Quote of the week

The learning curve is real and needs to be addressed
—Tami Reller, chief marketing officer and chief financial officer of Microsoft’s Windows division, commenting on Windows 8 in a New York Times interview.

The phone that once was

The real phone

Source: Shoebox Blog

Educational and informative sites

Here are some sites where you can learn something new and interesting:

History of digital storage

It isn’t often that you have an area where there are changes that amount to many orders of magnitude. My first personal desktop had a 20 MB hard drive. My present desktop has multiple drives and several are 2 TB. So my main drive has 100,000 times the storage capacity that my first one had. Some history of digital storage is shown in the infographic below.

History of storage media
Source: Daily Infographic

A personal opinion about Windows 8

Well, I tried—I tried to like Windows 8 but it just was not to be.

I have been using the new operating system off and on for a year, beginning with the beta and I have it installed as the main operating system on a laptop and in a virtual machine on a desktop. But it just doesn’t work for me. Oh, it’s usable alright but too many things take extra steps. Almost everything I want to do on a computer has to be done on the desktop and that is part of the problem. Microsoft really, really wants you to use the tiles, and apps, and the Start screen. Using the desktop is just not as convenient as it used to be. And I already have a very nice iPad for much of what Windows 8 is touted to be good at.

I’ll continue to use Windows 8 because I write about it and give lectures about it. But I won’t be recommending it to my friends. I have finally learned how to deal with many (but not all) of the things I dislike about Windows 8. But why should the average PC user have to go through learning what amounts to a new operating system?

If you would like a review of Windows 8, I refer you to an article by the blogger Dedoimedo written in his inimitable style. Be aware that the author Dedoimedo is fond of four-letter words.

Tuesday links

Monday links