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Another Windows 8 Pre-Beta Surfaces
angry tapir writes "While Microsoft has not announced the release date of its follow-up to Windows 7, an early pre-beta version of Windows 8 (although its official name has not been confirmed) has surfaced on the Internet, the second version to appear within a month. It is the second milestone release that has showed up on the Internet this month. Users of this Windows 8 software have said it features a Ribbon-based user-interface, similar to the one used in recent editions of Microsoft Office. This specific milestone build also has software for a Webcam, a new task manager, a PDF reader and an immersive browser." "Surfacings" like this tell me that Microsoft sees the value in crowdsourced opinion gathering far more than they're sometimes given credit for.
new user-interface is a bad idea and may slow down users moving to windows 8.
Some places are still stuck on XP and are moving to 7 now and now 8 is on the way with a new GUI?
also what software / hardware that works in XP / 7 will windows 8 not work with?
In windows 7 you can already right click then select 'go to service(s)' and they're highlighted.
Users of this Windows 8 software have said it features a Ribbon-based user-interface, similar to the one used in recent editions of Microsoft Office.
Overheard at Microsoft: "Hey guys, you know that ribbon interface that everybody hated? How about we put it everywhere in the system?"
What's next, will they bring back Bob and Clippy as well?
Circumcision is child abuse.
A built-in PDF reader, eh? Should I feel sorrier for Adobe's devs, so incompetent that Microsoft felt the need to step in and provide a PDF reader built by grown-ups, or for Microsoft's XPS team, who have so failed to set the world on fire with XPS that Microsoft felt the need to step in and provide a PDF reader?
Given that using Adobe software to view untrusted material is the rough equivalent of injecting yourself with used needles in the hope of scoring free heroin, I'm going to adopt a "it couldn't possibly be worse?" stance until otherwise demonstrated.
I'm actually interested in seeing how well the ARM version handles. Will it actually be able to run quickly on hardware usually much weaker than the average PC? Only one way to find out.
What, does PDF scripting API include destructive methods? Microsoft can choose not to enable scripting by default.
Democracy is for the people; you only vote once per season and we'll do the rest of the work for you don't have to.
In the good old days you got rants like the holy fire of whatever god you think is the coolest rained down on the world.
These are the most pathetic Microsoft bashes I've ever read.
Not even an M$ so far. WTF?
Oh come ON! We're geek here, and my non-geek fiance was able to learn how to use the ribbon in a few minutes.
Are Linux nuts so incapable of learning a UI? Or is it a UI in a Microsoft product that automatically puts up a mental blinder that they cannot push through?
Ever day that passes I have less and less respect for geeks who can't remain impartial.
Microsoft says Give us more money to fix the bugs in Windows 7. It's called Windows 8.
Not a popular question I know, but I've got to ask... what are these bugs in Win7 that you've encountered that need fixing? Seriously. No, don't go searching for something. Tell me what part of Win7 that you have ever tried to use has failed you due to bug. Not design critique. Bug.
Be real. Given the massive feature set of the OS and how many lines of code there are in it, the thing is very, very reasonable quality-wise.
"Oh no... he found the
I can sum up why in 2 words:
It's complicated.
(As in not user friendly) And yes, even if you do "advanced mode clickbox," people will shitfit and complain to remove it because of privacy concerns, and/or older people will get scared and want it gone due to information overload.
OK then, make a "Super Advanced" mode clickbox with pulsating red graphics and a low, 60 Hz rumble for a sound effect.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's not that the ribbon is a new UI to learn. It's that they changed other fundamental things. For instance, a big pet peeve of mine: you used to be able to double-click the axis of a graph to pull up the axis properties dialog; now this doesn't work and you *must* right click and select a menu option (or navigate to the ribbon). Also, the tab stops in the new dialog don't work the way they used to, increasing the number of key-transitions required to change the axis dimensions. This is a real pain for those of us who were forced to use Excel for technical things.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
IE 6 was also an 'immersive' browser. It made me want to drown myself.
Your reply makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The entire Computer Management console is complicated, but it's still there. There are tons of complicated aspects to Windows. Have you ever wandered about in the registry?
As for people complaining, who's going to complain? What "privacy" concerns? "Older people"? What the fuck?
FTA:
"Microsoft declined to verify the authenticity of the milestone release. "
Dang! Genuine Advantage strikes again!
Anybody else remember it?
Your desktop background was a browser.
You had a side panel with "channels".
Web sites were supposed to continuously push feed to you, just like TV.
Ribbons? RIBBONS?
The most useless POS interface ever.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
See, that's the thing: Geeks want to adapt if the new paradidgm is /better/ than the old one. If it's the same or worse, geeks will simply go 'why bother?', or 'I have to /pay/ for something /less/ useful? get real!'
This is why Android tablets have taken off among the geeks: The new paradidgm is better than the old one(for some things).
With Linux, you're at least gaining a load of programming tools, free software(as in beer), and the gui interface isn't that much different from XP.
As far as office goes, it's a matter of the old version doing just as well with less resources on top of not needing to learn a new version. Why upgrade for no appreciable benefit?
I'm a vocal stupid fucking idiot, and Windows 7 was my idea.
sic transit gloria mundi
The ribbon is a marked improvement over the old style file menus. People just didn't like it at first because it meant they needed to re-learn the locations of the commands they use. I'm having to relearn where to find certain things on the new Firefox GUI, but that doesn't make it bad.
If someone had been brought up using the ribbon, and you showed them an old-style menu, they'd think it was designed by amateurs. Where do you change settings.... edit>preferences, or tools>options? Find is under edit, not view? And print preview is under file, instead of view? Why is print a file command at all? And why is import, when paste is under edit? Come on, towards the end they were just cramming in new commands wherever they'd fit.
Because the development of a OS isn't something that can be done within a year. Windows 8 won't be here soon, and they probably started working on it at the same time Windows 7 was RTM.
Then - how often does one undo the automatic (by default) snap/all screen window hog feature in W7? Ridiculous!
Aero snap is one of my favorite features in Windows 7; I use it constantly. When I use XP, I'm constantly dragging my windows to the edge of the screen to no avail.
If you want to turn it off, just search for "snap." The first result should be "Turn off automatic window rearrangement," Just select it and click the check box.
That's why Windows Professional on ARM is so exciting to some (for app compat reasons) but the user experience with using a stylus on a Windows tablet still sucks balls if you ask the consumer buying public. To fix the UI, they've got to make the Windows Explorer shell touch friendly. They've spent a boat load of money on the ribbon, and the corpoate space is somewhat used to it, regardless of what many /. readers think of it. So, they're going to go with it.
I still love my iPad, it's the perfect couch top. But no Flash and certain vertical market websites used within my business make it hard for my company to adopt them as a laptop replacement for some user groups. If MS can kill the stylus and make a touch UI on top of the Windows Explorer shell that doesn't suck, they could have something. The harder part will be wowing over the consumer market, which seems to be driving tablets to the workplace in the first place. It's all about getting a Windows tablet on ARM that people wil want... We'll see if Windows 8 is that product or not.
xp is 42.9%, 7 is 34.1% even circa march 2011 according to below stats :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows
considering most of the presence of new windows versions would come from windows being forcibly bundled by newly sold pcs, and not xp, it easily can be said that people did not MIGRATE to windows 7. even with this forced pushing, its share is still lower than its predecessor.
'most used os in united states' -> who gives a fuck. world is a 7 billion crowded place.
Read radical news here
Poppy cock!
I have setup a lot of machines for a lot of people over the years. I have found most users really confused by the current Task Manager, especially if it's something that isn't a window. I've tried setting up setup Sysinternals Process Explorer for many of these users, especially the ones who just don't understand anything, and I have found that they find it easier, or just as hard. The Process Explorer shows nesting well, doesn't obscure things, doesn't jump around in the list, and is more self-explanatory.
The learning curve on the Process Explorer, because it shows us the data in a more logical way, is MUCH smaller.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Your dog has been automated.
The main reason is because Task Manager is often used to try and regain control of a system which has stopped responding. It must be a small and efficient program so that it can be loaded and used when the system is low on resources (like processor time, memory, or even handles). It provides enough information for the user to determine resource usage for the system and running processes, and provides enough functionality for user to manage them. It is not meant to be used for in-depth performance analysis or detailed process information.
You'll notice that the "Services" tab which was added under Vista is very slow to populate when clicked. This is most likely no accident that it loads the service information from the registry on demand (only when the tab is clicked) instead of retreiving and storing it when Task Manager is first opened.
Process Explorer allows you to peek into intricate process details like handles and loaded DLL's, you can even view the strings in the DLL's memory. It also provides extremely detailed information about the system, like loaded drivers, DPC's and even hardware interrupts (which even interrupt the kernel scheduler and can't be tracked by standard Windows programming methods). This much information is great for doing a deep investigation of a driver or system issue, but is not necessary (and may even be confusing to many users) for regular process management.
They also probably do not include it in Windows because of anti-trust claims and such. They do not include software from most of their product lines in Windows anymore (even extremely useful things like Word Viewer, Windows Live Photo Gallery, or Windows Mobile Device Center). They are left to the user to download and install... If they included a checkbox in Task Manager for Process Explorer, competitors may cry that it's bundling.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
Why on earth, when screens are getting wider, do they keep using up more and more of the vertical real estate for mostly useless menus? Office's displayed work area has shrunk to where you can barely see a paragraph at a time because the screen is full of ribbons. Why not push that crap to one side of the screen and let the document occupy the full height of the screen? If they absolutely must put ribbons on the screen, why not make them autohide like the task bar?
This next part is really dangerous and advanced
Ok
The next dialog will erase your drive
Ok
Erasing your hard drive
Ok
WTF Windows. I followed all your prompts and I lost all my data. Grrrr!
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
What I've never understood is why MS didn't just make the Sysinternals 'Process Explorer' the default task manager
Or even better--in this day and age, why aren't the SysInternals tools pre-packaged into an MSI for easy deployment to machines complete with a %PATH% modifier so you can just push and run...?
There's no place like
I could use a bit more "complicated" in my Windows experience. Windows 7 has an obnoxious habit of producing error messages that amount to, "Something went wrong!" without any further information that might help me to narrow down and solve the problem. If we can get a Microsoft that does away with this attitude of making things user-friendly to the point of excluding the advanced and knowledgeable user, then I will welcome the change.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
Sorry, gotta bite on the troll too. I must admit, my Linux HTPC crashes MUCH more often than my Win7 laptop. Of course, the laptop never has to play 1080p video, but when it crashes, it's usually from overheating, not a Windows bug. That goddamned HTPC crashes so often because X freezes and the only way to fix it is to ssh in or reboot - that's a crash. Bleh.
Ubuntu 10.10 on a Zotac ION ITX mobo combo, running XBMC 10.1 stable rendering with VDPAU, broadcast video handled by MythTV and a Hauppauge HVR-1950, if anyone cares. All the hardware's on the "thumbs up for the penguin" lists, but it's about to get a windows media center treatment, damnit.
I'm an "older people". Guess what - it was older people who built the first PC's. In fact, all the people who created the first operating systems are older people now. We made your apps, your games, your everything.
Alright, I'll make an effort to be fair here. Probably 20% of the people my age have never owned a PC, and never will. Another large percentage has never done anything with a PC other than check email, play a couple of games, and maybe read Fox News headlines. Many of the rest have never diddled in the registry, and have almost no idea how to diagnose or cure a virus problem - that's all automatic with the version of Norton shipped on the computer from Dell (or HP or Gateway or) and if that doesn't take care of it then the computer shop can fix it.
But, it isn't just older people. I can find a few dozen youngsters (25 and younger) who have no clue about the internal workings of a computer just as easily as older people. No freaking clue.
Older people. Phhht. Wait 'til you're an octogenarian, and the young pukes are making fun of you. Ha! More, I hope you live to be 120, and you have to tolerate the condescending bullshit from the kids for all of your last 40 years or more.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I still remember WinNT and my Amiga hard disk.
I used it with Linux+UAE at work, and with my Amiga at home. It worked fine.
Then something tempted me to see how would WinNT react to it.
After good 12h of recovery of my files I knew for sure. NEVER trust Microsoft. They LIE.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
M1 and M2 were leaked everywhere and writers admitted with no shame that they had downloaded "from the usual places" in order to run and test. Reviewers from major mags that would crush bloggers over using part of an article (or even deep linking, in some cases) post stuff about software they've downloaded without permission. Why doesn't anyone seem to care? If I downloaded a leaked game or something, it would be a big deal. As a publisher for a large mag, I certainly wouldn't take the chance of publishing knowingly and obviously infringing material.
Put identity in the browser.
Try looking in the logs.
Guest post by Mary-Jo Enderle
I have seen the future: Windows $NEXT_VERSION Milestone $MOCKUP.
I tried it on a low-end laptop with four Core 2 Duo chips and only 8 gig of memory, and trust me: $NEXT_VERSION is shaping up to be one heck of a product.
WordPad and Paint have seen major overhauls to their user interfaces. Forget the freetards and their "distros" full of all sorts of useless shovelware like "FireFox" and "OpenOffice" and, haha, "GIMP"! — the bundled software with Windows $NEXT_VERSION is clear, simple, sparse and to-the-point. The much-loved Ribbon user interface from Office $HATED_VERSION is now part of WordPad and Paint!
The controversial Digital Rights Management system in $CURRENT_VERSION has been worked over, with user-downloadable "tilt bits," which you can configure to your own liking. It'll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, and the beta nearly took my finger off, but of course that's only if you want to play premium content. The Blu-Ray of Battlefield Earth was unbelievable on this operating system.
A public beta should be released by the end of this year. There's just no way that Steve "Trains Run On Time" Ballmer will miss the Christmas deadline. The final release should leave the midnight queues on $CURRENT_VERSION release day — the street riots, the water cannons, the rubber bullets — in the shade.
I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, those are all fixed in $NEXT_VERSION. And they're finally ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF.
Also, there'll be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It'll be awesome!
I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
But, it isn't just older people. I can find a few dozen youngsters (25 and younger) who have no clue about the internal workings of a computer just as easily as older people. No freaking clue.
If anything, it's worse. People of my parents' generation either didn't use computers or used ones running a system that basically required them to know something about how it worked. Now, we have undergraduates arriving at university who have never used a command line. All of their interactions with the computer happen a couple of abstraction layers higher than was even available when I got my first computer.
If you wanted to do anything interesting with the machines I grew up with, you needed to set video modes, set pixels, shuffle palettes, and poke various memory addresses directly. If you wanted to do anything interesting with the machines my father learned to use, you needed to write machine code (if you were lucky, you got an assembler - you definitely didn't get a compiler) and you probably needed to build some hardware. If you want to do something interesting with the computers people have now, you fire up your favourite 4GL and sit in a comfortable virtual environment.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The last time Microsoft tried to include PDF functionality in one of its products as a shipped feature, Adobe threatened to sue under antitrust law (see the Microsoft Office 2007 and "Save as PDF" fiasco - Microsoft eventually dropped it as a shipped feature but released it as an installable addon). Do you think that this time its going to be any different?
I predict a repeat of the internet browser lawsuits, and Microsoft removing their PDF reader from future Windows 8 builds.
I just tested a line graph in Excel 2010, double clicked on the Y axis and the Format Axis dialog popped up. Same for the X Axis.
You seem to be wrong.
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Nope, the Linux on the same machine that I used to read the disk (and run UAE) couldn't read it afterwards either. And it wasn't some fancy "image mount under emulator". Linux, using AmigaFFS system would mount the Amiga partitions within its own filesystem, using standard AmigaFFS kernel module shipped with vanilla kernel, making them normally, natively accessible, R/W mounts I could normally use from Linux. Then I would launch UAE with "local directory as hard disk" pointing to these mount points. So, no, the operating system that ran on that hardware, with PC
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
You can see these without any extra tools in XP if you're using the command line.
/SVC
tasklist
It was nothing like that... Basically, it was:
Win 3.xx -> Win 95 -> Win 98 --> Win ME, where the line dies. In parallel the NT line looked like this NT 3.xx -> NT 4 -> Win 2000 -> Win XP -> Win Vista -> Win 7.
That's the operating system family history. From the consumer point of view, the "next version" from Win 98/ME was Windows XP, and that's where the "professional" and "consumer" lines merge. The period around Windows 98/ME/2000 was pretty interesting. There were plenty of consumers that didn't want ME, and asked for 98 or 2000 instead. Yes, consumers went with 2000, I've seen many specifically asking for it. Even Dell sold consumer PCs with 2000 as an option. So reality was more like that the users from 95 (plenty of people still ran 95 in that time), 98, ME and 2000 migrated in roughly the same period to XP.
Since this brings up Windows 2000. Windows 2000 was, in my opinion, their best system hands-down. It simply got neglected and was a bit too early to incorporate Wireless. The two "big" things that are missing from 2000 versus XP are wireless support out of the box and fast user switching (for the home user). You can get wireless to run on a 2000 machine, but you have to use the horrible, horrible applications that wireless card manufacturers make. With Windows XP, you usually can avoid those. (but alas, they are still in existence... why is completely beyond to me as the standard interface does everything well)