Slashdot Mirror

You sure?

This seems to suggest otherwise - quote: "Metro style apps in the Windows Store can support both WOA and Windows 8 on x86/64. Developers wishing to target WOA do so by writing applications for the WinRT"

Huh? Microsoft doesn't need Intel to port .Net apps. .Net applications are MSIL code and should work for for any platform they have a byte-code compiler for, including ARM. Microsoft has had .Net running on ARM devices (Compact Framework) for 10 years. Here's a real article from Microsoft outlining development for ARM. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2012/06/12/what-you-need-to-know-about-developing-for-windows-on-arm-woa.aspx

Wait! I thought RT used a Metro interface; so what's all this talk about Taskbar and "Desktop"?

That Win8 on ARM (what's now called "Windows RT") was restricted to Metro was a rumor early on, but the official story has corrected that. It does have desktop mode, same as x86 edition.

The primary difference is that it only runs desktop binaries signed with Microsoft key - so in effect it only runs Microsoft software in desktop mode, with no ability to install anything else; third-party software is relegated to Metro only. On the other hand, it does come with Office (desktop version of it - no Metro version has been announced yet) out of the box.

Wow! What an absolute CLUSTERFUCK! I can't WAIT to see the market acceptance of THAT set of contradictory, and seemingly arbitrary, restrictions.

Wait! I thought RT used a Metro interface; so what's all this talk about Taskbar and "Desktop"?

That Win8 on ARM (what's now called "Windows RT") was restricted to Metro was a rumor early on, but the official story has corrected that. It does have desktop mode, same as x86 edition.

The primary difference is that it only runs desktop binaries signed with Microsoft key - so in effect it only runs Microsoft software in desktop mode, with no ability to install anything else; third-party software is relegated to Metro only. On the other hand, it does come with Office (desktop version of it - no Metro version has been announced yet) out of the box.

I'm just going to switch to Desktop Mode.

You do realise the Metro Interface has completely replaced the Start menu

I'm just going to switch to Desktop Mode.

Frankly, Windows 8? It's not really that different outside of Metro and ARM support but I can see a lot of opportunities to now buy the upgraded tools that are "integrated" to work with it.

MS OFFICE , you'll have to upgrade that ...
Visual Studio, yeah same there

the list goes on and on. Frankly, just keep Windows 7 around guys and just keep refining it because I don't see much benefits in 8 that would affect me.

Hopefully he just mistyped 2012, which is metro only for the free version.

Since he was talking about the UI of VS itself, it still doesn't make sense, since VS 2012 is still not Metro (though it kinda edges in that direction).

By the way, there was a change of plans - there now will be VS 2012 Express for developing desktop apps.

Windows already does that since Vista.

It's not proper OS support on Windows it's developers who know WTF they are doing. Microsoft told people how to do this in 2001. Few listened.

Microsoft added support to bail out such devs in Vista, but that does fuzz things up a bit...

So when will they relent on THE ALL CAPS MENUS?

One lone blogger does not an outcry make.

No, but 1500 people who voted against this on UserVoice do. As do all the blog comments.

If you go to the source, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-design-with-all-caps.aspx, they note that there will be an option to disable it.

There's also a blog post that shows the registry key that works today to disable it.

Yuh huh, and they said the same thing about the newer Start Menu nonsense in Vista and 7 with respects to reverting it back to a saner format similar to XP. How's that Start Menu working out in Windows Metro? Er... 8?

If you go to the source, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-design-with-all-caps.aspx

Thanks for the link! It was worth visiting to see them (try to) defend the decision and read people's reactions in the comments. I like the not-so-subtle insinuation that their users are screaming monkeys reacting on emotions instead of the calm, well-thought out logic that they so generously employee while studiously finding the most "effective way of providing structure and emphasis".

I am forming a hypothesis that designers can rationalize any decision they've taken a fancy to, no matter how obtuse. This ALL CAPS thing a great example (better than the new-tabs-open-on-left feature they introduced previously), so here's what I think: their real goal with this change is to remind programmers not to make arrogant design decisions while they're coding. :O

If you go to the source, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-design-with-all-caps.aspx, they note that there will be an option to disable it.

There's also a blog post that shows the registry key that works today to disable it.

From everything I've read, Windows 8 won't run unless SecureBoot is on. That means to swap OSes, the user would have to boot into the BIOS every time he wanted to change OSes. That's just shitty.

Well again, that's wrong. Do you actually believe they would expect you to discard all existing non-UEFI machines and have no upgrade path? They still support 32bit x86 but you think they would abandon traditional BIOS?
Anyway:
Windows 8 will also enter the market in a time when the industry is shifting to the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) for BIOS on all new client systems. We will continue to support the legacy BIOS interface
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/20/reengineering-the-windows-boot-experience.aspx

They hacked Safari's privacy measures previously.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/17/google-tricked-apples-saf_n_1284551.html

They also ignored IE's p3p setting.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/02/20/google-bypassing-user-privacy-settings.aspx

Expect Google fanboys/employees to slag MS for protecting the users' privacy in the comments.

>was to put a 3rd party in charge of the process

What third party? And if they did do that, everyone here will be complaining about MS getting to pick them.

How about the Linux/BSD/Haiku/ReactOS/Hurd community pick a 3rd party or just one of themselves? The OEMs are more than willing to include the keys.

>include guidelines in UEFI for how keys could automatically be installed safely

Automatically and safely don't go together. The reason is the dancing bunnies problem.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/07/12/438284.aspx

Then why this post from Raymond Chen: Windows is not a .NET Framework delivery channel either?

its not quite true - the ^ crap is their C++/CX system, its a "easy to use" wrapper around the underlying WinRT runtime API, which itself looks a lot like COM.

There is a more 'native' looking C API for WinRT, but MS doesn;t want to promote it much - they'd much rather you wrote your code using the proprietary (surprise!) ^ nonsense, thus forcing you to keep using Visual Studio.

The non-^ system is called WRL (for windows runtime library) and is sortof like ATL.

VC++ is not a C99 compiler; deal with it. It's a C++03/11 compiler with accidental support for C99 stuff - hence no inttypes.h etc

C++11 requires them.

all Win32 APIs (and now also WinRT APIs) use UTF-16 rather than UCS2 - so characters above U+FFFF work just fine

Except where they don't, and that seems to be the majority of calls I used recently. For example, all console calls (WriteConsoleOutput(), etc). Or, character classification (iswupper(), towupper()).

If you really want UTF-8, though, you can have that as well (codepage 65001).

This is supported only in a couple of conversion functions, you can't do I/O, fopen(), etc via it. Lengthier discussion.

The way it'll happen is that tablets and laptops will converge with creative use of docking stations. We're already seeing this with Asus and Lenovo hybrids, and now Sinofsky went on record to say that this is basically what Win8 is aiming at:

Two devices, not three

Imagine a tablet. Light and thin. Amazing battery life. Gorgeous screen. You can lounge on the couch enjoying a beautiful, fluid experience, doing the things you love to do on a tablet: playing games, socializing, browsing the web, reading, touching up photos, watching TV. You are just immersed in your experience, doing the things you love to do. You hand it to your daughter and she knows exactly how to use it.

But then, if you want to have a bit more control and efficiency, you can set this same tablet in a stand and attach a keyboard, or just flip a keyboard around, and suddenly you have a complete Windows desktop experience, with full Microsoft Office, multiple monitors, peripherals, and a mouse.

Or, imagine a featherweight laptop with a beautiful large screen and a great keyboard. But in addition to doing everything you use your laptop for today, you can also use your favorite new apps built for today’s tablets.

Windows 8 imagines the convergence of two kinds of devices: a laptop and a tablet. Instead of carrying around three devices (a phone, a tablet, and a laptop) you carry around just a phone and a Windows PC. A PC that is the best tablet or laptop you have ever used, but with the capabilities of the familiar Windows desktop if you need it. You may choose to carry a tablet, or you may choose a laptop/convertible, but you do not need to carry around both along with your phone. You never think about a choice, or fret over your choice of what to carry. Things just work without compromise.

Great hardware like this doesn’t quite exist yet, but it will be commonly available later this year. This is the promise of the Windows 8 experience. With a little imagination, you can start to see why this kind of device will change the way you think of a PC.

Why isn't my time zone highlighted on the world map?

In the original release of Windows 95, you could change your time zone by clicking on the map, and the time zone you selected would highlight. Similarly, you could change your Region Settings by clicking on the world map. This was one of those little touches that made Windows 95 that much more fun to use.

But we had to remove those features within months of release, even though we based both of the maps on the borders officially recognized by the United Nations.

In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we'd get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether.

The time zone map met a similar fate. The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You can't stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them.

Geopolitics is a very sensitive subject.

Google gets entangled in Taiwan-China dispute

Google Inc.'s popular online mapping service has become entangled in a long-running territorial dispute between China and Taiwan.

Until recently, Google's maps described Taiwan as a "province of China." That sparked protests from Taiwan's government, which has considered its island an independent state since ending a civil war with China more than a half-century ago.

Shortly after Taiwan's foreign ministry formally complained, the China reference abruptly disappeared from Google's Taiwan map last week. That change has provoked cries of dismay in China and talk of a possible boycott of Google's service in that country, according to Chinese media.

If I recall correctly, Microsoft also faced the same issue after they suggested Taiwan was somehow an independent nation in locale settings, but they changed it after the Chinese government complained.

Windows' mess has everything to do with backwards compatibility. If they could break that without angering their 90% market share, they'd go nuts. Go ahead and browse through something like http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing and check out all the horrible duct tape and shims that are in place to preserve old apps.

Technically OS/X IS for PCs. The hardware is the same. Intel x86 processors, same as any Windows desktop. Same onboard audio hardware, same video cards, same everything. The difference is the standard driver quality being much better (since there are comparatively few to maintain) and the backwards compatibility isn't there. You can dual, triple, whatever boot it with other OSes.

I really don't understand the hype. Neither option is particularly special.

Kindly have your own reading comprehension checked.

Non-Windows does NOT automatically and exclusively mean Linux.

Also, once that reactionary rash of yours stops flaring up, go investigate what ZFS and its tools, such as scrub, can do for people who care about data integrity.

Also, in your detailed reading of the article, did you note, for example, "NTFS detects", "NTFS attempts", "NTFS validates", "healing feature built into NTFS",
"introduced a new file system (emphasis added) ReFS"

Here, have another look: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/09/redesigning-chkdsk-and-the-new-ntfs-health-model.aspx

It seems the lighting under your troll bridge is, well, a bit dim.

A filesystem with all these features missing must be good, right?
Right?

In fact the whole blog is interesting Building Windows 8

I was curious as to why MS is continuing on with NTFS, surely there must be something newer coming out of their R&D labs. So a quick google turned up this from the same blog, but earlier this year: building the next generation file system for windows refs

if Microsoft ever gets any mobile devices out, they'll have the same problem

Ironically, it was already done in the very first release of WP7 (for one particular property), but developer feedback was overwhelmingly negative, so it was reverted.

Win7 runs in half a gigabyte. Win8 uses less than that.

By typing "ubuntu alternative desktop" into Google

The first hurdle is first informing users that alternative desktops exist in the first place, and that complaints against Unity in particular don't necessarily apply to desktop Linux in general. The second hurdle is informing users that they're called "alternative desktop". I draw an analogy to the web browser market about a decade ago, before Mozilla heavily promoted Firefox and the median user thought the blue e was "The Internet", not a replaceable "web browser". (Internet cafes in developing countries were still seen using the IE logo to mean "web access here" as late as 2010.) The solution then was the "browser ballot", an advertisement for the most popular web browsers that appeared the first time IE was opened in certain language versions of Windows.

[Annoyed users of Unity] are going to do the exact same thing they would do if it were a Windows preinstall: Ask their technically-inclined friend/relative/associate/GeekSquad

Which is the easiest way to get the machine wiped and reimaged with Windows Pirated Edition if the technically-inclined friend/relative happens not to be familiar with Linux.

contact the manufacturer directly

Ideally, the manufacturer would inform the user of alternative desktops. But for one thing, it reduces the manufacturer's technical support costs if everyone's on the same desktop. For another thing, manufacturers' reliance on automated voice response systems, long hold times, and pay-per-incident live support have conditioned people over the years to just accept computerized technology with its faults and not buy that brand next time rather than to investigate fixing the faults. I'm just trying to keep complaints against Unity in particular from rubbing off on desktop Linux in general.

If you use Windows, the forthcoming Windows 8 "Storage Spaces" feature appears to be perfect for situations like this. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/05/virtualizing-storage-for-scale-resiliency-and-efficiency.aspx

Wait, what, they made the buttons in VS11 flat and greyscale?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/02/23/introducing-the-new-developer-experience.aspx
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2623017-add-some-color-to-visual-studio-11-beta
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/726448/make-proposed-monochromatic-ide-changes-optional-in-vs11

All WinRT applications have to be obtained through the Windows Store, as I understand it. Where does this leave companies that develop applications for internal use as opposed to for sale on the Windows Store?

You can basically have your own internal "app store".

The particular exploit that you refer to was only present in Win7 beta. While initially it was responded with as a "won't fix", this was reconsidered after a few hours, and the fix went into RC. The original exploit worked because you could change the setting without triggering a prompt (unless it was at "always prompt"), and you could muck around with the setting programmatically via SendKeys and the like. Both were fixed in RC.

So, no, malware can't get root without user confirmation in Win7 when UAC is enabled.

The particular exploit that you refer to was only present in Win7 beta. While initially it was responded with as a "won't fix", this was reconsidered after a few hours, and the fix went into RC. The original exploit worked because you could change the setting without triggering a prompt (unless it was at "always prompt"), and you could muck around with the setting programmatically via SendKeys and the like. Both were fixed in RC.

So, no, malware can't get root without user confirmation in Win7 when UAC is enabled.

The reason DropBox won over the existing services (there were many) was simplicity. It's a folder that syncs. That's all people want. More features, more complexity: Microsoft has tried it. Dropbox ate their lunch.

For a while, maybe. Microsoft just announced new upgrades to SkyDrive where it essentially works just like Dropbox, with more storage for free accounts.

FWIW, though, many people who preferred Live Mesh to Dropbox did so because Live Mesh allowed you to sync arbitrary folders, rather than just one big folder. That was good for (lame) programs that require files to be in certain locations.

This is all out of date as of yesterday. Max file size sync has changed, etc... Please keep up!

Skydrive offers 7GB for Free, Google Drive offers 5GB. Sky Drive offers a max of 100GB of Paid Storage, Google Drive offers 16TB of paid storage.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/23/the-next-chapter-for-skydrive-personal-cloud-storage-for-windows-available-anywhere.aspx
https://apps.live.com/skydrive

They need to update their Google compare: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/compare
Make sure you keep up with the news :)

An important attribute of this app model is that apps are suspended when they are no longer visible to the user. Suspending Metro style apps in the background is a good thing, as it conserves CPU for other apps and ensures that background apps don’t cause activity that can consume resources, thereby improving the battery life and increasing responsiveness.

I have to wonder what they were smoking when they came up with this restriction. It's one thing to say the default behaviour is to suspend an app but apps may request an override and the user may restrict further. But to deny it completely is utterly wrongheaded and contrary to the way people use tablets and PCs. I can't think of a rational reason to lock down the UI like this other than some underlying brokenness in the implementation which is deemed too high risk to fix or expose to the user.

An important attribute of this app model is that apps are suspended when they are no longer visible to the user. Suspending Metro style apps in the background is a good thing, as it conserves CPU for other apps and ensures that background apps don’t cause activity that can consume resources, thereby improving the battery life and increasing responsiveness.

I have to wonder what they were smoking when they came up with this restriction. It's one thing to say the default behaviour is to suspend an app but apps may request an override and the user may restrict further. But to deny it completely is utterly wrongheaded and contrary to the way people use tablets and PCs. I can't think of a rational reason to lock down the UI like this other than some underlying brokenness in the implementation which is deemed too high risk to fix or expose to the user.

They could be but I'd say that's a bad bet - trying to "out Apple" Apple.

Microsoft has always had advantages in existing software compatibility and enterprise security features (say what you will - Windows Mobile had many more security features than Android or iOS for a long time). They seem to be casting off their only real differentiators in an attempt to copy the success of the iPad. This will fail spectacularly.

What nonsense. There are a whole host of Windows x86 tablets coming with full touch support and with new form factors which will be fully compatible with existing software and enterprise features of PCs.

And not to mention the fact that the author doesn't mention the enterprise features that Windows RT has. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/19/managing-quot-byo-quot-pcs-in-the-enterprise-including-woa.aspx

Very telling that the author is Gregg Keizer, who was involved in the scandals with faking Windows benchmarks to drive page hits. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/why-we-dont-trust-devil-mountain-software-and-neither-should-you/31024

And the submitter is CWMike, from Computer World. They know that Slashdot laps up anti-MSFT FUD and thus they use it to write drivel and get page hits from Slashdot. And judging from the comments, they're very successful in manipulating Slashdot for their own gains as they've historically with the fake benchmarks.

That's right - I need to look at this more, but you people should give MS a HELL of a lot more credit for what they are doing here. BYOD is the security nightmare du jour, ever since the iPad came out. Our security team have spent huge resources, and are still woefully under-resourced to make managing these devices day in day out remotely safe enough. The last thing you'd want to see, and the first thing you'd demand - from an info sec perspective - is that AD not be baked into this consumer oriented OS. Until Win RT is a couple years old every security team worth their salt would nix any directory / infrastructure tie up with a device which is easily lost, unhardened (at least through painful experience) and virtually an Alpha product.Yes it can be done, but the overhead is massive and most people wont have the headcount to secure bridging the two safely - and KEEPING THEM SAFE. Releasing in this form provides entry to a consumer market, and a platform which has a lot of the headache of apps installed from Lines of Business fixed through the separate publishing infrastructure (which the original article is ignorant of, or lying). Staff get their tablets. It sounds to me that MS are getting a head start on Android and iOS. Read the link the guy above posted. They have provided a tiered, clean way of getting business apps to a consumer device. It still requires security risk assessments and penetration testing of the apps (which would need hella strong authentication / 2FA for anything which holds sensitive or above data, but the lack of the 'generic' client for the enterprise directory will make this much easier to deploy and work with than if they had tied things together with AD. It means more work - but thats what it takes, unless you want your firm to get owned.

In that sense, Windows RT tablets can "join a domain" as well (and also have restrictions applied etc). But it's not really joining a domain as such, no.

Take some time to read this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/19/managing-quot-byo-quot-pcs-in-the-enterprise-including-woa.aspx

There are a whole host of enterprise features that Windows RT supports.

If they're not enough, you can get a Windows 8 x86 tablet, which will support anything that a desktop PC currently supports.

Why didn't the article link to that blog post or talk about it? It's plain FUD targeted at people like you and the MS haters have lapped it up hook, line and sinker like they've done with the author's previous articles. I am sure you can make a case that the features are not enough, but not even mentioning them AT ALL shows that it's a FUD article designed to drive page hits.

See the submitter of this fake benchmark article:

http://tech.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=story&sid=10/02/18/0429258

Look at the submitter of this Slashdot story. It's the same Computer World guy.

Here's Slashdot post about how the above article was a fake.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/21/2329249/windows-7-memory-usage-critic-outed-as-fraud

They could be but I'd say that's a bad bet - trying to "out Apple" Apple.

Microsoft has always had advantages in existing software compatibility and enterprise security features (say what you will - Windows Mobile had many more security features than Android or iOS for a long time). They seem to be casting off their only real differentiators in an attempt to copy the success of the iPad. This will fail spectacularly.

What nonsense. There are a whole host of Windows x86 tablets coming with full touch support and with new form factors which will be fully compatible with existing software and enterprise features of PCs.

And not to mention the fact that the author doesn't mention the enterprise features that Windows RT has.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/19/managing-quot-byo-quot-pcs-in-the-enterprise-including-woa.aspx

Very telling that the author is Gregg Keizer, who was involved in the scandals with faking Windows benchmarks to drive page hits.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/why-we-dont-trust-devil-mountain-software-and-neither-should-you/31024

And the submitter is CWMike, from Computer World. They know that Slashdot laps up anti-MSFT FUD and thus they use it to write drivel and get page hits from Slashdot. And judging from the comments, they're very successful in manipulating Slashdot for their own gains as they've historically with the fake benchmarks.

They are indeed supporting as a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), which makes more sense for a lightweight tablet.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/19/managing-quot-byo-quot-pcs-in-the-enterprise-including-woa.aspx

WinRT does have central administration capabilities, just not as extensive as enterprise editions of Windows.

Last time, you nearly had me convinced that Microsoft is too busy doing other things, and we should excuse them for their failure to implement C99 (or all of C++).

But have you SEEN what the Visual Studio team has been working on with 11? That god-forsaken UI is the ugliest thing I've seen since Motif. And at least with Motif you always knew where one button started and one button ended. ... If THAT is their excuse for not implementing C99, may they burn in hell. Or at least their project managers.

Well, it's not like there is a single monolithic "VS team". There are many different teams doing different things, and, most certainly, it's not the C++ team doing the new theme in VS11. In fact, even for the team that does (which would be VS Platform team, and more specifically Shell), most of the work is done by designers - there isn't much dev time spent there. And devs are not easily swappable, either - C++ team is, of course, mostly writing in C++, and they don't really care about much else; while theming work is 99% WPF/C#.

And yes, as far as the theme itself goes, I agree that it's ugly, and it's not like it's even "Metro" (which was the original excuse). Don't ask me how this got through dogfooding, either - I'm too bitter about that to be objective.

Well, at least the people responsible know about that by now... so it's not the end of that story yet.

Furthermore, some projects break when you try to import them from VS2010.

If a VS10 project fails to open in VS11, that's almost certainly a bug. If you have a LiveID or don't mind creating it, file it. If you'd rather not mess with LiveID, I can file it on your behalf.

It's actually one feature that I'm surprised is not pervasive yet. Search over all commands in the application is extremely useful, especially for the more complicated suites like Office or VS.

It's slowly trickling down elsewhere - e.g. we've added something like it in VS11 (with more filtering features, but that's feasible because it's a product for developers who can handle and appreciate that complexity), and, I believe, most Java IDEs have had similar for a while now. But why not e.g. add it to the standard Win32 menu control? Or, in frameworks which have UI actions as first-class entities regardless of their placement (e.g. WPF commands, or Qt actions), provide a stock widget to search through all actions available in the current context.

Yeah, I think that was mentioned in Luke Hoban's talk on ECMAScript at Lang.NEXT (if not, I saw it elsewhere that I can't recall). That would certainly help and even make calling LAPACK possible in JavaScript, but I still think it wouldn't be much fun. It would be pretty cool though :-)

Karpinski does at the moment have a beard. – Karpinski

Evidence: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2012/Julia

Except - how many people in a work environment have their data reported?

Microsoft addressed this exact question in this post, reposted below:

@Andrew wrote: "I'd like to point out that this data you collect is most likely from non-corporate users, you're basing all your statistics around home users and not business users. Most enterprises will turn off the CEIP by default in Group Policy as a security precaution and to prevent chatter from the network."

Andrew, while it’s true that some enterprises choose not to enable the CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program, which gives us anonymous, opt-in feedback about how people are using Windows,) we still receive a huge amount of data from this program, including from enterprise customers. In addition, knowing the region, language, edition, and deployment attributes of the product allows us to further refine the data as needed. We often refer to this data as a full "census" (again noting that the data is opt-in and anonymous) as the number of unique data points is magnitudes beyond a "sampling."

In addition to the CEIP program, we have a wide variety of channels to our corporate customers to understand their needs. For example, we collect feedback continuously during direct engagement with customers (such as during on-site visits and in our briefing centers around the world), from advisory council and early-adopter program members, and at public events such as TechEd and //build/. We also work closely with industry analysts (via consultations and their research) and execute a wide range of our own research studies directly. From these interactions, we know the kind of functionality and control that enterprises want over the Start menu and we are definitely taking these into account as we are designing and developing the changes for Windows 8.

When you look at the data, we can see that enterprise customers do, in fact, have some different experiences with their Start menus:
While 81% of home users have the default links like Control Panel, Games, and Documents on right hand-side of the Start menu , fewer than 2% of our enterprise customers have this experience.
Most people have removed some items in this part of the Start menu (with Games and Media Center entry points most often removed).
Enterprise users are launching pinned Start menu apps 68% more often than home users, but the usage of pinned items is still less than 10% of the sessions.

What are we doing with this information?

In general, individual enterprise customers are using Start menus that their administrators have customized. Using this research and our engagement with the enterprise community, we are working on special features that can help address the need for customization in the Start screen. For example, enterprises can remove items like Games and Help & Support from the Start screen. For Windows 8, we support deployment scenarios that include Start screens with a layout of tiles that matches their business group’s needs, allowing for an even greater number of pinned apps to be pre-defined for their users. We also support the managed lockdown of customization of the Start screen so that it is consistent across the corporation. These features have been built especially for our enterprise customers, taking into account the existing functionality that we have provided in the past and the needs that we perceive they will have in the future. And as many know, tech-savvy individuals can use these customizations as well.