to time.
Oct 9, 2022 20:08:58 GMT -6