This week, Microsoft held its annual BUILD conference for developers at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Ars had Peter Bright on the scene when the company announced the new features that will be added into Windows 8.1. In the comments section beneath Bright's article, What does Windows 8.1 offer to desktop die-hards?, there were some mixed opinions about how meaningful Microsoft's changes will prove for desktop users.
dkazaz thinks the changes don't really solve the problem that Windows 8 really has: that the OS is trying to be all things for all devices. "I don't understand why the use of the two interfaces needs to be intermingled," dkazaz writes. "I'm quite interested in a hybrid desktop/touch OS. I just don't want to use a touch interface with a keyboard/mouse and I don't want (obviously) to have to use desktop elements on a touchscreen... Merging the two forces compromises on both. That doesn't mean that you can't have both in the same OS as long as you have clean switching between them. Is that really so hard for MS to figure out?"
robotic_tourist was a bit more charitable about the design choice: "I think the Start Screen is the new version of the ActiveX desktop. I never saw it used to good effect but it allowed animated widgets connected to the Web to display info on the desktop. What do most people have on their desktop? Application launcher icons. What do you get if you cross application launcher icons with animated widgets sucking down information from the Web? The Start Screen. Yes we laughed when we first saw the ActiveX Desktop, but now may be the time when it finally fulfills its potential!"
g0blue also had some positive things to say about 8.1's changes. "Another welcome addition to 8.1: Invoking the search charm (Win+Q) from the desktop no longer switches to the all-apps start screen. Instead you can search for apps (or files, webpages, etc.) from a sidebar on the desktop. Although the hot-key is slightly different, you can now search-launch apps without losing the view of your desktop or installing any third party utilities."
Not everyone was quite so positive. dagamer34 thought the changes were trivial and hoped there would be more to come. "Hopefully people can stop complaining about the Start Button/Menu and move onto far more important things that should be addressed in Windows 8/8.1."
Video Phone
This week we also heard a rather strange story about a young man in South Carolina who called in a fake bomb threat to get his girlfriend out of school for the day. The man was 20 and his girlfriend was 16, and while the legal age of consent in South Carolina is 16, federal law classifies sex videos with people under 18 as child porn. Unfortunately, the couple recorded just such a video on the phone he used to call in the bomb threat. Now he's serving 18 months in jail and will be marked as a sex offender for life.
One twist in Nate Anderson's story, Legal sex + smartphone video = child pornography, is that the issue was elevated to a federal level because the young man's smartphone was made by HTC. This meant it was classified as a production tool that has been exchanged through interstate and foreign commerce. mdporter was incensed about this.
"Making him a convicted sex offender and putting him on an offender database for life due to a video found on a found is an incredible overreach. The bomb threats were stupid and he deserves jail time for those, but the sex part is just malicious prosecution. And hey Federal assholes, it is not possible to buy a cell phone made in America.