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Windows 8 Rubbish Apps

Amar, on the other hand, has been rather more defensive about the whole thing. He appears to be part of the Microsoft Student Program, and rather than apologise as the others have, his response was “I do knew that am using sample codes. But almost every people are doing the same…” Obviously just following the crowd… except that most people have at least tried to make the games their own.

Regarding submitting multiple times – “by the time I finish my application there wont be any cool names available. So I just did that to reserve cool names.” I look forward to seeing how he uses 8 Balls, Crash Ball, Maze Ball, Hop Ball, Ball Balance and Dragon Balls for these new games he’s working on! Interestingly, he was also the first to ask who I am!

Calling out the rubbish from the Windows 8 store

Surface and Windows 8 RT don’t have that many apps to begin with, but if a significant part of them are cloned basic examples from the MSDK example pool or other useless trash apps then the actual app count is even lower and one has to seriously wonder if buying so soon into the Surface ecosystem is a good option. It was already a dubious option but this kind of problem is just absurd. What are Microsoft reviews doing at their jobs?

If you value your money and don’t require a tablet this very minute, just wait and see how the things go. Don’t go splashing notes at a Surface or any other Windows tablet before the rest of the market picks up. There’s no point or benefit in being a lab rat for Microsoft but there’s significant losses if you end up without 500 ($/€) and a tablet with a lousy or inexistent software selection.

On the other hand there’s always a tablet that works ok and with an excellent software selection, so why should anyone buy a Surface?

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Steve Ballmer’s Dilemma

Death of the desktop is clear not because Windows desktop sales are declining but because Macintosh desktop sales are declining. When Mercedes (Apple) begins to suffer declining unit sales, what does it mean for GM (Microsoft)? Not good.

The only option is to invent the future, which Ballmer and Microsoft are attempting to do by entering the tablet hardware business (again emulating Apple) and cutting bold smart phone deals with outfits like Nokia. But Microsoft, for all its posturing and $1 billion marketing budgets, isn’t any good at inventing the future and knows it. Ballmer lacks confidence that Redmond can invent it’s way out of the current hole. And because he lacks confidence, as does nearly everyone else at Microsoft, of course it won’t happen.

Microsoft didn’t invent the PC but benefited from its invention. Microsoft didn’t invent BASIC, they didn’t invent the PC operating system, they didn’t invent word processor, spreadsheet, or presentation applications, they didn’t invent PC games, they didn’t invent the graphical user interface, they didn’t invent the notebook or the tablet, they didn’t invent the Internet, they didn’t invent the music player or the video game, but they benefited from all these things.

Like Blanche DuBois, Microsoft has relied on the kindness of strangers.

I, Cringely

There’s a couple of errors with this reasoning. First, Macintosh desktop sales has been declining because Apple has provided very little value in its latest lines of desktops, and this while the world is going through a very strong financial crisis. I would suggest that the only way to actually see the desktop trending average would be to avoid the edges of the market and see what’s the “middle-class” buying.

Second, although i don’t disagree that most people will be perfectly satisfied with their pc-as-appliance model of tablets and smartphones in the future, Enterprise computer needs will remain stable for some sort of desktop computer, even if not some cumbersome power-hungry beast based around Intel’s x86 line.

Third, Microsoft is not “a person”, it’s a set of persons, which has changed a lot through out the times and it’s definitely not the same set of persons today than it was yesterday. Just because 30 years ago MS didn’t invented BASIC or the Operating System it certainly doesn’t mean that they will not invent something revolutionary and ground-breaking now.

Fourth, the whole argument is based on Ballmer being some sort of machiavellian genius of finance and business strategy. And that I have a very hard time believing…

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Why I’m Returning My Microsoft Surface RT

The hardware makes promises that the software can’t deliver – and the ability to type faster than Word can digest is a great example of that.  Sure, I understand that the shipped version is “Microsoft Word Preview,” but you can’t deliver software like this.  It’s a recipe for returned products – and frankly, that’s exactly what I’m going to do with the Surface RT, return it.

Brent Ozar

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Hotmail: Your password was too long, so we fixed it for you

My previous password has been around 30 chars in size and now, it doesn’t work anymore. However, I could login by typing just the first 16 chars.

This limitation is well known (see Graham Cluley’s excellent post on the password limits of various services) however, what caught my attention was that by cutting the password to 16 chars, it would work.

To pull this trick with older passwords, Microsoft had two choices:

* store full plaintext passwords in their db; compare the first 16 chars only * calculate the hash only on the first 16; ignore the rest

Storing plaintext passwords for online services is a definite no-no in security. The other choice could mean that since its inception, Hotmail was silently using only the first 16 chars of the password.

To be honest, I’m not sure which one is worse.

Securelist

Microsoft: Screwing up security and best-practices since, basically, ever!

I assume there’s nothing wrong with the water up there in Redmond, so why do MS keeps doing this kind of stupid things and just not giving an jota about security? Or Standards? Or just good engineering?

Another good example is this one:

@bphogan: Example of NIH: Microsoft PowerShell: “New-item foo.txt -type file” instead of ” touch foo.txt”

Microsoft could just have implemented some sort of POSIX compliant shell (( bash, zshell, and endless others )) all freely available, all standards compliant and all widely used in every other OS in the world. Instead they have to go and reinvent the wheel and do some half-baked effort, that probably is way more limited, way more insecure and always halfway but never there.

Update: To answer the original poster, apparently is the last one, MS has always only stored the first 16 characters of your password and simply ignored all the remaining ones.

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Why Microsoft Got its Logo Right

This year has seen a full immersion into Microsoft’s now publicly catchy Metro design philosophy that favors flat colors, light sans serif usage, and user interface elements on a grid — an approach that is hard to be in disagreement with as it saves us from the 1980s, 90s, and early 00s Microsoft design philosophy which never get an official name, but let’s just call it Hideous.

Brand New

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EU expands browser probe to include Windows 8, Windows RT, says report

“Earlier Wednesday, Reuters reported that the European Commission had launched an inquest into accusations that Microsoft stymies other browser makers’ efforts to build software that runs in Windows 8 and the offshoot designed for ARM-powered tablets, Windows RT.”

Computerworld

Microsoft wanted so much to protect their Windows brand that they’ve brought along their past with all the weight, cruft and brand burning. Curious if this process would go ahead on the Windows RT side, if it was simply called “Metro OS” or some other name.

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The new Microsoft

Proposed design for Microsoft

Andrew Kim – Minimally Minimal

I find this proposal amazing. Very well conceived, it doesn’t completely deviate from the past but it is definitely light-years ahead.

What i find most interesting is that i’ve seen a dozen or so of new design proposals for Microsoft or Microsoft products in the last 6 months. That means two things i think: a) everyone “senses” that Microsoft is in trouble and fighting to stay relevant; b) that most of its products need a serious redesign to remove clutter, excess decoration and garish colours and just simply be more friendly. What i find most amazing is how that message has managed to miss Redmond completely. Don’t they browse the web sometimes?

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Windows 8: New UI, but old-school Microsoft

“The integration with the classic desktop though? Wow. It’s. Completely. Fucking. Insane.

The combination is jarring, confusing and ultimately unusable. I can’t even respect it as an interesting attempt, as it just simply doesn’t work. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Metro UI and apps should have been set off in a ‘mode’ – similar to how the Windows Media Center works. The fact that the Metro UI has been integrated in wholesale with the old-school WIMP interface is ridiculous, and more to the point, represents incredible cynicism on Microsoft’s part.

Make no mistake, this is Microsoft falling back on old-school monopolistic tactics to take on an upcoming challenger to their OS dominance. It’s like 1997 all over again, when Microsoft jammed Internet Explorer into Windows in places it didn’t really need to be in order to compete with Netscape. Remember when the entire *desktop* used to be an IE Window? Remember all the security and performance problems that came as a result? Remember U.S. vs. Microsoft? Why in the world do they think this tactic which failed so spectacularly before will work now? Are they psychotic?”

Russell Beattie

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A couple of questions about Windows 8 convergence

Just a quick question that has been bothering me. Considering that Microsoft goes full steam ahead with this plan of one OS for mobile phones and desktops, how will this work regarding new versions?

What i mean is, until now, both Android and iOS have been quickly iterating, with at least one major version per year, and several minor ones. Assuming that the several minor updates can be swiftly implemented and are just minor bug corrections without big hinderances, does this means that:

  1. Windows Phones will only have a new OS version every three years or more, becoming native feature stagnant in between? Third-party apps can offset this problem but if iOS and Android can do feature X and Y natively and more streamlined it would be an advantage for them.

  2. There will be a new major Windows version every year both for desktops and phones, making the legendary long-term support and software stability of windows a distant memory. I assume that by then, they will have no other option than going the Apple OS update prices to avoid OS fragmentation in at least half-dozen versions of Windows. I wonder how enterprises will react to this.

  3. The Windows core that both share will become feature-frozen for the conventional three years between Windows versions and only the Metro interface and API (Metro OS ?) will “suffer” frequent updates. But this will bring the same problems in itself. Either both desktop and phone Metro are currently updated and changed, leading to application versions conflict and possible fragmentation for the developers unless they (MS) make sure that everyone updates their Metro OS, possible only if nothing ever changes in Metro’s legacy code; or only the phone Metro will be frequent updated leading to a future and iterative divergence between phone Metro and Desktop Metro.

I’m not sure of the actual equivalence of Windows 8 Metro and Windows Phone 8 Metro, but if the Metro is supposed to be a common ground and they both share Windows Core, then they can’t be that different. And that, seems to me, is trying to tie together an elephant and a cheetah. One needs to run really fast to catch its opponents. The other just needs to be really still and move very slowly so that it doesn’t disturb or break anything in its current ecosystem. The only chance of they continuing “one” is feature stagnation for Windows Phone 8. Or tearing apart the “elephant” in a quick succession of runs and fast movements.

Or just finally assuming that they are two different applications of an OS and calling quits on this “One OS, no compromise” thing, because it will quickly lead to several compromises, it seems to me. However this is all based on the little that i know from Windows 8 Phone and Windows 8. Can anyone enlighten me regarding this “futurology” and the technical details?