Windows 8 Rant

So I have kept Windows 8 going for another few weeks but I’m rolling back to my Windows 7 snapshot in the morning. Now that I have used it for way to long for those minor tasks that I need to use Windows for I can truly say Microsoft is doomed. I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft or Windows but I never thought to myself “oh great I need to load Internet Explorer again to do this task”. I love the company I’m working for now but I’m so glad that I going to a company that doesn’t use any Microsoft products. No more windows for sometime I hope!

 

 

Windows 8 Review (Post Release) Part 3

I have been using Windows 8 for 4 days now and this is my verdict.  If you are happy with Windows 7 don’t upgrade.  If you are still running Windows XP and want a new computer, well you might want to try to find a computer that has Windows 7 installed.  I get Windows 8 for a multitouch tablet, maybe even a multitouch laptop or desktop but if you want to use a traditional computer without touch screens, just stick to Windows 7, move to Linux or buy a mac.  I personally find the user interface to be annoying, putting my mouse into a corner to bring up a function of the UI, I’m sure there are hot keys for most of the gestures but the average user isn’t or at least rarely going to use hot-keys (alt-tab still works to switch between applications thankfully).

I will be going into more details of my experience later.

 

One more thing it goes back to my post entitled Windows 8 maybe the end of Microsoft’s dominance on the desktop.  I was reading an article that Microsoft will be releasing a new version of Windows every year or every 2 years.  Microsoft can kiss the enterprise market good buy if they do that.  The enterprise market or at least most of it will be making a move to another operating system very fast especially those still on Windows XP.  I see a bright future for Apple, Red Hat, and Canonical.

Windows 8 Review (Post Release) Part 2

I started the upgrade around 1:10 am and it completed at 1:35.  For an install 25 minutes isn’t bad.  When Windows 8 finishes installing it gives you a quick tutorial on how to use Windows 8.  Then it proceeds to take time to “install apps” and configure my settings. and that completed at 1:40.  All my files on this VM where there and Office is working perfectly.  I’m going to be running this instead of my Windows 7 VM (which I have backed up) for the next seven days.

There maybe an input device driver problem since my mouse isn’t working but I’m going to blame that on VMware.

===UPDATE ON MY MOUSE===

Rebooting seemed to work…amazing how that works with Windows…

Windows 8 review (Post Release)

Windows 8 Review

Today I’m working on my Windows 8 update. First off my first complaint is the amount of disk space it requires when you do an upgrade from Windows 7. It needs at least 20 gigs of free space to do the upgrade. Windows 7 by itself uses 10 gigs and then Microsoft Office 2010 uses at least 10 as well so my virtual environment that I’m testing the upgrade on needed the virtual hard drive hard drive expanded. Most users wouldn’t upgrade a virtual machine but simply install a fresh copy of Windows 8 but I’m trying to test the Windows 8 upgrade process. If you are using a standard desktop or laptop computer and you don’t want to do a fresh install keep in mind you need at least 20 gigs of free space to perform the upgrade. I have never had a good experience doing upgrades between Windows versions (Windows XP to Vista or Windows XP to Windows 7 or Vista to 7). My experience would say to backup your data and perform a fresh install hopefully at the end of this upgrade I will say go ahead and perform an upgrade.

 

Moving forward with the iFolder fork!

I have made contact with a group of open source enthusiasts that live Texas and in Europe.  The project now called NoFolder, started as a blog and forum to help individuals setup iFolder on various Linux distributions most notably SUSE.  The goal of the project now is to get the current version working on RHEL 6 and CentOS 6 so it isn’t just a project that has packages for one Linux distro.

This is really exciting.  I just built all the required mono packages for both RHEL and CentOS.  The next step is to get iFolder RPM’s built for RHEL.  It looks like I would be able to just rewrite the SPEC file so I can build the packages in RHEL, nothing else should need to be rewritten thankfully.

If anyone wants to help please get in contact with me!

Stop developing apps on Oracle’s JDK and move to the openjdk

Today it looks like that the jury came back in favor of Oracle the intellectual property dispute between Oracle and Google.  Which I feel will open the flood gates for more lawsuits.  I really think everyone in the open source community that does Java development should quickly abandon developing on Oracle’s Java flavor and move to the openjdk or move to an different language entirely.  Red Hat is making that move with their applications I bet to avoid patent or other intellectually property issues with Oracle.  Oracle is proving to be an anti-open source company, if I had resources, I would personally fork the openjdk, virtualbox and any other open source project that Oracle sponsors before they use them as leverage over the open source community specifically openjdk.

 

iFolder 3 – Should be forked and developed by the community

When I worked at Novell the best application they deployed was iFolder, especially since I had both a desktop and a laptop computer.  I setup iFolder to sync my entire documents directory so if I was on my desktop at the office or on my laptop on the road I had everything I needed right there.  Sounds like new consumer services like dropbox or sugarsync right?  This was in 2005 well before dropbox and sugarsync.  Not only would it sync my entire documents directory I could create a shared iFolder and share documents with colleagues and have version control over the documents.  It was a great enterprise solution much better then a shared NFS export or CIFS share.

I personally have an iFolder server that I’m running out of my home office and I have hacked together the ability to access my files using webdav on my iPad.  It isn’t elegant but it works.

It is too bad that no one has taken the iFolder project and made it better.  Novell doesn’t seem to be doing anything with the project (www.ifolder.com).  It hasn’t been updated in years.  It is GPL and it is truly an awesome project, it just needs to get out of the hands of Novell.

If I was more then a hobbyist developer I would take up the challenge to make iFolder an awesome project.  A good chunk of it is written in C# so it needs an overhaul to another language like C++.  It is a project that I hope will be revived in the hands of someone or a company that actually truly cares about their open source projects.