My thanks to the SHR Media Network for allowing me to broadcast in their studio and over their air twice weekly, Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as appear on the Sack Heads Radio Show™ each Wednesday evening.
This was BZ’s second night running the new SHR laptop with Windows 10, and the machine hosed me. I had previously set up the show on Spreaker, filling out the requisite information and, with 7 minutes before broadcast, it told me I had updates ready and forced me into a restart. It took 6 minutes to restart and I was able to open Spreaker and complete filling out the show material with about 10 seconds before the show had to begin at 8 PM Pacific. Furthermore, I lost all my audio cuts with the restart and played the Patton speech so that I could have enough time to reacquire those cuts from the internet as it was playing. Close.
If I sounded a bit rushed and flustered at the beginning of the Saloon, now you know why. Not happy, but made it work.
Tonight in the Saloon we discussed:
- General George Smith Patton addresses the troops;
- Damn, it’s hot in the studio again; the official SHR lava lamp is still lighted;
- President Trump fires FBI Director James Comey; I give background;
- The chatroom fills out; Conservative LA visits the chatroom briefly; thanks for that;
- Texas Governor Greg Abbott signs the sanctuary city bill, Leftists go insane;
- Emmanuel Macron beats Marine Le Pen; France has a new president;
- France decides it wants the status quo and continues to embrace multi-kulti;
- Germany’s Angela Merkel larfs maniacally as she is now the official French President By Proxy;
Listen to “BZ’s Berserk Bobcat Saloon, Tuesday, May 9th, 2017” on Spreaker.
Please join me, the Bloviating Zeppelin (on Twitter @BZep and on Gab.ai @BZep), every Tuesday and Thursday night on the SHR Media Network from 11 PM to 1 AM Eastern and 8 PM to 10 PM Pacific, at the Berserk Bobcat Saloon — where the speech is free but the drinks are not.
As ever, thank you so kindly for listening, commenting, and interacting in the chat room or listening via podcast. My apologies for not monitoring the chatroom because the second screen wasn’t working yet; it will next week.
Want to listen to all the Berserk Bobcat Saloon archives in podcast? Go here.
BZ
My thanks to the SHR Media Network for allowing me to broadcast in their studio and over their air twice weekly, Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as appear on the Sack Heads Radio Show™ each Wednesday evening.
I’m going to break with some of the comments above.
Keep in mind that I only ran Windows as a primary platform at home briefly in 1995, and then on a work machine from 1998-2000. I have set up and supported machines for friends, families and clients, but my platform of choice has been Linux for the past twenty years.
That said, I have been using Windows 10 in a virtual machine on my desktop for several weeks, as well as on a phone for the past week. Additionally, I upgraded my mother’s tablet from 8.1 to 10 this past weekend.
My initial impressions are generally positive. I maintain that 8.1 was actually a decent platform for touch-enabled devices (especially tablets), but it definitely had severe short-comings as a desktop operating system. Invoking controls that were hidden as a sop to mobile devices with smaller screens was cumbersome and unintuitive with a mouse.
They have largely addresses these concerns. Most common control panel functionality has been subsumed into the new Settings app (with obvious links back to the more comprehensive control panel for advanced or esoteric settings). Metro apps are no longer forced full screen on the desktop, so you don’t get the absurdity of an app designed with 5″ screens in mind taking up a 27″ monitor. Continuum and universal apps promise a far more harmonious and integrated experience than the jarring and sometimes confusing divide between the metro and desktop modes of Windows 8*.
* Whether that promise is delivered depends somewhat on adoption and transition, but at least the platform has moved in the right direction. And it is somewhat academic for a dedicated desktop device, since it will never need to be in tablet mode.
There are certainly some privacy concerns, but that is true with every vendor. Windows 10 tracks no more information than Google does on Android and Chrome, for example, and they are surprisingly transparent about what is being collected and provide straightforward ways of disabling it. This is a fairly good article on the subject:
http://www.windowscentral.com/all-you-need-know-privacy-windows-10
And it is true there is some functionality that has been phased out of the Windows release. Windows Media Center was already deprecated by the time Windows 8 came out, though there was enough lingering demand at that point that they released an expansion pack. If you are upgrading from Windows 7 or a Windows 8 edition that contained those features, you will get the new DVD player app for free. Otherwise they offer it as a $15 add-on, but I would recommend downloading the excellent (and free) VLC application instead.
They also removed the Solitaire games from the distribution, but similar apps are available free as downloads from the Microsoft Store as “Microsoft Solitaire Collection” and “Microsoft Minesweeper”.
Microsoft has also been transparent on these changes, listing removed and change features right in the specifications:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/Windows-10-specifications#featdep
Personally, if I were running an earlier release on my “daily driver” and was happy with the experience, I would hold off. But if I were buying a new machine, I would definitely go with Windows 10. At minimum it is a significant improvement of Windows 8/8.1 and Windows 7 already fell out of mainstream support in January. They are offering extended support through 2020, so it will run on existing hardware and get security fixes, but may suffer in terms of new hardware support and bug fixes.
Ideally, if you have a working machine that is powerful enough, I would install Windows 10 in a virtual machine to play with long enough to get a feel for it. Or maybe head to the Microsoft Store (if you have one near by) and play with a machine there for a while. That has the advantage of giving you a chance to ask the associates any questions you have about new features or behaviour.