(My very first impressions are here)
My gut reaction (hatred) of Windows 8 has passed, but what remains is a lingering discomfort. I found some of the important shortcuts (I go to desktop mode with Windows+D when I start-up or end up too deep in AppLand, and Window+ to cycle with snappy views) that quickly get rid of the strange layout where I often find myself. I've learned to open programs like Google Chrome NOT as an app, though it's frustrating that the Adobe Reader included comes only in app form and required another download.
The touch feature of many Windows 8 laptops appears mostly unnecessary to someone running in desktop mode, and I realized this when I noticed the majority of my touches to the screen have been to remove a hair or dust speck, which now causes an unwelcome scroll up or down. It's possible I will find niche instances where I will save time moving my hand to the monitor vs. moving the cursor, but we'll have to see. The swipe gestures using the touchpad were triggered inadvertently about 90% of the time, and I had to edit the registry to turn these "innovations" off. My point that all these examples allude to is:
My Windows 8 experience gets better as I get better at ignoring its irrelevant changes to what used to be a good OS.
The leap that W8 has failed to make with me so far is from "cool" and "useful in the abstract" to "useful in my real, everyday experience". The goal of an operation system that it still loaded onto over 4 in 5 new computers should not be to convince me it is cutting-edge or innovative. The ideal operating system for the mass market maximizes ease of use and minimizes confusion and frustration right out of the box. And, for the love of god Microsoft, if you want to teach customers something now, you better have plenty of tutorials. My concern is not for savvy Googlers like me who will willingly find workarounds to silly settings. But for the hefty majority of older users (who are intimidated opening a command prompt, diving into settings or even using a search engine), the net result is not learning to snap and swipe and swing and scroll like Millenials or thinking that Microsoft is relevant again. The net result is simply wasted time looking up tasks users knew how to do for the last fifteen years.
I understand that, from Microsoft's perspective, few people would be convinced to use the new features the company staked its future on if users had to opt-in to experience them or if it was easy to quickly turn them all off. But there need be no choice between cool and usable. Mac OS and iOS are both so easy a cavemen could learn them. Android adds customization to the iOS formula while being only slightly less intuitive. The Windows 8.1 update, while embarrassing in the sense that Microsoft either diluted or removed a number of the risks it took, is encouraging that the company can admit its mistakes. Microsoft is making the transition to an internet-based company like Google where failures are reversed quickly with updates. A year to correct glaring goofs is forgivable...for now.
I joined the Windows 8 world yesterday (9/20) after my Toshiba met a rather timely death after over 3 years of solid service. RIP Toshiba. Anyway, I've read about Microsoft's crazy year-old experiment for, well, a year now, and wonder what I will think if I commit myself to figuring it out and using the Metro interface to its fullest.
I expect my opinion to change dramatically over time, so there will be periodic updates.
9/21
Warning: Snap judgments ahead.
I hate it. I hate change. I just want my computer to be a computer, as I have defined it in my head. I'm among the first generation to have the internet my entire life (my family got our first computer when I was 1, and it accepted only floppy disks), but Windows 8 makes me feel like I'm old and don't understand technology. I'm being tossed into the abyss of tiles, touch, and terror. My burning questions so far:
1. Why, when I open Chrome, do I get a crazy view with no buttons at the top of the window and no icons below, but in Internet Explorer I get a view similar to the classic interface?
2. Why, when I download a file from the web, is there no option to open file location?
3. Why is search, an integral part of any OS, hidden? The only way I've been able to do it is my swiping from the right, and then selecting files within search. Why not default search everything?
3. I was warned about the fit/resolution issues, but I still wasn't prepared for this teeny tiny height on the text, url bar, volume etc. Why does Microsoft insist that I feel like an old person?
I will watch some tutorials and and start personalizing my live tiles, but I wonder why Microsoft did not send me a high quality tutorial upon first startup. In what way is the tile view intuitive to any first-time user? Just getting to Youtube and switching to the more familiar view was like walking a dark creepy forest of Microsoft's creation, and they wouldn't even hold my hand.
More to come. If you have any help or advice for W8, let me know in the comments!
A few days ago, I was playing a late-night round of everyone's favorite social-experiment-pretending-to-be-a-board-game, Settlers of Catan (consider checking my guide to crushing your opponents in Settlers here). The game, or should I say massacre, had one player building five cities before I got more than 2 roads off the ground. The number of 10's and 11's rolled defied all reality. Needless to say, it was a painful game to take part in. But what interested me most was the sheer unlikelihood of it all. I was witnessing a 3-standard-deviation event, a blue moon, a 100-year-flood. And I had no idea how to react without evoking sour grapes.
The first conclusion I reached is that I need to tone down my competitiveness, especially in games that involve luck. My desperate attempts at trades and persuasive maneuvers in the face of absurd dice rolls more made me crazy than did any good. It was the equivalent of a mouse writhing and flailing while already in a snake's grasp. I should have accepted my friend's victory far earlier and focused on enjoying the good company of Emily, JFran, and Alex.
Second point (this is the extreme value analysis one!)
To make a larger point, I've noticed that it's intuitively hard for most people to deal with rare statistical events. It's a "we'll probably be fine" way of thinking that allowed the New Orleans levees to not be raised or reinforced, young adults to avoid buying even basic health insurance in case of catastrophic illness (pre-ACA I mean, now it's an economic decision), or thousands of financial analysts to disregard the remote possibility of million of simultaneous mortgage defaults in the 2008 housing crisis.
You may be familiar with the human tendency to assign patterns to random events, especially unlikely ones. I've heard remarks in-game such as "ugh 12's are never rolled" and "4's have been on fire this game". The former is a small but important rounding error, like saying a piece of paper or a small volume of air weighs nothing, when enough of either would crush a person. The latter is a clear case of the gambler's fallacy. We forget that a 100-to-1 odds coincidence is still going to occur more often than not if we have at least 68 rolls of the dice, and if we considered 10 such (independent) 100-to-1 coincidences, one would occur every 7 or so rolls (used my friend binomdist for these). The point is, if we try something over and over, we would foolish not to expect rare events from time to time. We should try our best to plan appropriately, devoting 5x more effort to defend against a 10/1 occurrence vs. an equally bad 50/1 occurrence.
But what if the stakes are high? An extreme event in Settlers only meant that I finished the game with 3 points. But if you are a government, or an insurance company, or you are gambling with your health, one cataclysmic disaster every few decades is not good enough. If magnitude-7.5 earthquakes are very likely to occur in LA this century, but an magnitude-8.5 earthquake is only 7% likely, the local government better damn well bite the bullet and require buildings be constructed to withstand an 8.5. If you are a multibillion-dollar insurance company you cannot allow yourself to be be on the hook for over $440 billion in insurance payouts in the event of a housing collapse (AIG), even if it is quite profitable and you consider the bad case quite unlikely.
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| Extreme weather indeed. |
So, extreme value analysis matters in how we see the world and prepare for the worst, especially as a group. I am a free-market guy who errs on the side of low regulation, but the long time horizon of the US and the high stakes means I bend my ideology on some issues. I support inspection for food quality at the federal level because it only takes one great screwup to harm hundreds or thousands of people; pure market forces would allow this to happen in rare cases to increase efficiency, but a government is interested in a society where consumers can trust their businesses. I accept public policy action to address climate change, even if I think the research is often wasteful and misplaced, because the stakes are high enough and our climate is sensitive enough to the potential actions of crazy people in power.
I guess you could summarize a practical use of extreme value analysis as:
1. Try to think about risks in a more precise way than "this 'usually' or 'never' happens".
2. The longer your time horizon, and the more intolerable the consequences, the more you must bend your precise thinking to over-prepare for when that remote event occurs.
If you were a big data scientist or a sales forecaster or the FEMA chief, I'd ask you to make models. For the rest of us, just try to use numbers when thinking about extremes.
