By the time Windows 7 was released Vista had enough service packs to make it quite usable, so I don't think that it is fair to say that my statement was far from the truth. There are plenty of people who still claim to this day that Vista was an unusable mess even though that was just the initial teething problem.

And even then, a lot of what was said about the OS was just wrong. I avoided Vista because of what I read about it here. When I finally got a laptop for my wife with it pre-installed, I decided to try it out for a laugh before I wiped it with my XP CD only to find that it was a perfectly capable system. It certainly didn't take 30 seconds to do a directory listing for me. I'm sure that a lot of people had driver issues that caused problems, but the other stuff said about it (like the DRM that was supposed to infest the OS and stop you from doing anything that Microsoft didn't want) was just the product of fantasy.

Of all the examples that I gave of the times when people have said that a version upgrade of Windows gave no real features, I think the Vista to Win7 would have to be either first or second in the list when ordered by plausibility. I think the fact that this claim was made about Xp->Vista (when that was the biggest change in Windows under the hood in nearly a decade) shows that in reality it is a bogus thing to say. I certainly don't say it. I was just pointing out that with each upgrade, someone will make that claim.

The difference there is that if you didn't know about the hot corners, the Mac was a perfectly usable system. On Windows 8, you had no way of getting to the start screen or charms without knowing about them. Without that knowledge, Windows 8 was an unusable system.

I should have been more clear that having the ability to do this is fine, but requiring the user does it as the main interface is not.

A lot of those shortcuts were also on the Windows 7 start menu (unless you turned them off). I don't have a Windows 8.1 system in front of me, but I don't recall anything on it that could not be pinned to the Start Menu. Perhaps some of the direct links into the Control Panel, but that could be done with a bit of fiddling.

That's true. It is also different to "it prints blank pages" and "it emits no pages". "It doesn't print" is vague and unhelpful, because as you said customers lie in bug reports and will therefore say it won't print when it actually prints garbage.

Having been the recipient on many a bug report that was as simple as "it won't print", I know that you almost always have to follow up such general bug reports with questions to narrow down the problem. This is especially the case with printing when the problem may only present with certain documents (something a crash report will not tell you).

But when Firefox doesn't crash it doesn't send that information (obviously). The equivalent of "it won't print" would be "the web page is blank". A rendering error will not trigger the crash reporting system.

However, if a bug report is generated due to a crash in the print spooler then it will be obvious that it didn't print so adding the text "it won't print" provides nothing useful.

This was answered in the link that you provided. Right click on the task bar icon and open a new instance of the application (or access the jump list of recently used files). It works for Windows 7 and 8.

Yeah, I hate the Metro interface too. But this is the high profile change that they made to Windows 10, so it is already a solved problem.

This is a configurable option in Windows 8.1, so that isn't a problem.

It will be interesting how many of Windows 8's less intuitive user interface features will still be around in the final version of Windows 10. My most hated modern user interface idea is the removal of UI hints to simplify the screen. You end up having to try clicking and swiping everything just to see if it does something. Having to move the mouse to particular corners of the screen is a crap idea too

Well that is what they have done now. I read a great article once on the though process that went on behind the scenes about the new interface. I wish I could find it again, because it put it all into perspective. I will still always hate the Metro interface and the loss of functionality that it brings, but I have been surprised at the change of heart about it that the staff at my company have had about it. They went from hating it to acceptance (and even one who loves it).

That gets said about every version of Windows. XP was just a face-lift on 2000. Vista was just XP run as a limited user. Windows 7 was just Vista, which, for some reason, the people who hated Vista decided that they loved. The changes in each version are more noticeable when moving back to an old version. You suddenly realise how many of the new features you use when they suddenly disappear.

Now I write that though (on my Windows 7 computer), I can't think of any examples of things that I miss from Win8 right now.

"It doesn't print" isn't a complete and useful report because it is just one step up from simply saying "it doesn't work". Presumably it does print for some people, so the developers really need to be able to narrow down the problem.

Does it crash as soon as it starts the print process, or does it go appear to generate each page? Does it send anything to the printer (flashing light on printer), but just no pages are emitted? Is it just that blank pages are emitted? Or random garbage characters? There can be many symptoms of not printing, and they would each suggest a problem in a different bit of code.

Yes, it does log activity in the beta versions of Windows. It seems that their collective head is in the right place. However, all the logging in the world can't see what has come out of your printer.

A few extra watts? That is understating it dramatically.

Then surely this just backs up my point, which was that you can't use the current performance as a guarantee of future results. What I was using the past performance for was as proof of that exact point; not that past warming was proof of future warming but that the current pattern cannot be used as proof of the lack of future warming.

Of course it didn't go back a long way. It was a graph showing more detail of the most recent temperatures to demonstrate how noisy the data is that you can't use a short term phenomenon as a predictor of long term trends. It was not the graph that I was referring to throughout the rest of my post about the previous lulls and drops in temperature not being harbingers of the end of global warming. I was looking at a PDF of a graph while I was writing, but I had intended to link to an online version in my post. Rather than me choose one that you might take issue with, why don't you do a Google search and find one yourself. Whichever you choose they demonstrate my point.

We have a pretty good picture of temperatures dating back thousands of years from various sources like tree growth patterns and ice core samples. So do you really think that scientists suddenly get all stupid about interpreting the measurements made a hundred years ago? That they can't (or didn't think to) correlate between the various measuring stations at the time and factor equipment problems and local environmental changes?

It is no coincidence that temperature graphs for modern times all start in the mid to late 1800s. That is the time that scientists agree is when accurate enough records began. You might like to say that it is only the last 45 years that we have accurate measurements, but the scientific community would beg to differ on that assertion.

Suicidal? How can it be suicidal to reduce our carbon footprint to a level that we had in the past, when obviously we didn't all die out back then - either literally or economically. And they say the AGW proponents are alarmists!!

But if you are right and we really don't know enough about the environment, surely the most sensible approach would be to not keep pumping the atmosphere with substances that we don't know what effect it will have on our climate. Stop doing that until we know more. How can you possibly defend doing otherwise? Surely those children who haven't mastered basic arithmetic shouldn't be trying to build nuclear power plants.

No, not that Global Warming, it's another one. You can't say that it has stopped or is dead, because all you need to do is look at a graph of global temperatures to see that this is not unprecedented. The global temperature peaked in 1940 and then didn't reach that point again until 1970. Global Warming didn't stop back then, despite that lull.

In fact, that wasn't a lull, it was more of a plummet then a rise. If you look at the graphs, you will see that the global temperature repeatedly plateaus (or even falls) only to continue warming a few years later.

It is totally premature to try to call the end of a major trend while you are in the middle of it. Just look at how noisy the data is for the period that you mention (which is just one reading). Who is to say that we wont see another step up in the next year or so followed by another plateau at a higher level? It certainly fits the pattern that we have seen in the past.

If the NSA are supposed to be spying on foreign entities, then it stands to reason that Snowden telling everyone this would not be a huge revelation; it would be just stating the obvious. As such, Snowden could not have hurt the economy.

It doesn't look that dead just yet. While that graph shows a straight diagonal line of transistor count over time, there should also be a flat line alongside showing the number of people who predict that Moore's Law is dead.

Why would they need to partner with Apple when they can just shrink their own competing Ultrabook spec? They own the trademark to it after all.

What difference does that make? You are attempting to discredit this story by maligning the submitter. That is known as playing the man, not the ball. Nothing that mdsolar wrote was untrue, and it didn't even sound judgemental.

Rest assured that if a renewable power station went offline there would be plenty of other people who would submit stories about it, and I'm sure lots of them would have similar partisan posting histories (albeit with an anti-renewable agenda). The question is, would you write a similar complaint about those submitters or is it just those who fail to talk in gushing tones about nuclear power that incur your wrath?

How does Facebook make this any better than having it listed on a website? Sure you can click a link to go to another website, or you can just show it inline as an image on the page the is currently being viewed. Is anyone really going to want to spam themselves by having the daily menu coming up in their Facebook feed everyday?

Considering that the doomsday didn't eventuate during the cold war then it is not necessarily wrong to say that it was closer then than now. The main difference between the danger being face now and then was that back then you didn't have a huge segment of the population disbelieving the experts who said that the world was in danger. Nobody was so stupid enough to say that just because people died before the atom bomb was invented that it means that bomb couldn't be responsible for killing anyone now (to adopt one of the anti-AGW lines).

We are actually closer to danger now because politically we are further from a solution than we were back then. At least both sides recognised that they had to consider the ramifications of their actions and that something had to be done. Fast forward to today, and the two sides now want different things; one wants to change things while the other wants to keep the status quo. That is far more dangerous than what we had in the past.

The other crucial difference is that for the danger of doomsday to exist back then, someone would have to make the decision to "push the button". Someone would have to decide to be actively responsible for armageddon. The danger we face now is opposite. If we don't take action this time then the predicted doomsday will happen by itself. Nobody has to press any button to make bad things happen. We are closer to doomsday because the button was already pressed years ago when we started down the path of rapid expansion of our use of fossil fuels.

The fact is that the doomsday clock actually worked during the cold war. It kept the issue in the minds of the people, so that the political will was there to solve the problem. The clock wasn't accurate nor inaccurate. It was a symbol.

In the same way, the changing of the clock isn't striving for accuracy in as much as it is raising the notion that we are facing a crisis in the public perception. And it is needed now more than ever.