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News Microsoft kills Sidebar, Gadgets over security concerns

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by brumgrunt, 13 Jul 2012.

  1. Horizon

    Horizon Dremel Worthy

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    I DL'd the patches and nothing happened, evertyhing works the same as before gadgets still enabled, even tho I'll I have active the printer status widget and bing desktop which snuck onto my computer via windows update.
     
  2. Speed

    Speed I'm all you need!

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    I assume you just used the one and the correct one?
     
  3. Teelzebub

    Teelzebub Up yours GOD,Whats best served cold

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    Never have or will use it, I think it's a waste of space tbh
     
  4. Star*Dagger

    Star*Dagger What's a Dremel?

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    Now if they could just remove the rest of the OS that makes it slow, stupid and weak!
     
  5. JacSmith

    JacSmith What's a Dremel?

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    Saving electricity. :)
     
  6. Tattysnuc

    Tattysnuc Thinking about which mod to do 1st.

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    Oh well. I'm sure you'll be able to download the security patched app version of this from the MS shop for Windows 8...
     
  7. Guinevere

    Guinevere Mega Mom

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    You're saying with a workforce of 93k people with quite a significant proportion of those being engineers they couldn't find a 'spare' developer if they wanted to?

    Fat chance.

    They knew it would be a big job of auditing, reengineering and running through QA a huge behemoth of an antiquated set of C++ libraries.

    More a case of "We'll get a project management team on it pronto, they'll fine half a dozen experienced C++ coders from a dusty back room in redmond. We'll give them two weeks to digest the documentation, and another six to issue a fix"
     
  8. faugusztin

    faugusztin I *am* the guy with two left hands

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    You misunderstood me. What i said was along the line "we don't want to waste time of any of our developers with that old junk, especially with Windows 8 close to release, and no one is going to pay MS for fixing that stuff. Let's throw it out."
     
  9. dogknees

    dogknees Minimodder

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    Not happy at all!!

    I have a live local rain radar, phase of the moon, satellite cloud cover as well as the cpu meter, network meter and a calendar. Rainmeter only does a fraction of these tasks.

    One of the best things about them is that you can set them almost completely transparent so they don't get in the way, and just have to roll the mouse over them to check something.

    No set of tiles that cover the applications you have open will replace this functionality.

    And don't get me started on the limitations on watching the output of a TV tuner in full-screen only! The whole, point of big monitors is that there's space to have all these things visible on the screen at once, and to have enough space to type this on bit-tech at the same times.
     
  10. rollo

    rollo Modder

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    Can't say I've used it first thing I disable on new builds.
     
  11. longweight

    longweight Possibly Longbeard.

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    Isn't that what smaller windows are for?
     
  12. thehippoz

    thehippoz What's a Dremel?

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    if you write gadgets, you can make them pretty efficient.. they're nice- especially the vista version of the sidebar.. set opacity and run your browser the right size.. can monitor many things at once

    combine with everest (or aida nowdays xD) you get a full monitoring of your rig from the taskbar to the sidebar and the osd handled with afterburner.. really only useful to programmers though- because a lot of the gadgets out there are coded pretty crappy

    I've taken quite a few and slimmed them down or strait fixed them- or wrote from scratch.. just because the luffagus don't use them doesn't mean anything (they actually ruin everything including gaming).. it's a useful feature

    I use my custom gadgets all the time! :p
     
  13. CrazyJam

    CrazyJam What's a Dremel?

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    I only use two of the default gadgets that Windows 7 comes with (CPU/RAM & Weather) so would I need to uninstall the sidebar as well or can I keep using it?
     
  14. dogknees

    dogknees Minimodder

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    Apparently Win8 will only support DTV tuners in a full screen view and only under Media Centre. So, no other windows visible at the same time.
     
  15. thewelshbrummie

    thewelshbrummie Minimodder

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    Each to their own I guess. Never helped that Microsoft were late to the desktop widget party, with Google and Yahoo having their own versions well before Vista. Lack or awareness didn't help either - once I showed my old man how to use them they've been on his work PC ever since (especially foreign currency exchange and weather). Having currency exchange, CPU/RAM meter and a twitter client auto load on boot without doing anything is a massive advantage - live tiles don't come close to offering that functionality (this coming from a hard core Win Phone 7 user, where the limited screen resolution makes tiles a more sensible route imho).

    Rainmeter didn't work for me, especially as my Win7 install has had massive niggly problems that seemed to coincide with installing it (updates fail to run, my Codemasters games fail to run - F1 2010/11, Dirt 2/3 refused to load). I liked that MS gadgets had to fit a certain width which worked perfectly with the Vista Sidebar. 7 isn't quite so good if you have more than the screen height full tahnks to the sidebar removal but they still work in the same way. Transparency options also helped limit their impact where needed - the twitter client I use is usually set at 20% transparency so is nearly invisible unless I hover the mouse over it - perfect for my needs.

    Rainmeter excepted, there's no longer an obvious alternative. Yahoo bought out the biggest desktop widget platform, Konfabulator, a few years back - it was shut down in April. Google depreciated Google Desktop last year, which included desktop widgets. Now Microsoft have gone the same route. And obviously Apple Dashboard won't work on Windows. As stated above - Rainmeter didn't work for me - I may give it another go on a sacrificial Win install but desktop widgets are very useful and make far more sense on a PC desktop than Live Tiles in Win8 do. Will be pretty disappointed with Microsoft if a bug fix isn't coming forward, though since the gallery was depreciated and the rumours flow about gadgets being removed from Win8 RTM I doubt we'll see it. They will be missed.
     
  16. [USRF]Obiwan

    [USRF]Obiwan What's a Dremel?

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    Rainmeter Cheesecake!
     
  17. CrazyJam

    CrazyJam What's a Dremel?

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    Just a bump to see if I can still use the default weather and cpu/ram monitor or do those pose a risk as well?
     
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