Quote:
Originally Posted by Nicholson58 View Post
I "UPDATED" to 7 because XP was no longer supported. Not only do they require updates, You cannot own the new office suit. My old OFFICE will not load by their $$ extraction plan. You must rent it now by the year. I suppose that when it expires while you are at sea, you will be incapacitated. I am so angry with their exploitation of the customer base. What a business plan. I may be going raspberry pie/Linux or re-loading 95, 98, XP and Office. Perhaps Mac. I think I am done with Mr. Gates knows best etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chala
So will be many others, just waiting for someone else making a better OS.
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Well, Nicholson 58 doesn't need MS Office. That kind of user needs OpenOffice or something like that.
MS Office is for intense professional users, for whom the continuous development and updating is worth the
price of the subscription.
I have no problem with this system for my own usage. Office 2016 is full of improvements which are really useful in my
work. And the cost is reasonable compared to
buying a
license and regularly upgrading. It would be nice, of course, if Microsoft had real competition, making it harder to exploit the installed best, and were less costly, but that's a different conversation.
The cost is reasonable NOW -- you can install it on FIVE devices, and move the installations between devices easily. So it's actually quite a bit cheaper than
buying licenses, if you have multiple devices and would be upgrading frequently anyway. The cynic in me says that this advantage will disappear when they finally kill off regular licenses. I don't disagree that Microsoft is a rapacious company, which exploits imperfect markets. But that does not mean that they do not produce useful products, even good ones.
If I were at sea doing only personal things, with limited connectivity, I would ditch MS Office for sure. It's just not intended for that kind of use. I like OpenOffice very much, and there are a number of other choices.
Concerning Windows -- it's also not for everyone. Linux runs better, is open, and free. I think for many sailors this is the ideal OS.
But Windows is now a different OS from what it was. On my machine, 8.1 runs phenomenally well, incomparably better than Windows 7. I don't know why this is, but it is. The UI is maybe not for everyone, but it sure as hell is for me. It works phenomenally well for me. It is indeed not only for touch screens -- it works extremely well with touchpad gestures and arrow keys.
I think that the bottom line is that the Mac/early Windows idea of a GUI had some fatal flaws, and was even a kind of dead end. Having to move and drag virtual objects around in a formless virtual space is an extremely inefficient way to accomplish a discrete task, compared to a keystroke or other kinds of inputs, even choosing something from a menu. It's some kind of solution for users who are incapable or unwilling to learn a keystroke sequence, and that's the birth of the Mac in one phrase. For all of the many faults of early Windows, you have to give MS credit for some profound improvements to this primitive idea of a GUI -- of which the right click contextual menu is probably the most significant.
Windows 8 changes the virtual space of the GUI by adding granularity and structure to it. No longer is it just a formless "desktop" which you just pile icons onto. This builds on the idea of Android, but it goes far, far beyond that, and it is not, indeed mainly useful for touchscreens. And one argument for that -- suddenly, Windows 8 can be used pretty well even without a MOUSE, much less a touchscreen. Unlike the old Desktop, you can get around it efficiently -- extremely efficiently -- with keystrokes. Spend 10 minutes
learning some of the keystroke shortcuts (some of them here:
Mouse and keyboard: What's new in Windows - Windows Help) and it will blow your mind.
This is, finally, a GUI made for people with brains -- the exact opposite direction from Mac, which seems (to me) to be designed for chimpanzees (my sister, for years senior editor of MacWorld, will kill me for that remark
). I know the Mac system has quite a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but I've never seen anyone using them (other than the very basic ones like Ctrl X, Ctrl V, etc.) -- it just goes against the whole idea of the Mac system. Even real
power users.
I realize that I am not a typical user so my point of view might not be applicable for everyone. The paradigm for interaction between man and machine for me is UNIX. I realize that this paradigm doesn't
work today, when normal people have to be able to use with some amount of efficiency dozens or hundreds of different applications without any
training. We used to have to take weeks long
training courses every time we started using a new program in UNIX, and this is obviously impractical the way we use
computers today. But the problem is that we've gone all the way to the other extreme, and no one learns anything anymore, even about their OS, much less about their applications.
You need to study Windows 8 a little bit -- just a little -- in order to be able to use it efficiently. Boy, does it ever pay off.
I don't know anything about Windows 10 yet. From what I hear, the differences to 8.1 are not profound. I don't mind the subscription system for Office, but I'm not sure I want my OS to be like that. So I haven't upgraded yet.
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