On the decline, originally uploaded by http://andrewskelton.net.
Please don’t invite me out to dinner at the moment, Dear Reader, I have very little appetite after the large slice of Humble* Pie I’ve had to ingest after my postings about Windows 8. I’ve now had a more thorough, and real world, test of Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating system and reluctantly, at first, I have to admit I do like it, even the new Metro interface.
The most visible changes, the metro interface, the charms menu etc are just different ways of doing the same type of thing as you could in Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 but what has changed, bringing the OS more in line with things like the iPhone and Android operating systems is the utilisation of cloud services. As with these laterly mentioned phone operating systems, system settings allow you to configure services and how over they communicate with the servers, albeit in a simplistic fashion ie ON or OFF!
I’m not sure I’m ready to upgrade my home systems to this new OS just yet, not because I don’t want to encounter bugs that inherent in first iterations of any piece of software** but at £50 per machine and Christmas fast approaching I can’t warrant the cost.. that and Amazon have their Black Friday sales taking place all week!
* The correct term is Umble Pie, a medieval dish that contained the often discarded parts of a butchered beast such as heart, and lungs which was eaten by the peasants.
** Nintendo’s recently released Wii U requires a firmware update before you can use it – the download is over 1Gb and should the download process be interrupted in any way then there’s a very real risk that the newly purchased console could be turned into a “brick”*** before it’s even used.
*** Brick – a phone, pc, console (other pieces of electronics are available) that are rendered unusable when the application of a new piece of firmware (the software that makes the system work, a bit like an operating system) fails so that the device won’t even power up.
Andrew Skelton: 
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