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Windows 8 Early Build Hints At Apple, WebOS Competitor - EWeek
Microsoft's next Windows could be a cross-platform OS in the style of Apple's iOS or Hewlett-Packard's webOS, if supposed early builds are to be believed... "Bloggers Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott, in a series of April postings on Rivera’s Within Windows blog, have described the various features of what they claim is an early build of Windows 8: an Office-style ribbon integrated into Windows Explorer, complete with tools for viewing libraries, manipulating images and managing drive assets; an unlock screen that harkens to the 'Metro' design style already present in Windows Phone 7; an 'immersive' user interface and a built-in PDF reader they call 'Modern Reader.'"
TFA is full of empty speculation and even if Microsoft were trying to do this their extensive history of withholding key, drastic hardware control level features at the last minute argues against the idea they could carry it off. There will be no pan-fundatio Windows 8.0
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I be flaming.
:D)
Microsoft should just keep pushing good stability features for their crappy OS. Every single OS release is an "oh we got this new x and that new y (both available in other decent OS for ages, except for the occasional innovation)" moment, instead of a "We have increased security and enabled you to fully control your computer. If you are not a computer expert, this OS is great, as it always has been, but if you are a computer expert, then now we have given you the ability to fully manipulate your computer" kind of thing. That's what Windows should do -- add powerusers to their marketshare (I mean real powerusers). Also, it isn't FLOSS (I just had to troll
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
Remember that early builds from MS mean nothing. In the end it will just be Windows 7 with no 32-bit backwards compatibility and a new skin.
"I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"
-Jennifer Saunders as Edina Monsoon
It is the most terrible difficult and unintuitive development in ui I have ever seen. Give me my damn menu's back, he'll I would prefer vi over ribbons.
It is even more annoying than WinXP in so far as something small as the file manager in Win7. You can select the files, it tells you how many you selected, but it no longer says how many MB / GB of files you selected.
Odd - mine shows the size of the selected files at the bottom. I'm running Win 7-64bit Ultimate.
Place nail here >+
How did you get to that conclusion? Does OS X have a tablet mode similar to Windows Phone 7's UI, or a ribbon interface?
What a strange troll...
In what areas do you think the core OS should be improved?
But this is the company that has made Wordpad an unusably over-complex piece of garbage - and I say that even though Windows 7 is a vast improvement over XP; installed on my laptop because XP was giving up with too many programs open, and now all those programs run nicely together.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
If you select more than 20 items, size does no longer appear.
Its apperantly for performance reasons. The same reason why it does no longer show the size of the curren directly in the status bar.
That is for me the only thing i hate on W7. And its so useless a restriction, too.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
That's certifiably false, regardless of your experiences. I'd wager you have some dodgy hardware (memory going bad?) or a really awful 3rd party driver.
Because Win7 is as rock solid an OS as I've seen out of MS, and it's many times more stable and solid than XP ever was or could be.
Your experience is an abberation, and clearly the OS is not at fault here, something else is. You're blaming the wrong thing.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
in 5 minutes the following comes to mind: performance, efficient usage of system resources, stability, file system, decouple GUI from core, decouple apps from core, simple remote access, get rid of the sick registry, customization, documentation, adhere to common open standards, lower hardware requirements, better modularization, remove unneeded services/bloatware, provide a powerful shell, enhance security/permission features, ...
I'm sure I can find a lot of other stuff that's wrong with windows when thinking about it...
Stability
Security
Interoperability
Add a *real* command shell ...
Remember that early builds from MS mean nothing.
Right; this is crucial to remember. The reason for any information release at this point is to block MS partners who are thinking of becoming HP partners. MS will now be feeding this into their friends in your company and whenever someone points out what WebOS can do that person will say "if we just wait six months MS will do the same thing and we won't need to migrate".
Oh; and there will be 32 bit backwards compatibility; even if it's just through an integrated transparent hypervisor. Trust me.
If you want to adopt WebOS, get your project going now. Make serious progress as a "demo", "test environment" etc. If asked about the new MS product just say that this will give your organization a chance to prepare. Get real customers doing real things. At the point where Microsoft backs out or fails to deliver what your customers need, that is the point to make it really official.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Yeah, Wine just needs to add a couple more crashing bugs, and maybe a few exploits and they could get to 100% compatibility!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
performance - in what way is Windows 7/Server 2k8R2 slow?
efficient usage of system resources = How does 7/R2 fail to use systems resources in a efficient way?
stability - I can't seam to get my systems to have stability issues, how do I reproduce this?
file system - What is wrong with NTFS as implemented by 7/R2?
decouple GUI from core - Has already been done. Server Core
decouple apps from core - Which apps?
simple remote access - RDP and other methods are already built in.
get rid of the sick registry - In what way is it sick?
customization - In what ways?
documentation - What needs to be improved?
adhere to common open standards - Which standards?
lower hardware requirements - It can run on very expensive systems. Exactly how low are you talking about?
better modularization - Explain this please.
remove unneeded services/bloatware - Which ones are you talking about?
provide a powerful shell - Powershell
enhance security/permission features - Example?
So I'm a linux person through and through, but it's about the flexibility the platform offers, and I no longer feel justified in criticizing MS over the 'basics' with their improvements.
scalability
If you refer to the OS running on enough cores, I haven't heard of a technical limitation. I think they do have various arbitrary limits on their licensing, but the software developers have done the required work. Maybe someone can point out scheduling deficiencies or poor placement decisions in a NUMA architecture, but I've not heard that. Keep in mind this discussion is on the desktop, which probably will be non-numa and no more than 6 or 8 cores.
Modularity
They used to be more modular in their install, but the sad reality is 99% of people couldn't be arsed to think about it, so the default experience is less customizable. Even linux installers have trended toward skipping package selection. Other than that guess, it would need some specifics to understand exactly what you want.
Platform support
If you mean supporting other architectures (e.g. ARM), that was precisely one goal they already announced. I personally think this is a pointless endeavor for them unless they give some magical ability to run x86 binaries everywhere without horrible performance degredation. MS has tried repeatedly to support other architectures, but the reality is x86 is where the applications are and MS doesn't have a particularly special offering that people intrinsically want if not for the x86 applications.
Window management features
Ok, I'll give you that one of the big reasons I stay away from Windows is the relatively incapable window management stuff, but at the same time, I have to presume they think the features 'we' would want would confuse their main target market.
Speed
In my experience, I haven't seen anything particularly slow about Windows. This is probably one area I've never been able to complain except for disk IO due to Vista defaults that got toned down.
Decoupling of the GUI from the os
The only thing they would gain here is the ability to run an systems without any video chip, which they have no hope in hell of winning. If you refer to the ability to manage them via serial console *in addition* to video, they do have serial console support to do some basic things including starting CMD/PowerShell. Sure, we love our VTs on occasion, but a very small minority of people use them except when they *have* to. Perhaps inherent capability to ssh in and get cmd/powershell would be nice, but getting rid of the GUI on VGA console won't really win them anything in the market.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yea, Why would any OS maker do that? Apple doesn't include PDF Reader or iPhoto for editing images. Microsoft is breaking completely new ground here. /sarcasm
They are coupled with OS because people want them to be. PDFs have become so common that people expect their Operating system to read them and same thing with digital cameras. I would note that Microsoft already builds Photo editor called Windows Live Photo Gallery which does reasonable well for majority of people using digital cameras. People who need Photoshop will purchase it and majority will be happy with Live Photo Gallery.
Out of the gate, they're already behind. That is, if this isn't just some pathetic attempt by Microsoft to drum up some stock interest with a paid blogger doing a PR puff piece.
.NET. It's something that Microsoft did very well. Unfortunately, in their effort to "be more like the other guys", I feel like they're abandoning a lot of the consistency of development between Windows apps, Windows web applications, and Windows mobile applications. They're still using ".NET technologies" to do things, but the basic design philosophies and approaches are getting really scattered and confusing, while .NET itself keeps jumping all over the place in basic application design philosophy with each new incarnation. They really need to find a few basic approaches to developing applications for their platforms and stick with them. Unless I'm using Silverlight as my standard, out of the box presentation layer for desktop applications as well as web applications...and that's all I'm doing from now on, then fine. But pick one approach and stick with it, you know?
Both iOS and webOS have made a lot of strides over the past few years. A big part of how they do things is user experience...Microsoft gets too geekily technical about some details, and the fact is, those details aren't as popular with the wider population than they'd like to admit. It's been the same story since Microsoft first ventured into the mobile space years ago.
Personally, I really, really like how fast and accurate the built in search is on webOS. I know a lot of other guys who left the platform and came back because once you get the bug, it's hard to give up. Especially if you figure out how to really use the platform well. Instead of swiping and scrolling through silly little screenspace consuming icons, you pull out the keyboard, type a couple letters, and it'll give you contacts, apps, you can mod it to do a wikipedia lookup, imdb, whatever. It's pretty sweet. It's like taking all the best things about a CLI and all the best things of the standard GUI and putting them all together. That's something, to me, I can deal with using 2 year old hardware on a day to day basis when I know there's better hardware out there...and I could even get it for free. And unless my provider would let me install webOS on that other phone and all my apps work, I'm not going to switch hardware. I'll duct tape my first gen Pre together if it comes down to it, and if that doesn't work, I'd be spending plenty of time trying to make it work on other hardware.
The reason I say all that is that if you're releasing a new mobile OS, you aren't going to "get me" to give up my apps, my preferred workflow, my cash, just to switch if you're playing catch-up. Just because you're Microsoft or Apple or Google doesn't impress me. Its whether or not your stuff does what I want, and if your software can't do it like I want, then either you pay me to use your stuff, or give me some features I can't live without. And no, I'm not going to switch just to "get" with a paid third party app something I already have well-integrated and free on my current platform of choice. Plus, it's all got to work well with what I currently have, or it's not happening. Not only that, but I stopped writing software for Windows Mobile about 3 years ago. You know what I really liked about it? It was a fairly powerful (if not a little quirky) platform to code for. I like
Stability
I can't honestly complain any more. They have even go so far as a video driver crash being less fatal for them than Linux. Linux may be able to survive a video driver crash, but anything on the UI dies, and that's not the case for MS. They have made a lot of improvements here.
Security
They have managed to make most people stop running as administrator, with a 'sudo-like' implementation. Now I've heard mumblings about that being trivial to bypass (though I haven't seen it), which would be a critical flaw. They don't open a lot of services by default anymore. Largely any insecure behavior is non-default and the fault of users (either enabling features or misusing them). Their NTLM hashes they store on disk are pitifully weak, which could be improved, but only relevant if that is attacked. NTLM was/is a horribly insecure network authentication, but AD is a valid Kerberos approach and NTLM *shouldn't* be used if MS is used as intended. Overall, their security isn't bad.
command shell
I will say PowerShell is an improvement. I do think it borders on counterproductive pride as to why they don't have anything quite as simple as plain-ol-bash. Also, why they don't implement SSH for a nice common protocol instead of their WMI crap for remote command execution.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Read what this popular blogger has repeatedly pointed out about Paul Thurott's talents and track record.
What a tool.
What I read (the top result in the Goggle search string you provided) was nothing more than an extended ad hominem rant against Thurott by an unabashed Apple fanboy. It's entirely opinion-based, utterly biased, and highly inflammatory - and includes absolutely NOTHING in the way of actual evidence that Thurott is anything other than a Microsoft fanboy.
So, in sum, "Boo for the other team's cheerleaders."
Mind you, I am in no way, shape, or form defending or promoting Thurott here. Instead, I am merely and exclusively commenting on the "popular blogger" whose critcisms you seem to think are so compelling. They're not. His observations are opaquely colored with his own bias, and COMPLETELY unobjective.
"The problem with pissing contests is that everybody gets wet, and everybody smells bad afterward."
Check out my novel.
Server Core. Haha aha ha ha. Yeah, great. Now get a unix OS and see what a real headless/GUI-less system can do. It needs SSH, for secure remote login, remote file copying and remote command execution. Of course, somebody at Microsoft is right now programming a really shit set of updates for powershell to try and copy SSH, but they'll get it wrong, naturally.
Powershell is crap. The outrageously long commands they've created are a really bad joke, especially compared to the nice simple single-purpose commands of the Unix world.
The same hardware running OS X (hackintosh or Apple) tends to outlast Windows 7 in battery drain tests. I.e, Mac OS X does some basic stuff so much more efficiently that it translates in to lower power draw for the same tasks. Windows 7 needs to be more efficient.
The registry is crap, but it works. The WOW32 registry is a bad joke dreamed up by fools.
Search is crap. It often uses >1GB memory on a 4GB system and causes huge amounts of paging. This is probably the main reason that OS X is more energy efficient. I'm a programmer, and I've spent a lot of time researching where the memory goes on my systems, and I've come to the conclusion that Windows search is the culprit. It's just shit. Apart from that, it can NEVER seem to find stuff inside files in the filesystem -- at least not as well as spotlight.
I'll throw in a few others -- IIS, shit. MMC, shit. EventViewer, fucking hell, when did that get so slow? IE, shit, get it out of my default install, Run As user/administrator holy crap, that's bad - Windows /really/ needs a sudo clone now that the (sensible) default is to not run everything as admin. UAC is NOT sudo.
Final thing off the top of my head -- those stupid Windows 7 screen-edge 'gestures', the Aero Alt-Tab thing and the absolutely retarded shake-to-minimize-everything-else 'gesture'. If I could turn them off, it'd not be so bad, but I can't find out where to get rid of this intrusive 'feature creep/trying to add as many things to a checklist as possible' crap.
What would be the point? The kernel for Windows is perfectly stable, barring shitty drivers.
The UI may occasionally do odd things, but that's true of any OS. As far as the average enduser is concerned, it doesn't really matter two hoots if the underlying OS is still functioning if you can't interact with it.
If you select more than 20 items, size does no longer appear.
Technically correct, except you forgot to mention that a link then appears, which you can click to "Show Details". The total size then appears.
Its apperantly for performance reasons.
Lemme guess...if MS had allowed you select 20+ objects, requiring a few seconds each time to calculate the total size each time you did that, you would be the one screaming how slow and laggy W7 is. Some people you just can't please...especially the ones who have decided to hate you no matter what you do.
Sounds like the goal is to provide the ability to write a game once and it'll run on WIndows desktops and laptops, the XBox console, and their phone OS.
Wait ... you're saying their new OS will allow you to write code once for both desktops AND laptops if both run Windows? No way! That would be so cool .....
[/snark]
... before it is released. Once the software is released, it rarely lives up to the pre-release hype.
remember how they said that we'll all be using Netbooks??
Yep. This post it being written from one, and it's really rather nice. That said, I'm running Xubuntu, as Windows 7 crawled when I had it on here. MS really does need to remember how to make a lean, fast, and usable OS. Right now they've got market share, but the only way to keep that is to stay ahead of the game. As they say, complacency kills.
The wise follow a damned path, for to know is to be forsaken.
I've found XP to be pretty rock solid - having used it since 2003-odd, I can probably count on one hand the amount of times it's bluescreened on me, and it's about the same amount that Windows 7 has bluescreened for my missus on her new HP home PC that she bought just before Christmas.
Sure, it takes a couple of service packs for an MS OS to become rock solid, I'm not criticising Windows 7 for that. However, I'm mostly a Gnome user on Linux but I use XP in Windows Classic mode (I have done since 2003) and I really don't mind using it for gaming and for a few killer apps I cannot get on Linux. But I have always hated the default XP theme with a passion, it's truly awful and unusable.
My experience of Windows 7 so far is fairly minimal, I've set up a handful of new PCs for friends and family and that's my extent of using it. I won't deny it's stable or that it will be as stable as XP when it gets to SP3 like XP did - but I think the Aero interface is awful, quite frankly. As far as I'm concerned, it's nothing more than "change for change's sake", stuff has been renamed just to make it look different without thinking of the consequences to users who have migrated to XP, and the default desktop looks cluttered and unprofessional. There is TOO MUCH going on all of the time and I don't see the point of wasting CPU cycles for eye candy that adds absolutely nothing to speed or productivity. (That's something you expect of OS X.)
XP is now 10 years old and whilst it has some issues with supporting the very latest hardware properly, the fact that it's 32-bit and old is countered by the speed of modern PCs which means it runs pretty fast, as long as you spend time administering it and keeping it clean. For most home user tasks. 64 bit means very little anyway and there is little visible speed difference between running in 32-bit and 64-bit mode.
I didn't use Vista at all but I can understand why a lot of Vista users welcomed Windows 7 when it came along - but I see absolutely no reason whatsoever to move my last couple of Windows XP machines too it, and when Microsoft stop supporting XP to the point where it's no longer updated and full of security holes, then I see myself moving fully to Linux as Windows 7 does nothing for me.
I'm not a "Linux v Windows" zealot by any means, I really don't care whether it's Windows or Linux that runs on most desktops, I'd rather people sat down carefully and thought about what OS they want to use before finally choosing it. But if Windows 7 is a success then it's mainly because Microsoft has foist it on people by making it the default OS on many new machines and ensuring XP's retirement by not porting DirectX 10 or Internet Explorer 9 to it. People are not migrating from XP to Windows 7 in their droves, over 50% of the world's desktop PCs still run XP - that's because for most people it's good enough.
So, yes, I accept Windows 7 is better and liked more than Vista and that it will be as stable as XP ever has been. It may also be a better OS for newbies because they don't care to carry out proper administration on XP PCs like I do to ensure that it stays malware free (and it does, if you spend time with it and take a little care). But to say it's "more so" makes no sense.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Security: read this [wikipedia.org] and check out what Exec Shield and PaX do
Windows has full NX bit support. It also has ASLR, and a far better implementation of it than either Linux or OS X (as evidenced by pwn2own results).
What desktop linux distros ship with PaX?
Interoperability: more effort into native POSIX support. Mingw32, Cygwin, SFU, [...] shouldn't have to exist; this is a consequence of too much difference, most of it deliberately engineered for vendor lock-in purposes.
The reason why Win32 is not POSIX-compatible is not due to anything "deliberately engineered" - it's a consequence of backwards compatibility applied to the extreme.
That said, SUA (the new name for SFU) is native POSIX support. It does that by completely ditching Win32 subsystem, and using a POSIX subsystem implemented directly on top of NT kernel (unlike Cygwin, which tries to implement POSIX on top of Win32 - which is very hard due to many mismatches).
Mingw has nothing to do with POSIX at all, it is simply a port of gcc to Win32.
"Real" command shell: if you think PowerShell is not a joke, then perhaps you're acquainted with its super-compact syntax [stevex.net]?
Do you realize that all common commands have short aliases out of the box, most of them in fact taken from Unix shell? Sure, you can write "get-childitem", but you can also write "ls" - and all sane people do. Long names exist because PowerShell has a strict naming guide for all commands to improve discoverability (you can often guess the name of command you need by looking at the names of other commands that you know), and this is applied to common commands such as "cp" for the sake of consistency.
Oh yes, "write-output" is aliased as "echo", and "write-host" is aliased to "write". And "write-host" is a very different thing - it writes directly to the host (PowerShell can be used as a scripting language; host is the program that does so). Normal shell scripts should use "write-output" (i.e. "echo"), which writes to stdout as God intended.
A much bigger WTF is the decision to use a back-tick as a line continuation indicator. e.g., if you want to insert a linebreak into an echo statement (oh wait, it's fucking called write-host . So elegant!) you do so like this ... No \n.
What does "\n" have to do with it? In Unix shell, line continuation would be \ followed by end-of-line. "\n" is when you want to insert a newline in the output. In PowerShell, you write "`n" for the same.
The obvious reason why PowerShell does not use "\" as escape character is because it is used as the path separator by OS. They had to use something else simply because otherwise writing out paths would be very painful (and they can't just use "/" for that because that would be inconsistent with other applications - you couldn't copy/paste a path from, say, Explorer into PS then). Even so, other than the different escape character, all escape sequences are the same as in Unix shell.
Some more absurdities are move-item instead of cmd's move, copy-item instead of cmd's copy, and rename-item instead of cmd's rename. A command-line scripting language should be file-oriented from top to bottom, yet these -item suffixes are in some of the most commonly-used commands!
See above regarding consistent naming. As well, PowerShell is not file-oriented - it's object-oriented and object-tree oriented. Files are objects, directories are lists of objects, and filesystems are trees of objects. This lets it deal with any hierarchical data structure in the same way.
As well, "copy-item" is aliased to "cp", "rename-item" is aliased to "ren", and "move-item" is aliased to "mv"
It also has ASLR, and a far better implementation of it than either Linux or OS X (as evidenced by pwn2own results).
This is a complete and utter lie. In 2008 the only system left standing was Ubuntu, and since then no GNU/Linux has been in the contest. So you need to remove Linux from your list there, cowboy. As for your other points, I wouldn't trust a liar like you about anything.
-- Linux user #369862
By that argument, all version of Linux are just the previous version of Linux with a new skin.
There was actually a lot of under the covers changes in Windows 7, and the kernel changed substantially. Those aren't things you can see though, so you look at it and say "It's just windows with a new skin" because the skin is all you can see.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
IIRC (and ICBveryW), Windows is more-or-less entirely object-oriented in design. Seriously, you can't do a damn thing without messing around with all the overhead of instantiating objects, assigning attributes or calling methods.
Uh, what? The vast majority of Win32 API is plain C. You don't need to create any objects or assign any attributes to read a file, open a network socket, or display a window.
The reason why PowerShell is object-oriented has nothing to do with Windows design, and everything with being more flexible. In Unix, "ls" lists contents of a directory, printing it out as a series of strings. In PowerShell, "ls" lists child objects of the current active objects, producing the result as a collection (items of which can print themselves if asked - e.g. if streamed to stdout). The result from user perspective is the same, except when you start piping things - in Unix you always pipe a byte stream, and each program in the pipeline has to interpret (i.e. parse) its input, and then format its output. More often than not, you end up using intermediate steps like sed to extract the data you need, and then the script will break if new version of the app changes its output format. In PowerShell, there's nothing to parse - commands accept objects as input and produce objects as output, with properties filled with strongly typed data that is readily queryable, filterable etc; it only becomes text when you pipe it to a plain app that wants a text stream for stdin, or for the last step in the pipeline.
"Does OS X have a tablet mode similar to Windows Phone 7's UI"
Yes, they call it iOS.
"or a ribbon interface"
I still don't really see how a "ribbon" is different than a toolbar. OS X has lots of those.
This is a complete and utter lie. In 2008 the only system left standing was Ubuntu
The quality of ASLR implementation is not the sole factor that decides who wins the contest, so looking at winners is not giving you any information. But if you read the interviews with participants, they did explain some aspects of making attacks easier, and ASLR was specifically covered. For example, here is one from 2009, and I quote:
"ASLR is also very tough to defeat. This is the way the process randomizes the location of code in a process. Between these two hurdles, no one knows how to execute arbitrary code in Firefox or IE 8 in Vista right now. For the record, Leopard has neither of these features, at least implemented effectively. In the exploit I won Pwn2Own with, I knew right where my shellcode was located and I knew it would execute on the heap for me. ...
And just so that our readers know, ASLR is implemented in Windows Vista (but not XP) and Vista SP1 is required for the full ASLR. Leopard had some binaries placed randomly, but Snow Leopard is rumored to introduce full ASLR. On Linux, kernel 2.6.12 has a weak form of ASLR like Leopard does, but PaX and ExecShield will implement Windows Vista-like ASLR."
and since then no GNU/Linux has been in the contest.
Which basically means that we don't know how it really stacks up against Windows and OS X. By the way, do you know why they don't do Linux? Quote:
"Linux is not an operating system that has widespread use with any one particular distribution, flavor or configuration. In general Linux is still a server-based operating system, people do use it on the desktop, but you can't go to BestBuy and buy Linux with a specific distro on it that everyone uses that has widespread market share. If we were to include Linux, we'd have even more controversy and we just don't want to deal it."
So it's not because it's somehow magically invulnerable.
As for your other points, I wouldn't trust a liar like you about anything.
Fanboi much? You don't need to "trust" me on anything - you've got Google to check facts, and (hopefully) brain to check conclusions. Use them.
Of course, if you want to stick fingers in your ears and go "Lalala I can't hear you, Linux is the best OS in all respects because how could it possibly be otherwise?", then you're welcome to do so - you can join the company of creationists and other similar religious fundies over there.
I always appreciate software assessments from people never used the software.
Thanks.
Also, why does Slashdot ignore my first paragraph break? It has been doing this ever since I joined the site.
I think the general complaint is that the "ribbon" really isn't new. There have been "tabs" for a long, long time, including in Microsoft software. And some toolkits (not sure about MFC) consider the "menubar" to be a normal widget and therefore can be put inside a "tab". Furthermore many toolkits have considered a "menubar" to not only contain "submenus" but also "buttons" (often as a submenu title with no children). I certainly did this in a toolkit that is now almost 20 years old (see fltk).
Like a lot of Microsoft stuff, a lot of the angst is that Microsoft pretends they have come up with something *new* when in fact it can be a decades old idea. Also that they absolutely refuse to use any existing term for that idea, in order to defeat searches for prior art (ie the term "ribbon" rather than "tabs" which is certainly the keyword all previous versions used).
Conversely I think the anti-Microsoft crowd is to blame. They sit on their duff, scared to death of being "hard to use" or the dreaded "inconsistent" and thus refusing to actually incorporate any of these new ideas into actual end user products. So nobody actually sees these except for the programmers at Microsoft who examine the code and decide what to steal. And then when Microsoft comes up with it, they try to project their own fears onto them and try to say "oh Microsoft is being inconsistent and hard to use!!!"
You like the other poster are "cherry picking" and mixing and matching corporate and consumer which NOBODY did before XP. if you are gonna mix both then you need to count WinME which came after 2K and sucked hairy donkey balls, and both 2K and 2K3 server frankly sucked until Sp2, which was SOP for MSFT at the time. I remember how many wouldn't touch NT 4 until SP3 either, and when you look at the HUGE number of patches we are talking it has gone from mere bandaids to pretty much gutting whole subsystems. Also check out XP pre SP2, it was a buggy badly behaving insecure POS.
And Vista should be looked at as a giant DON'T DO THAT which they are gonna fail to heed with Windows 8. What we saw with Vista is that PCs have reached good enough that if people don't like it they'll simply stick with what they have, it isn't like the Win9x days where you really had to upgrade to support the latest tech or software. XP is going on 12 years old now and any corp would frankly be nuts not to have support for XP in their products, and Windows 7 has FINALLY, finally after all these damned years, given then a product that works on BOTH the business and consumer desktop that folks like and are willing to use.
Look I've been selling the things since Win 3.x, so I know of which I speak. there was about a year where my #1 money earner was killing Vista dead, people hated it THAT much. The things that keep folks on Windows are software and games, which makes them 180 degrees in opposite of Apple which has been able to go through no less than 3 CPU changes and still keep people buying. If MSFT tries to stick a WinPhone style OS in front of people and call it Windows folks will just ignore it and stick with XP and 7. Windows 7 gets extended support until 2020 (which they can't drop thanks to contracts) so it isn't like folks HAVE TO jump on board.
With Win 7 they finally have a UI where those like my dad can find new things and figure things out intuitively without bugging the living shit out of old hands like myself. Why fuck up a good thing? I'll tell you why, and this is from someone who makes their living selling MSFT products: it is because they have gotten too much of a hard on for Apple, that's why. you look at what has happened since Ballmer took over and it has been nothing but "Lets copy Apple and then we'll be hip too!" while ignoring they have completely different demographics.
Kin, Zune, WinPhone, everything Apple does will have a MSFT version less than a year later. They have a hit in the X360, they have a chance at making Win 7 as big a hit as XP, why cock it all up chasing a demographic that will NEVER ever buy your stuff? Apple is a hipster boutique label, it would be like expecting Ferrari owners to suddenly start buying Mustangs.
It is stupid, it is pointless, it will piss off the customers, and I bet if MSFT goes for this "Web 2.0 Cloud Extreme WinPhone OS" idea for Win 8 I'll be wiping it to put on Win 7 just as I wiped countless Vista installs to put on XP. The folks that buy Windows just aren't gonna jump on a cloud based PhoneOS for their desktop, it just won't work. To make it lean enough they'll have to destroy completely backwards compatibility, and if I'm gonna have to start from scratch anyway why not just go Mac or Linux?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If they are going to support ARM SOC they will be 32bit there so I doubt they will drop 32bit x86 since intel still produces ATom for Netbooks and some other devices.
I don't think implementing some choice backward compatibility via a wine-like scheme or vm is a bad idea though. Windows started as a GUI shell running on DOS, then it was basically ported to NT. There's really no reason microsoft couldn't take a bsd-licensed OS and modify it as Apple (via NeXT) did and end up with a winner on their hands. It could be that in a few years the only real objection left against windows is ideological. They certainly have the potential to deliver, so it won't surprise me if they finally do.
Caveat Utilitor
What would be the point? The kernel for Windows is perfectly stable, barring shitty drivers.
That would be the point, IIRC over 95% of linux is device drivers. There was one computer that windows xp was crashing on every hour or so, Out of curiosity I installed linux on the machine. I had never seen linux spew so many warnings about out of spec hardware and features being disabled. Linux was stable, but really, windows could have been just as stable, if they would have been willing to say, these features disabled because the hardware is lying about having them. But, if Microsoft had done that, it would have been Microsoft vs Foxcom (or who ever made the crapware) and it would have turned into a pr war. With Linux the hardware was tested, and people reported that it did R when it said it would do A, ergo, mark it bad, until someone comes up with a workaround.
Microsoft has a lot of baggage that makes people willing to take the crapware manufacturer seriously, the Linux developers are viewed as impartial reporters about the state of hardware.
Rants like the one here http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/pci/if_rl.c are unlike to make it into the windows kernel, no matter how true.
Work bio at MMWD
Microsoft's next Windows could be...
I stopped reading right there. It could be a lot of things. I was expecting a more informative "going to be"