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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.'"
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 >+
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?
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...
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!
Microsoft is usually damned if they do, damned if they don't. Let's say they added multiple desktop support, a la every other worthwhile OS. Everyone would laugh at MS for being late to the party. If they don't add it, then people will mock them for its omission.
I use a Mac and Win 7. There are some damn nice features that 7 has I wish my Mac would copy. Namely: snap to sides. Unfortunately, I doubt that Apple will ever add this, because they seem to refuse to admit to anyone else ever having a good idea. (We did get Spaces eventually, though, so perhaps there is hope.) I also really enjoy how the new start menu works. It's sort of an enhanced dock with the ability to preview and close windows without having to open them. Apple already does have similar functionality (sans the closing windows bit, and it's a little more cumbersome), but there are aspects of the Windows implementation that I prefer.
You could look at how Apple handled Snow Leopard. For the most part, it was an "under the hood" update, which is basically what you're asking for. And yet, even though it technically did bring a lot of new features, there were a lot of people who were mad at Apple for producing a "weak" update, even though it only cost $30.
You just can't please everyone.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
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.