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Microsoft To Switch Focus To Windows 8 In July 2010
An anonymous reader noted a bit from Ars saying Microsoft will be switching internal focus from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in fiscal year 2010. Microsoft's fiscal year starts in July, which is only eight months away. According to Microsoft's roadmaps, the release of Windows 8 is scheduled for 2012."
As a person supporting said software/hardware, I certainly cannot echo that sentiment :-/
What can Windows 8 do that can't be done with Windows 7?
128 bit, I think we heard previously.
Well, not all:
http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090729
Debian is on a 2 year cycle
http://news.opensuse.org/2009/03/05/112-roadmap-and-fixed-release-cycle-for-opensuse/
Suse 8 months
I think Ubuntu and Fedora go for the 6 month, but I doubt 'most' go for 6 mos. I think the average is to attempt an annual release.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
No, we heard that someone was ensuring the Windows codebase was 128bit safe, not that Microsoft was targetting 128bit architectures. People made the same mistake in that story as well...
I don't know which Linux distros your're referring to, but if you mean Ubuntu, yes, it has a release schedule of approximately every six months, but each release is supported for 18 months. These are more for casual use. The LTS versions are the 'major new versions' and are intended for large deployments: they're supported for a minimum of 3 years. FWIW, following the Ubuntu release cycle as it's intended, the last 'major new version' was 8.04 'Hardy Heron' released on April of 2008. The next LTS version will not be released until April of next year, and it's code name is 'Lucid Lynx' (which I think is very, very likely to get nicknamed 'XLynx' for obvious reasons. ;)
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openSUSE used to be a 6 month window. I think Mandriva still uses a 6 month window.
If you only count community distros, then Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE and Mandriva are the heavy hitters. Debian would be the exception.
However, this is a poor comparison to Windows. Windows wants you to pay money for the upgrade. Linux releases quicker, but it is a free upgrade. Many of these are more comparable to a Windows service pack.
If you count commercial distros like SLES and Red Hat, you'll see a much longer window between releases. These are more comparable to Windows releases.
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Depends how much of a service pack it is. XP->Vista made some pretty big kernel changes, enough to justify the version. Vista->7 really didn't change anything much, so it's like a service pack.
Isn't XP SP2/3 Windows 5.1?
Essentially, it depends how ambitious they are.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
So going to 128 bits wouldn't help?
Addressing DRAM is not the problem 128-bits is being considered for.
128-bit addressing is being considered right now for the off chance that a technology like PRAM catches-on. Once you have non-volatile RAM at much higher densities than typical DRAM, you can ditch the hard drive altogether.
This poses a problem, because disks and SSDs are currently I/O mapped and accessed via an SATA controller, which adds latency. But what people don't realize is how much memory-map space this arrangement saves us: consider that you can access TERABYTES of data in a device that requires less than 100MB of your memory map. And you don't typically care about the added latency, because the speed of disks is many orders of magnitude slower than DRAM.
Now, imagine the disk is replaced by something just as capacious, but also just as fast as DRAM. PRAM in the capacities to rival a hard disk would likely need to be direct memory-mapped I/O to achieve good performance, and for that we really need to consider 128-bit addressing, because current hard disks (single disk and storage arrays) are already pushing those respective 40 and 52-bit limits.
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And occasionally whores for Karma.
Well, I skimmed the replies and found an important point missing, concerning how Windows 8 will be marketed: If Windows 8 is going to be released in 2012, that means that sometime in late 2011, Microsoft will start telling us that Windows 7 is, in fact, dog shit.
But Windows 8 will solve all those problems, and be faster and more secure!