My wife always has black coffee, I am surprised at the amount of people who ask if she wants milk in her black coffee ...

Having tried out all the preview builds on a spare laptop here, I think I'll wait for MS to finish Windows 10 properly before I use it. The final RC was still very messy, certainly to the level that I highly doubted all the bugs and inconsistencies would be fixed before release (just not enough time left). Basically, my findings very much mirrored These.

Also, El Reg has had numerous articles up lately about bugs, crashes and other such issues, so I reckon I'll wait a bit until 10.1 comes along and Microsoft actually fix it. At the moment, I just can't help feeling that they'd committed so much to this release date that they found it preferable to release an unfinished product, rather than push the date back by a month or so...

Welcome to the world of software development. You never release a final product, even before The Internet, this never happened. Someone somewhere who has control of the purse strings will tell you enough is enough.

As it is, it was probably already pushed back several times already, considering it was supposed to be an updated to Windows 8 originally.

With The Internet being as ubiquitous as it is now, releasing software on shorter release cycles is definitely a good thing. And Microsoft have already said this is what they are doing now and there will be an SR1/10.1 for Windows 10 before end of this year.

I find it a mixed thing. For smaller apps, no big deal. But for something as key as an OS, it seems as if a lot of the care and consideration has been dropped recently. There's no need any more to carefully design something when you can just shove any old rubbish out the door and keep changing it and modifying it every 5 seconds.

This is one of the reasons I ditched Firefox as a browser. Their rapid release cycle meant that they were constantly removing features, shifting things around, breaking things and forcing me to have to keep tweaking my add-on list to fix things back again. I got sick of opening my browser and finding that it wasn't working properly any more and needed tweaking back into shape every couple of months.

With Windows 10 being basically released when it's clearly not properly finished, we're in this situation again. Sorry, but I prefer the old-school way of thinking where a team carefully designed something that's coherent and well designed (ie, Windows 7), rather than just rushing out a buggy, confusing and incomplete pile of shite and thinking "It's OK, we can just fix it later".

Not saying Windows 10 is shite mind you, and I also appreciate that post-release bugs and issues arise in all products, but Windows 10 definitely could have benefited from being finished properly before being released...

In a word, Nescafé

Yeah, Direct X 12 is supposed to be good but I'm not sure any games take advantage of it yet.

And i'm not worried about running everything at max resolution so i'll stick at Win7.

Nescafe is owned by Nestle so I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

I drink and eat Nestlé stuff, it doesn't bother me.

But Nescafé bothers me. Greatly.

Windows is in a weird position now, though. It's still overwhelmingly dominant on the PC, obviously, but it's in a strange kind of dead-end.

Outside of the PC it's irrelevant (ignoring WinCE embedded stuff which is more of an anomaly than anything else) and the narrative for the past few years has been that the desktop is dead/dying. Which is obviously bollocks but it's certainly true that mobile has been the growth area for the last few years and MS have spectacularly failed to do anything at all in that market.

So they're left with a woefully outdated* desktop OS and their choice is: play it safe and give that creaky old OS another new coat of paint or play it risky, try to shoehorn that OS onto mobile and hope for some penetration (YJ).

And they've kinda opted for... both. Which leaves them with a technically quite good but massively unpopular mobile OS and a technically dead but massively popular (though not hugely profitable) desktop OS. They can't afford to do an actual new Windows for a market no one is sure matters any more but they can't withdraw from a market they have like 90% share of. So... we get Windows 10, while they figure out what the fuck to do and/or hope that people suddenly start liking Windows on mobile.

And with the diminishing significance of the OS on the platform they still control (largely due to the rise of web-apps but the diversification of computing in general has played a big part too) they're slowly bleeding out in that market too as users opt for Macs, Chromebooks or just an Android/iOS tablet instead of a laptop.

It'll take a long long time for MS to lose their dominance on PC, obviously, but without new tech or genuine new features (so not Cortana) even fanboys are going to struggle to find reasons to stay after a while.

* Basically the NT4 kernel; weird, semi-64bit support (and mostly 32bit userland); outdated, feature-poor filesystem (which is poor on SSDs) - no snapshotting, no decent built-in (and trusted) encrytion, no decent (i.e. 'free') compression, no (real) on the fly-resizing, no pooling/cloning/subvolumes etc. etc.; Poor security model (even aside from NSA-backdoor concerns (which business in particular is increasingly concerned about)); No real sandboxing (nothing like chroots or BSD jails); terrible containerisation support; shitty VM tech and no in-kernel hypervisor.

You're curious.

Which two fingers and how?

I suspect 90% of people would be similar, but it'd be index and middle finger wrapped around the handle, coming back into one's palm with the thumb placed on top to steady things.

When I say 'attempted', what I actually mean is that I got home from work, turned my machine on expecting it to notify me to install. It didn't, so I didn't.

I'm happy to wait for the notification rather than faff about with an ISO or USB install.

Maybe I'm in the 10%. Thumb on top, three fingers in the hole/handle (YJ) and little finger outside at the bottom for support.

You don't have to use an ISO or USB, you just go to the link and download a wee exe file which does it all in-place. If you want to do it.

Still too much faff. I don't have the sort of time to download a file and double-click on it! Are you some sort of mad-man?

Jeez.

Eww.

With regards to Windows on the desktop and starting over from scratch. They can't, or rather people up-high have told them they can't. I'm sure there are plenty of developers in the Windows group that would love and have probably tried to start over, but have been shot down / don't have the needed permission from the bean counters to make it stick.

As for Windows Mobile - 8 and 10 really aren't that bad. Microsoft's biggest problem was enticing users and thus developers away from Android and iOS. Essentially, Apple and Google have done and are still doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to it's competitors on the desktop - got people too heavily invested in their platforms for them to be able to switch. But in the similar vein, Apple and Google are now nearing the same position Microsoft are in but on Mobile - they have so many users heavily invested in Android and iOS that they simply would not be able to afford to start over.

And I'm not going to touch the NT kernel stuff - obvious troll is obvious :P

You obviously know WAY more than I do about an OS, but I will offer this: NT was actually good back with Windows 2000. I really liked W2K because it was such an improvement over path picky and cranky W98/98SE. ME was a shitbox OS; of course, the old saw of "every other release was OK" applies (for me), but I didn't care for XP at all.

Windows 7 was, in my opinion a better extension of 2000 but it was way too bloated. I installed W7 32 bit on an SSD and paid the ultimate price because it didn't play nice with GRUB, even though *nix and Windoze were on 2 separate drives, both OSes were hosed one fine day when something wasn't well liked.

One thing that really grinds my gears is the endless restarts on updates with Windoze. They HAVE to get away from that. With Linux (specifically Mint, but they all operate pretty much the same in *nix land), I can install 442 updates in about 4 minutes whilst continuing what I am doing without a disruption. 442 updates on Windows could take 30 minutes, and I have to watch a circular juggle of balls(YJ) whilst I do not do anything else because Windoze prevents it.

I am glad to be rid of the Charms Bar (well, it is mostly gone) but I want to be rid of 80% of those "touch the edge utilities". I don't have a tablet or a touchscreen, so stop making me use an OS that thinks I have a touchscreen or tablet, dammit! Actually, I dislike using a laptop because I hate the keyboards, preferring a full size, clacky keyboard.

Microsoft doesn't realise, nor do they care it seems, that the OS needs to be just a tool to get things done, rather than something that invades the whole time spent on the box. I don't want the OS to be so front and center that I know it is there all of the time. Now I am going back to the Linux box because whatever I borked when sonny and I were tearing the basement apart - a light fixture had fallen and knocked the FiOS cable out -  now works again.  :-D
 

It's been interesting any time I've been to any developer-related Microsoft events (Tech Ed many moons ago, a SQL course in Seattle more recently), to hear the tales from the people on the ground in Microsoft. There's a lot of inter-departmental wrangling goes on, especially for something like SSIS, where the SQL team were dependent on what the Visual Studio team could produce for the interface, and had to deal with the Office team to figure out how the hell to extract data from the various formats of Office documents (and if you want a laugh, all you have to do is ask about date handling in Excel and 64-bit ODBC drivers).

I wonder what'll happen in the future to the stuff like Visual Studio and SQL Server - it's not sexy modern customer facing stuff, so it doesn't sell to the general public, but I imagine the licensing of that kind of thing is a fairly hefty chunk of their income, and it is dependent on having an OS that'll run the stuff.

(The main reason I wonder what'll happen is because if they were to decide to give up on SQL Server, rather a lot of the stuff I work on, and the people I work for, would be a bit screwed.)

Meanwhile, I can't upgrade my home PC to 10, because "There are no supported networking devices", despite my computer having an utterly bog standard Atheros (wired) and Ralink (wireless) devices.

I'm taking that as a hint not to bother upgrading yet.