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Windows 8 To Be Released In October 2012
dkd903 writes "Microsoft has been very secretive about the next version of its Windows operating system. After the success of Windows 7, everyone is very interested in the next iteration – Windows 8. A few leaks have been the only source of news about Windows 8 till now. However, a slip up from Microsoft Netherlands has put the release date in October 2012."
I can fully understand people not wanting to upgrade to Windows 7 due to hardware/driver constraints or program compatibility...but if neither of these things are problems, I say why not? Windows 7 is much more user friendly and easier to navigate (not to mention much more stable and secure, in my experience.)
Living With a Nerd
The exact same journos are writing that there'll be a 128 bit version as well, demonstrating:
a) Somebody's feeding them horsepoo
b) They really are as clueless as people say.
No sig today...
Try a phased roll-out to 20,000 desktops - with unknown compatibility in 4,000 departmental desktop applications.
You can see the regression issues that make a desktop roll-out of ANY new OS a suicidal risk for any IT organization of size. The answer they are grasping for? Consumerization of IT. Bring your own device, and we'll police connection/identity and document policy.
You see, people have already been bringing in their own Macs and Androids for a couple of years now - and "self servicing". This is how the IBM PC showed up next to the 5250 terminal, 25 years ago.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It's a time-honored way to get unique page hits--> speculating about the next Windows release from Microsoft.
The entire piece was so much fluff. Microsoft is scared to death that we'll forget about Windows, and with good reason. At no point in history has Microsoft been this vulnerable. Controlled leaks to the press will be common place. Little rumors about this and that. Then there'll be leaked releases, first looks, and so on. It's the same formula that Microsoft has used for 20+ years.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Mostly because of three things:
1) Many companies (and governments) have glacially slow approval processes for new OSes. My facility would like to move to Windows 7, but there's still no official DoD hardening and approval process for it. Since we're planning to jump over Vista straight to 7 we're on XP till we get official blessing.
2) A *staggering* number of companies still need IE6 for various internal web apps. A little hunting will turn up companies still selling solutions that require IE6 right now, as XP runs down the clock on even security support. Someone must be buying this crap, though I can't imagine who or why. I don't know which is worse, that Microsoft made IE6 so standards incompatible that this happened in the first place, or that they then immediately reversed course and left all these standard's non-compliant apps hanging. (Though at this point the companies still using them have no one to blame but themselves, XPs retirement schedule has been public for a good long time).
3) A lot of companies just don't feel the need. XP has the distinction of being probably the first Microsoft OS that really worked so well that there's not a lot of compelling reasons to upgrade it (besides its support clock running down). DirectX 10 is mostly unimportant to business, and the rest of Vista and 7's improvements can often be matched by just installing 3rd party software on XP (which many businesses did long before 7 was available). There's some really nice functions in the newest version of AD, but so far MS hasn't allowed XP-AD integration to break.
I suspect the only thing that will actually force companies to upgrade will be XP finally becoming completely unsupported. Even then I wouldn't be shocked to see a lot of companies jump to Vista instead of 7 on the theory that it's been around longer and is therefore better supported.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
"There are too many legacy dependencies, as well as testing for existing apps that has to happen before they can even being to roll out Windows 7.'
If those nimrods haven't seen the joys of 7's XP Mode, then they should be fired, kicked out of the building, and shot.
50,000 station deployment and NOT ONE SINGLE LEGACY ISSUE.
Because XP Mode uses an ACTUAL XP SERVICE PACK 3 IMAGE.
It's as if nobody pay attention to the features and only focuses on the Windows name.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Businesses, hardware buyers A.K.A. Microsoft's installed customer base, only make software changes when absolutely FORCED to.
I was working at a financial services firm which still had O/S2 boxes handling their fax communications YEARS after IBM has stopped selling O/S2. Its called "If it ain't #$^ing broke, don't #$^ing fix it!" As long as the hardware/software could handle (send/receive/OCR faxes, it was going to stay inviolate. For all I know, the machines are still there, chugging away...
Windows buyers, mostly businesses, don't upgrade because upgrades hurt them in the pocket book. They LIKE not having to spend money. They LIKE having equipment going well past its amortization date. (Otherwise, NO building in New York City would be older than 30 years. Goodbye most of the skyline.)
Since home Windows boxes are always on the verge of chaotic collapse, and are bought by people whith the same motivation as the businesses that employ them, and seeing all of the problems IT has keeping Windows boxes running, its a rare person with enough guts to do an upgrade. (Oh, that driver no longer works. #$@&!!)
OS X buyers, mostly consumers (what my SysAdmin friend calls LUSERS,) upgrade and gladly pay for the pleasure. I have bought OS X 10.1 to 10.6 and I've mostly enjoyed the experience. (I finished my career in management after years in object-oriented financial software development.)
Linux users (see comment above,) are die hard dependency chasers. :-)
Different strokes for different folks.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
There's absolutely no reason for an enterprise to update to Winbdows 7. Nothing about it would increase productivity, so it's a useless expense.
Microsoft's Windows customers are computer manufacturers (and one or two of us who build gaming machines).
Free Martian Whores!
Under Ballmer, Microsoft has taken increasingly to working with the Internet as a standard than Bill Gates ever permitted. Like it or not, but the fact is that if Gates were still head honcho, Microsoft would not be bragging that IE9 will leave a smoking crater where its competition used to be---on standards compliance. Even if IE9 is imperfect there, the very fact that Microsoft is moving steadily in this direction is a massive corporate culture change over Gates where everything was about trapping developers and f#$%ing over everyone to stay on top.
It is probably unrealistic to expect Ballmer to do what I said. Mainly because he'd likely be ousted by the Board of Directors if he did what I said. They wouldn't "get" that Microsoft is a platform vendor first and foremost and that their platform is increasingly under attack mainly from corporation-backed commercial rivals.
++True
XP mode is a virtual machine inside your windows 7 installation. Once installed, the user sees the application no differently than any other app, but when it is launched, it runs seamlessly in the VM.
That would depend on the application. I know of one application I use to work on that was a server, ran in the system tray, provided a GUI interface, and was installed a Windows Service. Guess what? Starting with Windows Vista all services are no longer allowed to have a GUI interface. Good luck integrating that with Vista/7; and I very much doubt it would work well under XP mode too. Why? We had problems with the app under normal WinXP when terminal services was used - guess where the service was told its GUI interface should go? Guess where the user got sent? Yep, not the same console; could we hard-code it? No - the user's console was indeterminate.
Oh, and it would have been a major rewrite to move the application into a server+admin-gui architecture like it should have been.)
Yes, the majority of user applications will probably run fine; but not all of them. Any IT administrator worth their salt would know they need to test every application that their users need to perform their job before doing a roll-out, and yes - that goes beyond what would be part of the official company standard. The larger the organization, the more software that has to get tracked and verified, so at the very least users can be notified that a problem will exist whereby they may need to purchase new software - either newer versions or move to another product, if that is even possible.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The push to the internet was over ("I've got email, right?") but the web got started in 1995 while Gates was the hands-on leader of Microsoft.
Gates got Microsoft turned around from a "navel gazing" OS and software development/stealing/buying/killing company(1) into a web facing company "on a dime!"
He saw the threat of his OS and Office apps marginalization because he'd been doing the same kind of shit to his "competition" since 1986.
In comparison Balmer is the janitor who's in charge of turning out the lights after everyone's gone home after calling it a day.
Balmer was the schmuck who decided to break antitrust laws and murder Netscape while calling it "lively proof of the viability of the software industry" and forcing them into a war of attrition on the browser and the server.
Netscape couldn't out last Microsoft's deeper cash reserves.
IIS went through revision after revision until IIS was almost as usable as Apache.
Explorer went through revision after revision until Netscape was dead, starved for funds while the antitrust trial was happening.
Then Microsoft stopped development on the web browser front dead, where it has pretty much stayed since. (That's a long time, ever in pre-internet years.)
HTML 5.x is definitely NOT a Microsoft initiative.
Gates no longer cares about the game.
He's won and he wants to get off the field because the stink of the corpses of everybody who ever got in the way, from Digital Research to QuarterDesk to ...
Unless you a poor African who's dying of something ugly, he don't wanna know about you.
1) The transcripts from the antitrust trials are available on the Web.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
A few years ago (2006 or 2007) I built a new PC for myself and tried to run it under Win2k at first. Which I still consider a perfectly good system, feature-wise.
But I could not get the damn thing to run stable, despite quality components. I suspect the graphics card driver, because the manufacturer (MSI) did not provide any up to date Win2K drivers anymore. I had the choice between a pretty old Win2k driver or running the XP driver. Both would install, but the PC had a tendency to crash a few times per evening.
Eventually I gave up and installed XP. The stability problems immediately disappeared.
C - the footgun of programming languages
It had better be faster on the same hardware or I am not interested. Windows Vista and 7 are both slower on the same hardware as Windows XP. I don't call that an improvement. Yes, they have added many, many new features, 99% of which I don't want or care about and all of those features slow down the system. Figure out how to make those features load on demand or something so that my system performs better under the new OS than it does now.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Far higher then OSX's point upgrades and of course far more expensive then Ubuntu releases. About a gazillion times more.
OS X upgrades typically cost $129. There have been a couple of exceptions to this but the pattern is clear. Windows upgrades typically cost slightly less than than (about $120).
Of course, the cost of a Windows upgrade is largely irrelevant, since the vast, vast bulk of Windows users get new versions of Windows either a) when they buy a new PC or b) when their corporate IT department puts it on their PC (which, due to how volume licensing works, costs "nothing").
Despite Google and Firefox and Apple and Opera being able to code fast and up-to-date browsers for XP, MS can't code IE9 to work on XP, because they are to lazy/inept (some MS fanboy will no doubt insist that IE9 depends on some fancy thing that no other browser needs to run fast, this is kinda like saying you need a 3D card to run a MS text adventure when text adventures have run on text only machines for decades).
Hilarious you offer Apple up as a counterexample when the minimum requirement for Safari on OS X is 10.5.8, released only a bit more than a year ago, and it's pretty much a given that the next major release of Safari, whenever it hits, will only be supported on Snow Leopard and newer.