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Gut-Check Time For Windows 8, Microsoft
theodp writes "GeekWire reports that, for better or worse, the upcoming week is shaping up as one of the most pivotal in Microsoft's history, as the software giant makes its pitch for Windows 8 at two important conferences. First, Microsoft will be huddling with hardware and software developers beginning Tuesday at its sold-out BUILD conference ('BUILD will show you that Windows 8 changes everything'), where it's rumored that Samsung will unveil a Windows 8 tablet. And on Wednesday, CEO Steve Ballmer and other execs will be holding the company's annual Financial Analyst Meeting, which was delayed from its traditional summer date to allow the company to put its Windows 8 strategy in context for Wall Street. So, are we about to finally see the realization of Microsoft's vision for Information at Your Fingertips (Part 2), which Bill Gates introduced with a hokey video at Comdex 1994?"
Windows 7 is a nice operating system, and is selling well. If they don't do something stupid like stop selling it when Windows 8 is released, they will do fine.
I think Microsoft is gonna take it on the chin over the next few months.
Too little too late in phones and tablets
Please convince me why I need up upgrade?
If you give me a system with win8 on it (and probably only a laptop) I'll probably leave a partition for it so I can update the OS once
or twice a year...
When they rushed out Windows 7 after Vista flopped that was understandable, but now Win8 is coming out just as quickly behind Win7. It's like they're doing the famous trash-good-trash-good pattern on purpose. Rush out the next trash OS to get the next good one out sooner.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't think Microsoft is that late for tablets. Quite frankly, I think the current Android tablets still aren't worth using. That leaves you with iPad, so there's definitely some market open for tablets and what Microsoft has shown about Windows 8 for tablets it looks quite nice. On top of that you get the support for Windows apps, which is a huge deal.
But even on normal computer side, Windows 8 seems to improve many things over 7, which already is really good OS.
Last I checked, they've got all sorts of contracts with every PC vendor out there (name brand). When Microsoft releases a new OS all their 'vendors' immediately update.
Granted, this is /. where the average user probably builds their own. But, the 'roll your own crowd' is not the majority.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Um, I'm seeing a lot of things in that future prediction that were dead on. Making purchases with cell phones? Right around the corner. SMS like texting on a small PDA device? Bingo. Roku-like video on demand, controlled by a standard remote and a simple menu system? Exact match. Stylish, flat-panel LCD monitors? Yep. The kid was pretty much doing his assignment straight from Wikipedia (with a more simplistic and stylized interface). At one point the kid and his mom went into an art store to shop. That was wrong in the sense that they wouldn't have gone into an actual brick and mortar store and talked to a saleperson who showed them things on a screen - they simply would've done it from home (eBay, Amazon, etc). Tablet computers - check, but they got the interface all wrong - it had external controls, like a trackball with buttons. Obnoxious PowerPoint presentation? Yep, that's pretty realistic. They went overboard with the amount of Facetime-like video. Takes too much time, too engaging, doesn't allow multitasking, etc. SMS came to rule the communication mode that Sci-fi movies and predictions figured would all be video chatting. The other thing is a lot of the style and design shown in this flick were never brought to the market by MS or the companies embedding their OSes, but from Apple. Now THAT is ironic. Whoever did the prop work on this video should've been hired by MS.
Better known as 318230.
The paid M$ shills are at it already. They are quick on the trigger in this post. I wonder where Bonch is? Sleeping?
* Carthago Delenda Est *
It would be a different world if everything that was going to "change everything" actually did.change everything. Or even if some of it changed a few things for the better. Maybe the hucksters could find a different overarching statement to describe yet another attempt to push product out the door,
Yeah, I hear that. I haven't ran windows as my main OS for over a decade now. But, this is /. You'll hear any news involving OS/2, BeOS, linux, *bsd, Windows, and any other OS here.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
The desktop PC Is a dying platform.
No, it's not. The form a personal computer takes may change slightly, but it's not going anywhere. I think you'll just find an atrix/bionic or EEE Transformer style computing experience coming, where your phone/tablet becomes your computer, and when you bring it home you just plug it into a docking bay with a good ole fashioned keyboard and large LCD screen. and maybe even a mouse, cause there's no way that you're going to want to play quake 6 with touchscreen. That's mid-to-long term though. in the short term, nothing portable is powerful enough to replace a real desktop for real computing work. sending an email or reading a pdf is not the kind of work I'm talking about either.
The average person is increasingly moving to smartphones an iPads to get away from the viruses, driver problems, malware, and other crap that infests Windows desktops.
smartphones already have viruses and malware. try again. most phones even ship with bloatware already.
It's too late for MS. To paraphrase B5, the avalanch has started, and it's too late for the pebbles to vote. The world had a few decades of Wintel, and it doesn't want to have more.
You writing this on your iphone? or are you man (or woman) enough to admit you've got an x86 cpu on/under the desk?
Ribbonization is a non-starter for me. My machine at work is still on XP-64 thanks to our IT just now allowing 7 on new machines.
Just because someone has a computer with an x86 CPU doesn't mean it's Intel nor that it implies Windows.
On top of that you get the support for Windows apps, which is a huge deal.
Even if Windows 8 runs on ARM processors, none of the apps will, so it doesn't seem like much of an advantage.
lot's of corporate uses is just rolling out 7 with lot's of stuff still stuck on xp due to software / old ie and maybe even some old hardware.
Now windows 8 new UI may be a big show stopper and likely have alot of software not work with it.
Based on past record, Win8 is scheduled to be another flop to the quality of WinME and Vista.
Windows 8 is another re-write attempt by MS .... meaning it will suck at release time and it will not be good for production usage until Win9 comes out as a paid fix.
The problem is that Windows is too simple for the elitist Linux users who like to program their lives away to get the OS to do all the things Windows can do natively. And yes, Win 7 has weird files and folders show-up unannounced and is still a bit bloated. But I do love the way I can do anything and everything without installing a program to "allow" compatibility.That is the beauty of Windows. That being said, I do prefer my Ubuntu for my coding and running vm on And MAC, weel I cannot stomach having to use special aids to load the OS on my own build.
.NET apps might.
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All those people with iPods, iPhones and iPads have now used a computing device that's not sold by Microsoft. Not only are they now aware of alternatives to Microsoft-powered devices, but a lot of them don't need anything else than an iPad, period.
Microsoft should consider themselves lucky that Apple doesn't seem to want the business market.
By
* 2 year lock in
* CDMA VS GSM
* locking out wifi on some phones
* saying no to tethering or makeing you pay more it's like the old cable days where they did not want you use routers and or make you pay for more ip's to use more then 1 system.
* low data caps with slow down or high fees for going over.
* app store lock in
* custom carrier ui's and apps.
* locked OS rom's
* app store mystery censorship
* lack of a local corporate app store on some systems
* insane roaming fees.
Windows trying to release Windows 8 with its tablet shell interface on a mainstream PC makes about as much sense as Apple release iPads with a command line shell. Here's what I mean; watch this video (starting at minutes 15) where the presenter tries to show how Windows 8 is just as easy to use on a laptop as it is on a tablet. It makes no sense for any user to have to move the mouse around that much just to get to the object they want to select. Microsoft needs to stop taking this silly "one-size-fits-all" approach with its OS. Make one OS for the enterprise, another for laptops (primary PC machine purchased nowadays by home consumers), and another for tablets. Tailor the shell to fit the machine, not force the machine to fit into the shell.
Now, while I still have my administrative gripes about Windows 7 (bloated size of WinSxS directory, unable to easily unlock a workstation locked by a user, behavior of & driver support for legacy devices, etc.), but I would still recommend that Windows keep selling Windows 7 for the enterprise rather than try to force us to swallow Windows 8. We want something newer, and a lot of these gripes could be fixed w/ SP2. Stop with the one-size-fits-all crap. Market Windows 7 for the enterprise and tailor it for the enterprise. Let Windows 8 start and develop on tablets. If Windows 8 turns out to be a good OS on tablets, I would predict in a very short amount of time, laptops will start to ship w/ touch-screen interfaces to take advantage of the Windows 8 shell.
Microsoft has lots of money yet to be made. Lots of people will continue to buy Windows PCs because they have to; it's pre-loaded. Some will buy Windows because they're wedded to some piece of software or another. Fine. It's all fine by me.
But the days when Microsoft directed the computer economy, the days when they actually created cool new things, are over. Microsoft just doesn't realize it yet. The horse is gone, and Mr. Ballmer is still mucking out the stall.
Statistics argue otherwise. More than 78% of desktops are running Windows. Even accounting for the fact that a lot of /. folks are huge nerds and eat, sleep, and breath linux, there's still a better than 50% chance that something running an x86 chip, posting here, is running Windows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
Perhaps not, but it very nearly implies a "desktop PC" which is what they were discussing.
Per Statcounter.com, The most recent monthly data shows that windows currently commands an overall share of the PC market of 91.39% when XP, Vista, and 7 are combined. OSX weighs in at 6.28%, and iOS has a whopping 0.9%. there is a remaining 1.43% of the market running something else.
per electronista.com, data from the second quarter of the year shows that intel currently has 79.3% of the overall PC market, with AMD covering 20.4%, leaving a titanic 0.3% to the rest of the market.
So yes, if you have an x86 CPU, it's quite likely you have an intel cpu, and a virtual lock that you have intel or amd (be real, the "wintel" platform includes amd cpus. they are 100% compatible and compete only on price vs performance, not on feature differences anymore).
Similarly, if you have an x86 cpu, there is a 91.39% chance you are running some flavor of windows NT based OS.
The HTML5/CSS apps will. Others will likely require little more than a recompile.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
I predict that it will be very easy for developers to port from Windows x86 to ARM. Yes, they will have to release separate binaries, but it will not be difficult.
Microsoft's consistent marketing strategy for Windows over the past quarter century can be summed up in a few lines:
No, the problem is that everything Windows does natively is done wrong.
(Score:3, Unintelligible)
Don't we skip every second windows release anyway?
Windows 3.0 ...
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Are those new sales numbers, or all existing computers?
Why is the market open for tablets, when someone already has the optimal solution? Same reason why people use ARM CPUs rather than try to spend billions trying to make dies that are power-sipping, but have the oomph to power modern stuff.
There isn't room for another tablet maker -- who would have the apps, the support network, the user base, and the developers? Only Apple.
With the explosion of smartphones and tablets, HP announcing they're leaving the PC business and all the news being how Windows 8's perhaps main feature being tablet (and smartphone) ability, the mobile aspect of Windows 8 is what many people will be looking at.
I hear some Windows fans talk about how Windows 8 is going to come in and eventually dominate smartphones and tablets. However, Apple already has been in the smartphone space since mid-2007, and the tablet space since April 2010. Android has been around since October 2008 in the smartphone space, and Honeycomb came out in February of this year (and a few months earlier things like the early Samsung tabs were coming out). Developers have spent a lot of time learning these platforms and writing code for them. The App Stores and Android Markets are filling up with apps, which are being improved continually by updates based on user feedback. Over 550,000 Android smartphones are being turned on a day. Customers are familiar with the apps on their phone, and how to do various things on their phone or tablet.
What do we he hear from Microsoft? It's all just vaporware so far. Even if developers want to develop for an SDK with no device, there's no SDK out yet. Maybe it will be put out after this conference. Also - Microsoft has been saying a lot of it is HTML 5 and Javascript. I'm happy about that, but it doesn't really exploit all the code and experience for Visual Basic, Silverlight, .NET and so forth. I understand they backpedaled on this a little bit, although HTML 5 and Javascript will still be on it. They're kind of forced to do this - they can't force mobile developers to develop just for Microsoft, they have to hope that the popular iPhone/iPad/Android applications are easy to port to Windows 8 so they can get some applications that way. Microsoft's Windows 7 smartphone/tablet market share is very, very low, so due to the lack of any kind of monopoly strongarm, they're forced to open up a little bit.
The two things Microsoft has going for it is the existing Windows code base, and the ability for people to connect to their PCs, or PC formats (Word, Excel) or Microsoft servers at work (Exchange etc.). As people dump Microsoft PCs for iPads and Android tablets, this lock-in becomes less important. Also insofar as the Windows existing code base, both Apple and Android have had a lot of C++ OpenGL code which used to be primarily dedicated to Windows ported to Apple and Android mobile devices. Miguel de Icaza and company have even brought Mono to Android, so a lot of C# and .NET code can get on Android. As existing Windows code can often be used on Android, this lessens the advantage of Windows 8.
And then there's other things. Microsoft makes money selling Windows 8 to manufacturers like HTC and so forth. Google gives Android away for free, and makes money on the hook-ins it has for Google Maps and so forth. I guess with the Motorola purchase, Google will make some money actually selling the hardware as well. Microsoft has to sell an unwanted product to manufacturers, when a free, popular OS already exists, with a user base of millions, with an Android app market with hundreds of thousands of apps, and many developers working on creating new apps and improving existing ones.
I also wonder how hard it is to develop for Windows 8. For Android, I can download Eclipse on a Linux machine, and the Android SDK, make an Android emulator, develop code in Java (with a few calls to special Android SDK Java classes like Activity), pay Google a one-time lifetime $25 fee to put as many apps on Android Market as I want, and I'm all set. I can even release the app to a non-Market competitor site and save the $25. So the whole shebang costs $25 for life. What will Windows be like? Will I have to pay to get on their app store? Will I have to buy Visual Studio or something? If they don't make things real easy and cheap for developers, they're going to have problems. They might even have problems if they do make things real easy and cheap.
With respect, saying that shows about as much ignorance as GameboyRMH's comment that Windows 8 is going to be a trash OS because of a few new features. Yes, Microsoft needed a better driver model and to improve security, but Vista wasn't a good OS. It was bloated to heck and ran poorly on machines that should have handled it wonderfully. Never mind that Microsoft didn't bother doing the right thing an approved machines as Vista ready that clearly never should have had it. End the cognitive dissonance. Your experience is just that, your experience. The mere fact that there have been tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands or millions of complaints about how Vista handled disproves any idea that it was a good OS. It means Vista failed on an absolutely critical element, the user experience. You were lucky Vista wasn't such a hassle for you, nothing more. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been, and we didn't lose out on those improvements you named. Which should emphasize just how great a failure Vista was.
I'm looking forward to seeing what Windows 8 has. I won't prejudge it without using it and I won't believe that just because I might have a good experience with it, that everyone will. I encourage you both to do the same.
Chances are, the PC you're using right now had its motherboard, hard disk, monitor, enclosure, and most other physical parts designed on a PC running Windows.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Even if Windows 8 runs on ARM processors, none of the apps will, so it doesn't seem like much of an advantage.
.Net apps will since they run on the CLR and the underlying architecture doesn't matter.
i am content with how things are. what i have works. there is no reason for me to 'change' things - especially things that are on the basis of a lot of other things as an operating system - and try to fix what was not broken.
.....
why the hell should i disturb the running of my daily life, work, and whatever i am doing, just because some company wants me to replace working stuff to sell me more stuff to make their shareholders happy
Read radical news here
The HTML5/CSS apps will run on everything, so it gives no advantage to Windows over its competitors.
And it takes a lot more than a recompile to go from a keyboard and mouse to a touchscreen interface, to say nothing of the things that contain x86 assembly or assume x86 processors in one way or another, or apps that are extremely poorly optimized for battery life, etc.
More to the point, even if all you have to do is recompile it, that assumes that you can recompile it. We're not exactly talking about open source software here. If the developer no longer exists, no longer supports the software, or is just waiting until Windows-on-ARM has a nontrivial installed base before they put in the budget to do a port, there is little you can do.
Napoleon XIV, is that you?
"Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two" -- RFC 1925
Most apps will work with a recompile, anything running Java, .NET or HTML5 wont even need that.
This sig has been distributed under the Creative Commons license.
And many haven't even started rolling out windows 7 yet.
I don't think Linus has any plans of letting C++ code into the kernel.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
Didn't say android tablets. But since you mentioned it, I know a lot of people who are buying iPads and Android tablets.
Honeycomb is solving a lot of the fragmentation issues with tablets. In the next couple months android tablets will drop
in price, and the quad core tablets may be quite nice.
I've seen the Blackberry Playbook, it makes me giggle.
i really doubt you'd be able to recompile a c++ app targeted at winforms on x86 to run on arm
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
yeah, the whole thing where MS is moving to html5 feels like they're trying to compete on merit rather than lockin which is pretty cool, i doubt the different MS departments will be able to not screw each other over and mess the whole thing up though
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
and likely have alot of software not work with it.
And this is a good thing, MS has been dragging along support for cruft for far too long, and its time to start over with a clean code base. They still have support for VB6 (a great language in the day) that was discontinued about 11 years ago.
It would somehow seem to make sense given ARM support. Putting it on a desktop seems ridiculous
and a marketing feature. The idea that I would want to use my fingers on a desktop screen (or even worse page up / down) is
one that caters to the lowest market segment of finger dragging imbeciles. No thank you, I don't need EVERYTHING gestural.
Chances are, the PC you're using right now had its motherboard, hard disk, monitor, enclosure, and most other physical parts designed on a PC running Windows.
Chances are all the chips that do the actual work were designed on PCs running Linux, or a few on Sun workstations.
How does that show that "everything Windows does natively is done wrong"?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Much of the talk about Windows 8 has described how fast this OS boots on modern hardware. Under 10 seconds seems to be a common claim.
And the articles profess this to be a good thing, which it may be.
But. How often does anyone actually cold-boot these days?
My aging Mac goes about a month between boots -it goes to sleep the rest of the time and wakes up from that in like two seconds. My Windows 7 PC goes at least three weeks between boots and probably longer. Both the Mac and the Windows 7 box take a while to cold boot -but this is not something that happens every day or even every week. Maybe once a month. I can live with it taking a while, once in a while.
I probably waste more time in my life trying to decide what flavor of toothpaste to buy.
So I am just not excited about Windows 8 claiming to be really good at doing something that essentially almost never happens anyway.
This is like saying you have found a really fast way to make yourself your very own birthday cake, which is a skill you get to use one time a year. Yay. Wow.
Sig for hire.
Lot is? Lot was? Something belongs to the lot?
Windows 7 is a nice operating system, and is selling well. If they don't do something stupid like stop selling it when Windows 8 is released, they will do fine.
I suspect we should just consider the "Metro UI" as a very hyped gadget layer (like those HTML+JavaScript gadgets that both Windows and Mac have had for years now), but allowing them to be more complex, better performance, giving them a new "swipey" way of accessing them, and allowing you to run your Windows Phone 7 apps as Windows 8 gadgets. Dashboard/Sidebar redux.
I think MS is hoping this will be a tipping point where these HTML+JavaScript apps now become actually useful and usable, and that the portability of gadgets between Phone 7 and Windows 8 will be a market advantage. But I don't see any way in which this should detract from existing Windows 7 usefulness. Just if you're on a tablet, you'll be interacting with the dashboard much more, and if you're on a desktop you'll be interacting with the desktop much more.
MS is stuck and I think their audience of business, developers, investors and consumers are confused. It can't be everything to everyone for ever.
The thing with an OS is you can't be evolutionary and change the entire platform without ticking off your largest customers - OEMs and Fortune 500 types. So, instead as Windows users, we're stuck with persistent sucky features, and the new OS releases have stupid features that should have been replaced a long time ago. And when you get as big as MS, the software that comes with Windows has to be kind of crippled otherwise they'll have the DOJ burning them for monopoly stuff all over again.
So what are we stuck with?
- Wordpad and Notepad that are about as useful as they were in Windows 3.1
- A non-customizeable interface
- A crappy and confusing command line (I haven't learned Powershell) but copy and move commands are seriously crap but better (somewhat) than the GUI version
And so what new features are we getting in Windows 8 other than GUI. I haven't followed this very closely, I admit, but lately they announced:
-- A faster boot time why didn't this get included with 7?
-- A multi-threaded copy/move operation in Windows which correctly reports time to complete
-- some new GUI you can turn on or off
As for Samsung tablet, I don't know what to say. I think the HP tablet firesale, is evidence enough, any tablet comparatively overpriced" compared to the iPad is not going to do any major volume. I think there's a $200 spot the market is willing to bear and that's it.
MS is also very conservative. Launching a trendy, hip product in front of a conservative crowd is probably not a good idea. Samsung should probably launch it on its own. Preferably with a guy in Jeans, a black turtle neck. Also put a hyponotizing background and spike the kool-aid at the conference. Tablet should do really well after.
and likely have alot of software not work with it.
Based on what? Given the desktop view and the fact that they don't appear to be deprecating APIs i would say there is every reason to believe they won't break compatibility.
Even if Windows 8 runs on ARM processors, none of the apps will, so it doesn't seem like much of an advantage.
Most apps are just a recompile away, so "none" will change very quickly.
Also, there's one specific killer app that alone is worth a lot: full Office.
And it takes a lot more than a recompile to go from a keyboard and mouse to a touchscreen interface, to say nothing of the things that contain x86 assembly or assume x86 processors in one way or another, or apps that are extremely poorly optimized for battery life, etc.
Productivity apps suck on a touchscreen either way - anyone who tried using Pages or Numbers on iPad knows what I mean.
What can be done, however, is a tablet that can be docked to become a netbook, like Asus Transformer or Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet. Imagine this kind of thing, but with Win8, and the ability to switch between tile-based touch UI, and classic Windows desktop - and running e.g. Office in the latter, with keyboard docked and mouse attached.
It doesn't matter whether it's bad, or good, or even the same. They will release it, and millions will buy it. It will be included on every new PC. It will be adopted across the enterprise. You really have no choice so you may as well relax and enjoy it.
And of course they know this, which makes one wonder if they're just mailing it in at this point. I mean, why bother?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
i really doubt you'd be able to recompile a c++ app targeted at winforms
A C++ app targeting WinForms - a .NET UI framework - is technically possible using C++/CLI, but is vanishingly rare in practice. Did you mean to say "targeted at Win32 UI API"?
If so, then yes, it is really a recompile away. Consider this: all primitive types are of the same size, endianness is the same also. From C/C++ level, there's no difference other than that you wouldn't be able to dereference an unaligned pointer (and even then I think this can be implemented if desired).
Well, I was including laptops with stationary workstations in my "desktop" vs "smartphone/tablet" discussion, but if you want to separate laptops and desktop workstations, I'll oblige.
The day that Ati or Nvidia comes up with a portable version of their upper-mainstream chipset that does some trickery where it runs at full desktop speed while your laptop is docked, and deactivates something like 75% of the cores when the laptop is running off of battery, AND pulls it in at a mainstream price... that'll be the day that I retire my desktop. Until that day, my desktop days are very much alive. It doesn't hurt my decision either that desktop components are still cheaper. Maybe you can get a $400 laptop that's pretty close in specs to a $400 PC (more likely a $250 or $300 PC), but you show me a $1200 laptop, and unless there is some overstock price reduction trickery going on, you can probably build a comparable desktop for $600 or $700. A year or so ago I tried to price a laptop comparable to my desktop, and it came in at more than -twice- what my desktop cost.
The "mobility" advantage of a laptop is highly overrated in the era of the smartphone and tablet. My wife and I just got back from vacation in Florida two days ago. I brought the laptop with us, and we didn't even take it out of the bag the entire week. Smartphones and tablets sufficed for us the entire time. We both agreed that it was a waste to bring it, and it won't be coming with us on the next trip.
The laptop tried to straddle the difference between "portable" and "powerful", and either failed at one of those two or succeeded but at the cost of a very high price tag. I think that the computing consumer public is moving to "keep the powerful computer at home, and bring the light duty smart device on the road". Note I said consumer. The business community is different of course, as it asks different tasks of computers.
MS needs to be in the tablet, phone, TV, whatever gizmo. They see the traditional desktop PC market fading. I think Win8 is a move towards a retargetable core with different GUIs.
Windows 1 changes everything!
Windows 1 changes everything!
Windows 1 changes everything!
Who cares about windows? if this gets a arm laptop with decent performance into the market i will just buy it, wipe windows off of it and put linux on it.
I wonder if they will make the corners sharp so Apple doesn't sue them. Apple owns rounded corners combined to touch screens with icons. Well, I guess Windows 8 isn't going to have icons so I wonder if Microsoft was smart enough to copyright rounded corners with square buttons interface.
The desktop PC Is a dying platform.
Compare a pick up truck to a subcompact car. Yeah. Pick up trucks are so ugly, they guzzle gas, and when they have a back seat it's uncomfortable as hell. I predict the end of pick up trucks!
Desktops are here to stay. What's more, cases are getting bigger and bigger, for better air flow. I'm writing this on a water-cooled i7 at almost 4GHz with 12GB of RAM, while running 5 simultaneous EVE Online clients on 4 monitors with 3 graphics cards. My CPU load is at 25%. Yeah, do that on your little tablet.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The HTML5/CSS apps will likely have to wait for Google and Mozilla to port their web browsers to Windows/Arm. Internet Explorer on Arm is not likely to be a compelling choice for applications that rely heavily on the web browser.
I wonder, will Samsung's tablet completely rip off Apple like they've been doing in every other product?
Microsoft has no choice but to compete on merit at this point. They have already tried to lock people in with Silverlight, but they did not get any takers. Heck, even with Microsoft working on its browser as hard as it can it is still shedding millions of users each month.
Most of the people I know don't use desktops any more - a laptop is their main computer - good enough to do the job, quieter, takes up less space, uses less power, and it doesn't lose your data when the power goes off. Tale your desktop, add in the cost of a UPS that will run it for an hour or two, webcam, speakers, keyboard, mouse, wireless adapter, and you're at price parity with the laptop, but without the portability.
Today's laptops make great portable servers.
Cleverbot? Is that you?
The desktop IS dying, and has been for years.
Emphasis mine. But this should be your first clue. What's taking them so long to roll over and die? Desktops are moving into a very real niche market. The guy who needs a server but not a rack. The guy who crunches a lot of numbers. The guy who needs lots of hard drives in a RAID array. The scientist who needs to plug in custom hardware. The gamer who needs to keep up with the video card upgrade cycle (which is much faster than the CPU cycle). Becoming niche is not the same as dying.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I liked BeOS you insensitive clod
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a reputable source has informed me that Win8 will have a feature Microsoft employees insisted on having: a chair widget you can throw.
hopefully this will reduce the number of flying chair injuries from Ballmer.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Smartphones are computers. The biggest difference between them is that the OS is built from the ground up to isolate applications, either by discreete UIDs as in Android, or in chroot jails as in iOS.
The desktop PC isn't dying; people are getting more options. Only a few years ago, people had a choice -- laptops or desktops, as smartphones were mainly the realm of execs. Now, computing tasks that only were doable on full fledged PCs can be done on smartphones, tablets, laptops or desktops.
There are tasks that are hard pressed to be replaced by a desktop PC. Take the PC in an office desk that is used for anything from Word documents to Powerpoint to Excel. Workflow on a tablet is a PITA at best due to only one app at a time, and no real inter-application communication. Task switching on an iPad is "meh" at best, and with some tasks, almost impossible.
Same here. It always booted so fast and had a 'good polish'. There's always zeta OS (think that's the name)...or is it Haiku?
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
i really doubt you'd be able to recompile a c++ app targeted at winforms on x86 to run on arm
Considering winforms is a .NET technology, I wouldn't expect a native C++ application to use it. A few years ago I was working on an application that had native Win32 and WinCE ARM builds, and there wasn't too much difficulty in producing separate builds from the same codebase - most of the difficulty was in slightly differing APIs. A native ARM Windows 8 should have the same APIs as the x86 one so a recompile should mostly be enough, as long as no endianness issues come into play.
it has hyper v so everything will work with it.
Why is the market open for tablets, when someone already has the optimal solution?
Yeah, so optimal that if i want to say work on a PDF in 2 different apps i have to upload the file from the first app to a server somewhere, close that app and open the second one then download the file from that server back to my device. Real fucking optimal.
What Microsoft is going to announce is that they're retiring Silverlight and that .NET is going to be .NOT.
Sorry to all you folks who invested your time and brain capital in those technologies--you f'd up, you trusted Microsoft not to screw you.
I wonder, will Samsung's tablet completely rip off Apple like they've been doing in every other product?
with the aluminum chasis
How dare they use aluminium, apple uses that, therefore it belongs to them!
black keyboard
Another Apple invention i suppose, never seen one of those before.
thick black bezel around the screen, and the Samsung logo placed precisely where the words MacBook Pro go on the Apple laptops
Yeah kinda like every fucking LCD TV and monitor has ever done...oh but then apple did it so therefore they invented it.
This Dr. Macenstein is one complete fucktard.
Remember when we all thought that the mainframe was history? (They are entrenched in corporate America, and have experienced a strong resurgence as they do what they do extremely well.)
Remember when we all thought that Unix was going to disappear? (Where do we begin? Android/IOS, MacOSX, Wireless routers, cheap Linux servers everywhere not to mention Linux workstations, Unix/Linux variants easily outsell Windows variants today)
Windows won't disappear any time soon, any more than *nix and mainframes will. Both are rubust and well suited to their "home turf" and Microsoft would have to perform a long series of stupid things before they could kill their long-entrenched legacy. Instead, we'll see new marketplaces built upon the framework of existing infrastructure, and right now, javascript has rapidly become an emergent phenomenon - there's a new paradigm forming before our eyes as it goes from a little toy to a serious application development environment.
Will we talk about Prototype or JQuery in a few years like we now talk about Windows?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Sooooo lame.
At the very least you should have tried the "But... this Win8... does it run on Linux/Beowulf Cluster?" line of trolling.
Agreed. I switched to Mac because windows laptops would sometime not wake up from sleep. Sleep is the common case, not cold boot. Crash on wake up means unreliable.
Also, with an ssd, cold boots are single digit decode anyway.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
what males you think that? Have you ever worked with a Microsoft product like SharePoint or CRM they are written entirely in .Net? How bout the fact that of you combine VB and VB.Net code there are more lines the. Any other language used by businesses including C and COBOL. How bout the fact SQL is partially written .NET. what about the fact the primary framework for Windoes Phone is in SilverLight? Think you have no clue what your talking about, MS isn't going to give up on .Net VB.net or C#. they tried to make Siverlight a flash killer they failed and Steve Jobs figured out how to, but that us hardly a sign that .Ne tis in the way out, neither is the support for HTML5 live tiles in Windows 8.
Nobody is going to pay a subscription model price for OS. Consumers want to pay once for a computer not reoccurring, considering many how many users only browse web and send emails, wouldn't MS just be pushing people towards smart phones and iPads? MS needs to consider a post windows world and consider the fact that word process g plus spreadsheet software should not cost in the hundreds of dollars.
Am i the only one who thinks Windows 8 sounds like an unbelievable mess in the making. I never cared for the ribbon menu since its contextual while most people i support works out of button placement and look. While ribbon is good in theory, it fails utterly when introduced to reality.
Im also vary of the Zune/WP7 interface and i dont really understand what it brings other than bringing people back to Windows 3.0. On a phone its usable (albeit it still lacks a ton of functionality, especially with respect for multitasking) but on a computer or pad you want more controls and more ways to arrange your workflow.
My biggest question is the mess that seems to be in the making with the naming where the ARM and x86 versions is called the same but are totally different beasts alltogether. Loads of people will think that x86 software will run on the ARM version and will be very dissappointed. Personally this looks like a scheme against ARM from Microsoft and Intel. "Here you have the worthless ARM hardware that wont run your old apps but lokki here, the x86 hardware will!"
As others have already pointed out, Mono makes C# and .NET available on Android. There are probably C# compilers for iOS too. However, even if there weren't do you think that every developer on the planet needs or even wants to be a tablet or phone developer? Tablets and phones get lots of hype, but in terms of paid developer jobs and total value of software produced they are niche markets compared to the proprietary server side software market. Meanwhile, the 'App Stores' that cater to tablets and phones are full of dinky apps that have all been done N+1 times so that nobody makes much money. A single hit historically isn't enough to launch a music career and it turns out that it isn't enough to launch a software company either; as many independent developers are now learning the hard way.
A lot of corporate users also use SAP. SAP taught me that the user interface can become uglier and worse than it was in the early 80's and still be part of a successful project. Windows 8 will do fine. Slashdotters just fear change. I myself have yet to embrace Windows 7. I begrudgingly used Vista for a month before I wiped it and installed Linux. I've been fighting every new Windows release as stupid and unnecessary since Windows 3.1. I remember my thoughts every single time: "WTF is OLE? Why do I care?" "This Windows 95 runs like balls on my 486." "Windows 98 is just 95 with IE uninstallable." "98SE is just 98 what the hell did they change?!" "ME is just the worst parts of 98 with a new interface. What a disaster!" "Windows 2000?! I bet nothing works with that stupid NT kernel." "Windows XP?! It's only been a year and I don't need a stupid candy interface. Get that outta my face!" "Oh great Vista, now my computer isn't mine anymore. I bet they won't even let me rip a DVD." "Windows 7 is just Vista without the name Vista."
HTML5 is basically Apple's attempt to created a crippled form of "cloud app" delivery so people buy iApps instead. It's hardly competing on merit.
And where do you get this from? That shitty article a few months ago?
Having access to the builds, I can tell you now that .Net is very much alive and available in Windows 8.
All I can say is, it is pathetic. Nothing works the way it should.
Translation: It's different, therefore it's wrong and I don't like it.
I have to spend hours searching the web to find out how to do anything with it.
Translation: I'm incompetent.
The whole concept of "libraries" is ridiculous. It is so jumbled up I can never find where my files have been stored.
It's effectively a symlink that points to multiple directories, this most basic concept actually confuses you?
Directories I never created just appear out of nowhere.
Yeah, programs you run created them.
Why is this modded troll? Just like "My (Pictures|Documents|Videos|Computer)" magical folders in XP, Libraries in W7 is probably the most useless and confusing feature. Not to mention the fact that it uses the same name as libraries, which serve a totally different function. Every OS has valid criticisms, and this one is particularly valid because users have to deal with this poor design every time they open Explorer.
What will they steal from which OS / Window manager this time ?
Dos 2 3 4 5? Windows 2 3? (Leaving out the 1 because you don't tend to add the numeric when there is just 1) Just why do you think it is 7 and 8?
Those who don't learn from history are bound to look silly.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
From my uni days...
Ubuntu 11.04 is opensources answer to Vista and ME. "Hey! We can suck donkey ass too and force you to relearn everything without tutorials on a system that is buggier then a MS first release and has more driver issues then a dos machine. It is not like you got a choice... stop looking at mint, that is not the distro you are looking for".
Calling Vista a good OS... stockholm syndrome much? MS has a solid strategy, they release a product they know is absolutely crap to make their regular crap look better in comparison. Just look at the people calling Windows 7 good... if I stop force feeding you shit and put you on a diet of urine instead you might think things are looking up. They are not.
It is new coke all over again. Give people a taste of how bad it can be and they appreciate their regular dose of crap a lot more.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Point to me to any evidence that you could not get a porn app into a Linux repo. Oh wait, there isn't one. See pornview for one.
The guidelines you refer to are about basic quality and legal requirements, not about censorship.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What Microsoft is going to announce is that they're retiring Silverlight and that .NET is going to be .NOT.
Sorry to all you folks who invested your time and brain capital in those technologies--you f'd up, you trusted Microsoft not to screw you.
Obvious troll is obvious...
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
I love how you intentionally extract fragments of quotes and completely ignore the images posted that show a laptop that absolutely looks like a MacBook Pro, with the same dimensions, chassis design, keyboard font, logo position, colors, and even a mock Apple logo as the default user avatar on the Windows 7 login in order to resemble the OS X startup screen.
No wonder you posted anonymously. Next.
If only there were some examples in history of a party coming relatively late to the market but still dominating it!
It would be easy to point to Apple and its late entry in both the MP3 AND smartphone market. There were smartphones before the iPhone, LONG before. In fact MS had smartphones before Jobs even thought of one.
And MS was late to the computer market as well, there were lots of companies that came earlier AND thought they had control of the market. They were wrong... their names? Apple, IBM, Commodore, Amiga.
I doubt MS will make it this time but it is not because there is such a think as first mover advantage. MS will fail again because they produce crap. The proof? Apple had according to you control of the smartphone market. Didn't stop Android did it now?
MS previously relied on lockin and it didn't help to sell any of their previous phones and now they come up with the UI from hell and people still won't want it. Because they don't have to.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
We all have a self confirming bias in favour of one system or another. The problem is that the greater the effort to please a wide audience, the less optimized it becomes for the speicalized user. Windows and all the mainstream linux distros are both going down the road of running tons of unneded stuff, that just slows everything down. We both know that - so we cut away the worst of the bloat on our primary system, which then runs pretty decently - but the 200 mashines in the server farm, and your wifes PC that gets infected with malware at least once a year - they'll all have to make du with a stock install, whicever OS they're running.
And I think it's strange how the latest Windows always seems to be the greatest thing on earth - while all previous versions suddenly stinks from the day when MicroSoft wan't to sell you the upgrade. They should rather adopt some sort of subscription model so everyone was running on the same newest version without the all the planned obsoletion.
Just in case anyone was wondering about my bias: I have an MSDN (free MS software galore) subscription AND run gentoo linux on my main mashine.
Run with the lemmings, and you'll get your feet wet.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
After many years of working primarily with Linux, I am using Windows 7 in my new job. All I can say is, it is pathetic. Nothing works the way it should. I have to spend hours searching the web to find out how to do anything with it.
Don't worry, Windows 7's new "improved" ribbon-y interface with its auto-hiding widgetry is just as bewildering to people who've used every version of Windows since 3.1, administered Windows servers, and so on. I'm just glad they've left the keyboard shortcuts in place, since otherwise I'd have a hard time saving anything in Office. ;)
To be fair to Windows, though, I don't use it exclusively, having also used MacOS since System 7, Linux since the 0.xx eat-a-bowl-of-disks days, Solaris since SunOS 4, Tru64 Unix since it was Ultrix, and iOS since 2.x (and those are just the ones that I'm still using the current version of; you do not want to see the full list).
On the other hand, none of those other OSes have ever managed to put out a new release with UI changes that confused me as much as Windows 7. ;)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
BUILD will show you that Windows 8 changes everything
I'm not surprised, considering Microsoft's history of always, bloody well changing everything, so you can't possibly guess your way through a new version. Hasn't this been one of the biggest complaints against using Windows and Office? Not the biggest, but still right up there. Every time there is a major change in the user interface, people have to waste time on learning how to do the same old thing again.
It is of course just a stupid slogan meant to wow the cool crowd; it just irks me, I suppose. The constant changes were one important factor in why I started using Linux - after 10+ years of development, it is still easy to manage the system - once learned, you don't have to re-learn.
I was planning on moving my second PC from XP32 to XP64 for the extra memory addressing. How easy is it to find drivers and such for XP64?
Please let me apply my Windows purchasing checklist to the new product:
1) Can I buy a permanent, non-revocable license to use the software at a reasonable price per seat (not per user) without requiring activation servers on my network and the possibility of the damn thing just switching off one day because it's unhappy? (I class "reasonable" as lower than the most expensive piece of application software I plan to run on the machine) Also, can I work out what version and license option I need, and find somewhere that will actually sell it to me, without spending a week researching the options (hint: I work in education in the UK and apparently it's just not possible to offer me a perpetual license at a sensible price because I don't have enough MS software on the premises)
2) Can I turn the desktop back to what I want it to be - basic, empty, simple, not requiring a full-3D graphics card just to load up?
3) Can I control EVERY aspect of the computer from a network server without waiting years for an appropriate Group Policy and/or other hack to appear? (I had to wait until Vista to control things like Power Policies effectively without using third-party software, I imagine there's a whole swathe of similar problems with newer OS too). This means being able to turn off pop-up warnings, taskbar icons, and EVERYTHING that might provide an avenue for a user to get to a dialog that I've deliberately locked them out of.
4) Can I just image a working machine byte-for-byte if something breaks (takes minutes) for diagnosis/repair/recovery/replacement without having to reinstall the entire damn thing or worrying about the licensing going apeshit?
5) Can my users use the damn thing on their own initiative, alone, without retraining, or do I have to rejig every single machine so that it's more familiar to them and yet still never quite get it to look/work the same as previous OS?
6) Can I install it on the same machines that I have now without things running slower? (Why is this such a big problem, especially if I want to run in "classic" modes?)
7) Can it run everything that previous versions did without requiring months of tweaking, testing, and crossing fingers?
My guess is that basically zero of those are true of Windows 8 (certainly, Windows 7 fails too, which is why we haven't deployed that yet). I don't think these are onerous demands, either, and if the newer versions of Windows offered even some of them, it would be infinitely more attractive. As it is, though, Microsoft are slowly pushing people out of their own market.
Seriously, you spend decades creating a product, and don't think that some of your big corporate users might want to exist without having to "activate" their own licensing from a server they have to pay for?
But. How often does anyone actually cold-boot these days?
But. How often you do you read articles these days?
According to their data 57% & 45% (desktop & laptop) of users shutdown instead of Sleep/Hibernate. Thats a large chunk of their users. It makes sense to improve their experience. (Ofcource its going to require a newish motherboard with UEFI support, etc)
Which begs the question why those designers then did not implement support of their work into Linux. ACPI issues with Linux are certainly not uncommon.
i really doubt you'd be able to recompile a c++ app targeted at winforms on x86 to run on arm
Why? The abstract machines that ARM and x86-32 present to C programmers are almost identical. The only difference is performance. For example, some shift sequences are cheaper on ARM, unaligned loads / stores are a lot more expensive (require a trap to the OS if the compiler doesn't spot them and add two loads and a rotate) on ARM. All of the basic types are the same size, it's the same endian, and the alignment restrictions are almost the same (you can do unaligned loads and stores on both, but they're slow, so don't).
Porting C code from x86 to ARM is a lot easier than porting it to x86-64. It's vastly easier than porting it to SPARC64.
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Why would they need to release separate binaries? Windows has supported universal binaries through .NET for a while. They're a bit of a hack, but they do work. Basically, you have a tiny .NET program in the first section of the PE file, which then detects the architecture and launches the correct version.
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You mean, is it going to be a rectangle like Apple's ? What a shame.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
That default start screen featured in the article - that's not what they expect me to use on my Desktop is it??
On a small device that looks fine. (I see the little "Desktop" tile... I hope there are multiple desktops....) But on a big screen, on a PC, it looks like an "e-business website template" circa 1995. Something you'd expect to find in a Photoshop 6.0 book, under a section about layer slicing for the web. It would be a horrible UI on the desktop or laptop computer.
Subscription? To an OS? LOL SoaaS hype flashback to 2008. Ugh. No, you're wrong, that modeld does not attract users, that's why that buzzword doesn't float around much anymore.
... like every other OS released by MS. It's been standard that MS has two teams doing OS development, their A team - responsible for such OS's as NT, 2000, XP, and 7, and their B team responsible for 98, ME, Vista, and now 8 - the pattern is clear. Avoid every other OS from MS as it is just a revenue generator till they get out a REAL OS. Of course Windows 7 was released a lot sooner than planned because VISTA s**ked so badly, with the result that it was still not ready for prime time. So Windows 8 should be another flop, and the wise system admin will avoid it like the plague...
I don't see my corp, large multinational telecom still running XP, ever running anything that looks like Win8.
"of Microsoft's vision for Information at Your Fingertips...?"
No.
+5 for inappropriate but hilarious use of apostrophe's (see what I did there?)!
That's mid-to-long term though. in the short term, nothing portable is powerful enough to replace a real desktop for real computing work. sending an email or reading a pdf is not the kind of work I'm talking about either.
although I agree with you about the dockable tablet/phones coming to take over all our bases, I disagree when you say "sending an email or reading a pdf" is not real computing work. It is, it's what 99% of work usually consists of (if you all writing Word/Excel documents in there too).
Sure, there's always going to be space for niche markets like your 'real' computing work, but that will simply shift to the server where real computing power can be applied. Chances are you'll still be doing that serious work, but on a thin client app which will happily run on your tablet. So if you ever wanted your PC to compile your apps instantly or a heavy-processing game to run, it'll happen, but not quite in the way you imagine.
Come to think of it, it'll be ironic if IBM's original estimate of 6 computers in the world comes true - the 'computers' will be called 'Google's datacentre platform' or Amazon's and we'll all connect to them via mobile clients over the "cloud".
You think XP on modern hardware screams, you should try win3.1. It boots in less than 1/10th of a second from dos (which doesn't take long either).
"Change Everything" usually just means they are making it shinnier at the expense of massive computation power. I haven't seen any real improvements since XP, and I can't argue with people who prefer windows 2000.
In the 1990s when Windows 3 came out CPUs weren't powerful enough for serious GUI stuff, so they buried a lot of basic functions inside the windows API. Linux has a more structured approach in having a X-window layer that's independent of the OS.
The basic structure remained even when it was no longer needed. For Microsoft to split Windows in separate layers it would mean a large refactoring effort.
If Win8 is something really different and better, I think people will be open to it.
If this is just a new skin on an old system or just an incremental improvement I don't see the point.
The focus on MS as toxic and moneygrubbing has softened somewhat in resent years. If they come forward with a great product that's a real improvement I think they'll find customers. If it comes off as just another in the "give me money again" cycle that predominated the perception of Win 95>XP>Vista>7 then I think they'll be headed for trouble.
I differ with most people in that I don't think the economy is bad. I just think the economy for non-sense products has gone away.
Good lord... Can anyone be original, copy-cats abound!
"Windows 8 changes everything" = Been said already! Get your own lines.
"Samsung will unveil a Windows 8 tablet" - Yet ANOTHER tablet to TRY..
A modern OS API (WinRT) that replaces aging win32 and a UI library "directui" that builds upon the native Direct2D and DirectWrite APIs introduced in windows 7. Native apps are put on the same level as managed apps - C++ is in resurgence . Apps for your desktop, tablet and mobile available via the app store. If anyone thinks this is crap, they need to stop drinking the Apple/Android cool aid. This is slashdot so I'll only only get flames, but when Microsoft Office works on your laptop, desktop, tablet and mobile and you can sync your work/excel and powerpoint documents seamlessly between them, expect to see Apple and Android panicked. And yes, when the large number of native, commercial engineering and scientific applications that are windows only are linked to WinRT and UI refactored, you are going to see a lot more professionals start to carry windows tablets onsite instead of carting around their notebook everywhere.
The Old Repbulic will run on XP. So, I have no need to upgrade.
I am very happy that I skipped Vista. When I finally do upgrade, I will probably jump several versions of windows, and will have saved hundreds of dollars by skipping the interim versions that I didn't need.
We need to tell you how important it is, and how it will change everything.... because on first, second and third blush, you won't be able to tell if it changes anything or not. You go to their conference. You are surrounded by people in identical clothing shouting rah rah. Much later in the day (you wondered if you would be allowed to leave at all), you are inundated with brochures, pamphlets, talking points, theme songs, colors, and a multitude of other stuff. And still you wonder what the new thing does that the old one didn't. They kind of gave you answers, but not direct ones. They talked at length (like a politician) about how the new thing does something, but you keep thinking 'but my old thing does that too'. If you raise that point, they quickly shout 'not it doesn't, because this does blah blah', and you think 'but how is that useful in any way'. Then they tell you about what to say to people who buy the stuff, and incentives and licenses. You are left thinking 'why should I bother again?'. Sorry if I missed the propaganda, but how is the latest version of office any more useful to me than office95, and why can't I replace it with any free equivalent and not bat an eye? Is it a single button that does 1 thing that I will never use? If I were to look at the source code for the latest version of office, and the source to office95, is it 99.5% the same, or is it 99.95% the same? In other words, how many times have I paid for office95?
microsoft don't need no stinkin START button no more. look, we made TILES in wp7, and it's selling like hot oh wait, well, hold on, let's rethink this guys. Guys ? GUYS ?
I turn my stuff off each day except my WS at work. My theory is the most laptops today have a secret electronics hobbs meter that actives the self destruct (or death by lousy customer service) feature at a prearranged date. A friends wife has the exact same HP pavilion LT I have and she left hers on 24/7. Her's is RIP mine is still chugging away! Must have been all that Farmville she was playing..
Why is this modded troll?
Because it's quite clear that the OP believes anything that is different is 'wrong', grandpa can't handle change.
Just like "My (Pictures|Documents|Videos|Computer)" magical folders in XP, Libraries in W7 is probably the most useless and confusing feature.
What is it about libraries that you find so incredibly baffling? You put your files in that library and that's where they are accessible from, if you have an external drive you can add that to the library too so you see all your media files in the one place.
What Microsoft is going to announce is that they're retiring Silverlight and that .NET is going to be .NOT.
So what you're saying is you actually think that HTML5/JS is a replacement for .Net, well it's pretty clear you have no understanding of either technology.
Huh? HTML5 isn't Apple's anything.
I'm just glad they've left the keyboard shortcuts in place, since otherwise I'd have a hard time saving anything in Office.
File->Save has been standard for a very long time, what's so hard about it?
And you leave out a lot of professionals... Photographers, designers, musicians... lot of niches still for the "dying" desktop.
***Game Over***Insert Coin***
You woke me up for Windows 8? Seems like their last ditch effort to save the company from oblivion in a few years. Get a Bionic with the dock. You'll be far better off.