In short…I no longer despise Windows 8. I don’t love it, and I probably never will, but I don’t hate it. In about a week, I have figured out how to more or less do everything I could before. The saving grace is the “Desktop”…a feature hidden under about a hundred useless apps that come pre-“pinned” to the new start page. So after I unpinned all but about 15 things, I discovered the desktop…which is pretty much like windows 7, less the start button. I will be spending 95% of my time there. I usually have 10-20 windows open at a time, and I don’t know how to do that any other way to do this in Windows 8.
I know that Microsoft is attempting to provide a unified experience with Windows 8 across all platforms, but what perhaps they are forgetting is that I use different devices for different things. No phone or tablet will ever replace my PC for “work”..including blogging. I need a big desk, a comfy chair, a couple of huge monitors, plus a keyboard and mouse to work. I can barely stand working in excel on a 16” laptop. Doing it on a 9″ touchscreen tablet is never going to happen. You can miniaturize everything else, but don’t try to shrink my display, my keyboard, or my mouse…they are just fine thanks!!. That said…Windows 8…outside of the “desktop view” looks pretty, but it doesn’t use space efficiently. I have a 27″ monitor for a reason…so I can have a ton of things open at the same time without scrolling. Windows 8…perhaps so it can be used on multiple touch screen platforms does not seem to realize this. Sorry, but I don’t need a gigantic excel icon…I’m not trying to teach a grizzly bear how to use a touch screen.
Just for kicks I did one simple speed test. I have one particularly large database in Access. The single table has about 5M rows and is 1.6GB. I lined up a 2 year Windows 7 old laptop with 4GB of memory with the new Windows 8 laptop, also with 4GB of memory. I closed everything else, and pushed the enter button simultaneously. The tables opened within a fraction of a second of each other… after a few minutes of processing.. so performance where I need it is about identical…no complaints here.
Anyway…it’s certainly not worth upgrading too, but thanks to the new hipsters at Microsoft, you’ll be forced to make a change in 3 or four years when your laptop finally dies. It’s an annoyance…change for the sake of change, but you’ll quickly adapt. If I were a teenage girl, perhaps I could appreciate the beauty of Windows 8 more than I do, but alas…that ship sailed a long time ago. To me, Windows 8 is like a new coat of paint on a dirty old work truck….It was fine before so what’s the point?
The US Daily Deficit for 1/29/2013 was $4.2B bringing the total through 29 days to $28B. We are likely to see mild deficits for the remaining two business days of January, so a deficit of $30-40B seems likely.
The US Daily Surplus for 1/28/2013 was $5.5B on strong revenues…pretty typical for a Monday. Cash in hand was $75B, and the debt limit is still unchanged. The House has already passed the bill, but the Senate still needs to approve it and Obama needs to sign it. This is expected tomorrow, or at least by week end. I don’t know how long it will take Treasury to unwind their “extrordinary” measures, but I will be keeping an eye in the change in debt once they do. Expect a spike in the $100B range. The last time there was a debt limit battle, debt outstanding spiked $238B the next day as Treasury brought their off balance sheet shenanigans back into the fold. I don’t expect that much…the battle of 2011 went on for a lot longer than this battle…if we can even call it that.
With 3 business days left, Revenues are up a solid 10% over last year and likely to increase a bit more. I expected a ballpark of $20B increase due to tax hikes and the trend. Add some delay to refunds (which we count as “negative” revenues) and possibly some filers pulling some income into 2012 for the lower tax rates, and there is nothing all that surprising about this “improvement”…if we dare call getting taxed more an improvement.
Cost is currently fairly even, but will likely end up $10-15B over last year. We’ll have the finals Friday, but $25B looks like a pretty safe bet for the monthly deficit. I said early on that deficit wise, January was going to be a snoozer, but never fear…February is almost here. Feb 2012 posted a $249B deficit…about a quarter of the yearly total packed into 29 exciting days!!. I have no reason to expect anything different from Feb 2013.
