Just dodge around the new UI and it's quite usable. Or better yet get Start8 and automatically skip the new UI on log in altogether (and get a win7 style start menu as a bonus).
Why they would include a tablet oriented touch centric UI in a server product is a matter for another discussion...
Yes. This can certainly be done. It's not ideal but it can be done.
The problem is that this a standard complaint everywhere, and that this is the standard response given everywhere.
In doing everything they could to force Metro down users' throats in Windows 8 (which is a decision I disagree with, but can understand), Microsoft completely failed when repeating that same judgement for a server OS.
Server-admins doing RDP does not want Metro. They have nothing to benefit from metro. They will never use metro. They will not install "apps" on their servers.
This decision has done nothing except harm Microsoft's perception among people who would normally be the proponents of their technology.
I can almost let the decision to have Metro on enterprise desktops slide, considering I use Windows 8 everyday in the enterprise and can almost fully ignore Metro (except for the broken desktop search).
But Metro on Windows Server? It just warps my brain trying to justify that. I cannot think of a single technical reason for it to be there. Except maybe consolidation of shell code, and that's a crappy reason.
They've obviously got their units messed up in that section. I used 99GiB yesterday, and I'm fairly sure I don't account for over a third of my country's bandwidth usage :)
that's an awesome idea and i hope we can figure it out one day :P our attempts so far have been unsuccessful. if you have any ideas as to how to do this, send them our way!
I doubt if that will work. As per http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_2...
"If the giver and the recipient do not live in the same country, the book may not available to the recipient due to copyright restrictions. In these cases the recipient will be given the option to request an exchange for gift credit on their Amazon.com account during the redemption process, or they may contact Customer Service for assistance in exchanging the book."
To extend upon this idea - if you really wanted to maximise the data you could transmit in a single twitter message you could use the full 31bits of unicode (instead of just the chinese subset) and then apply standard lossless data compression techniques to the generated unicode for further improvement.
There are a lot of code points that would need to be filtered out if you do this - Noncharacters, Control codes, High/Low surrogates, Private-Use, Whitespace, and then of course the ones that mutate other code points in the sequence - Bidirectional, Combining characters / diacritical marks. It isn't quite as simple as just combining random 32-bit characters, as I found when creating my URL shortener.
That's not right. Surrogates are code points. That's the whole idea! It means you can express characters beyond the BMP with legacy encodings that were designed back when the entire code space could be coded in 16 bits. Newer encodings like UTF-8 don't have to rely on surrogates to do this because they have that capability at the bytewise encoding level.
I just hope there will be a way to entirely disable the Metro UI. I'm sure it'll be fine for small form factor devices, but it has absolutely no place on my home desktop.
I would say "give it a shot, first". I find the Metro UI very attractive, but my wife (who is not into tech in the slightest) was turned off by it.
And then I let her play with my WP7 Mango phone and her opinion completely turned around. A pretty good example of the contrast between user interface and user experience, in my book.
I'm totally looking forward to using Metro. I want it on my laptop when I'm in consume mode on the couch. But when I go to the Office, back to WinLegacy mode.
Hopefully we will be surprised that the UI on a desktop was also taken into consideration, which I assume Microsoft is doing since the desktop is their main platform at the moment.
You're right, I haven't given it much of a chance. It'll be re-evaluated time and again as we get closer to release, this is just my feeling at the moment.
With 3 large monitors and lots of multi-tasking, I just don't see this being preferable to the desktop / window metaphor status quo. Not to mention 25TB of files to keep organised.
I realise this will all still be possible by running the "desktop app" (explorer.exe?), I just don't expect to do anything but run that straight away.
Again, I'm sure this will be excellent for small form factor and casual users (provided it's implemented well, which microsoft seems to be putting a lot of effort into), but for someone who uses a desktop for a large part of the day (for both work and otherwise) I don't see Metro as viable.
For a 3-mon system managing 25TB of data, I think explorer is what you'll use. I'll be shocked if there isn't a way to make explorer your default. If there isn't at lauch, someone will fix it.
They may also have difficulty getting large companies to upgrade unless the Metro UI is easy to disable. Lots of companies are still on XP because they considered 7 such a dramatic change; I'd guess that a forced major change to the entire UI could spell disaster for their Enterprise sales.
Why they would include a tablet oriented touch centric UI in a server product is a matter for another discussion...