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Windows 8 Roundup
There has been no shortage of Windows 8 news today. MrSeb writes: "Earlier this morning, at the Build Windows conference in Anaheim, California, Microsoft made it patently clear that 'To the cloud!' is not merely a throwaway phrase: it is the entire future of the company. Every single one of Microsoft's services, platforms, and form factors will now begin its hasty, leave-no-prisoners-behind transition to the always-on, internet-connected cloud." netbuzz pointed out that even the famous Blue Screen of Death will get a new look. Lastly mikejuk writes: "While everyone else is looking at the surface detail of Windows 8 there are some deep changes going on. Perhaps the biggest is that Metro now provides an alternative environment that doesn't use the age old Win32 API. This means no more overlapping windows — yes Metro really does take the windows out of Windows."
and I thought Microsoft was irrelevant before.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
So we're back to Windows 1.0 with no overlapping windows? How am I suppose to quickly look at two open applications? or drag and drop items?
It looks increasingly like Windows 7 will be the last version of Windows I ever have to use.
>> Your PC ran into a problem that it couldn't handle, and now it needs to restart.
Your software caused a giant fuck-up; don't try to blame the hardware.
So here's what everyone is hearing in the Windows world about Win8: "We're changing Windows. A lot. It's gonna look completely different. It's gonna act completely different. A lot of the things you do today probably need to be thought about differently".
Here's how IT management is interpreting that: "We might completely break Windows again. A lot. It's gonna confuse users. It's gonna make them less productive. Don't even think about using this product in a business environment without considering all of the extra support they're going to need."
Guess what? Based on what I've already seen, there's no way I'm even bringing this product into our environment for even a test basis until it's been out for over a year. If we're gonna have to completely retrain users how to do something, we're going to consider other things. That new Motorola Bionic with it's full screen dock and keyboard is looking more and more like something I want to own.
----- obSig
If only these 'clouds' or 'cloud services' actually had effective redundancy like they claim to and we didn't have so many 'clear sky' moments where they go down.
Oh, come on, it's not like all the big Clouds got hacked this past weekend ... like Google and Amazon ... .... oh ... wait ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Not always the hardware itself, sometimes the driver, but I'd say 90% or more of the BSODs I see at work are related to hardware. Very rare that it is purely a software issue.
http://i.imgur.com/vd2WA.jpg
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Is anyone actually stopping to say - "hang on a minute, what do people actually use?"
The hype of "the valley" would have us believe that everyone was sitting with a tablet with everything in the cloud.
The reality I see around me everyday is that everyone is sitting with a desktop/monitor/keyboard and is using a wide variety of local software. Not only are they doing that because it is "what has been", but also they are doing it because it is "what is required".
Is all this hype added to everything just to shift very large margin tablets and sell OSs? Was the netbook (a product that according to "the valley" is dead) so harmful that it's concept (low margins, fully functional, low requirements) had to be eliminated?
Funny how companies keep eating the retraining costs, while claiming those same training costs are the reason they don't deploy Linux desktops.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Because Microsoft is changing the default behaviour in the new product. And the new default behaviour will be LESS effective for the users of the traditional Windows systems (desktops and laptops).
Here's an idea. Why not leave the DEFAULT behaviour as it is already and add a new OPTION to change it to the tablet-friendly format for those who want it that way?
The problem is that cloud computing tantamount to slavery computing, turning users into slaves. It takes away all control and concentrates it in the hands of large corporations.
I'm all for ubiqutous computing, but unless I own and control all of the devices I use, and the software running on them, what's the point?
I'm tired of being a slave. A slave to the dollar, a slave to the government, a slave to the company I need to work at to survive in this pitiful existence. I don't want some big corporation to take away my personal computing experience.
I don't see how people are so blind as to think cloud computing is an improvement.
I think it's a project by Microsoft to see if they can hype things out (like they did with Windows 7) and get massive results (like Windows 7)... sort of like emulating the Apple rumor mill, but instead of leaving the world to speculate, MSFT is trying to fuel the fire itself.
OTOH, I think it will backfire, mostly because I think they mis-read the reason Windows 7 was moderately successful: Windows 7 didn't become popular by the hype machine; it became moderately successful because the last decent version of Windows (XP) was released 8 years prior, and both XP and Vista using Windows enthusiasts were gagging for something that was up to date but not broken.
CNET (I know, I know) has been spewing out Windows 8 puff pieces every other day (sometimes every day), even for incredibly minor crap (e.g. Hyper-V, mounting .iso files, etc... minor bits that really don't mean much of anything to the end user individually.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
> Windows 7 works just fine. It's the new XP - didn't you know?
It's sad, but you're probably right. Microsoft today is kind of like a rock star who's made so much cash, he's just going to be weird and do whatever the fsck he feels like doing from now on. If Microsoft is hyping "Metro" in an effort to generate developer excitement, they're having the exact opposite effect. Everyone *I* know is like, "WTF, has Microsoft gone completely batshit insane?"
It's almost like Microsoft's entire developer elite just hit their mid-40s, had a midlife crisis, realized they have enough cash to spend the rest of their lives coding for fun, retired en masse, and handed over the company to a marketing department that thinks making Windows look like a tablet UI so it can run phone apps better is somehow a good idea.
I have two things:
1 - Given Microsoft's track record for abject failure in the innovation department, does anyone really believe any of this hype?
2 - Does anyone else think trying to be two things at once will just be one hot mess? Unlike Apple who does iOS very well, and OS X very well, this seems to be doomed to trying to be two things at once, while simply sucking at both. I think Apple dabbled with the concept with Lion but quickly realized that when I'm using a desktop, I want a desktop OS, not a 27" iPad.
^^^ Exactly. People have forgotten that PCs were revolutionary BECAUSE they devolved control and power away from centralized IT departments, and put it directly in the hands of end users who could skirt bureaucracy and do cool, new useful things without having to wade through months of committee meetings first. Those who don't remember the past are doomed to repea...NO CARRIER
Regarding the new improved BSOD: "After expressing emoticon-style sadness"
Windows catches up with 1980's mac.
Well, I guess it's a start.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Not a lot of details yet, only one short (but tantalizing) talk at the general keynote today. Active Directory will now be paired up with some kind of security rules engine that can inspect claims (user attributes) and the contents of files and implement enterprise-wide access policies based on the values it finds. The example shown was someone putting a file with sensitive data in a public share. When an unauthorized user inspected that share, the sensitive file wasn't even shown.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I'm at the BUILD conference, and my impression is that Windows 8 will be very competitive. The re-imagining effort is sweeping, and touches everything from the back end to Consumer devices. The big news is that HTML 5 is now a "native" programming platform for the client UI. There are two JS libraries, a pure JS library that implements the new Metro look-and-feel (WinJS), and a Windows/JS bridge library that exposes the Windows API (and hence the Windows-controlled hardware such as the camera) in Javascript (WinRT). Tooling improvements include terrific new debugging scenarios and a major upgrade to Expression Blend to be able to edit HTML/CSS as well as XAML.
Basically, MS has taken the best ideas of the web development world, and leveraged them to massively improve the development experience for their next OS. If I wanted to write Windows-specific apps, Win8 is a huge improvement. It's an open question, however, whether people want to write Windows-specific apps as opposed to web-centric apps. Even then, Win8 will definitely shorten and simplify the transition from a web app to a Windows app.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Not that I use Windows for anything than gaming, and even there it sucks.
Windows sucks for gaming?
Considering we have give about 12% of our workforce ipads which are barely usable for "real" work I think MS is looking at things in completely the right way. I know I have little use for a tablet at work, but about 25-30% of my user base probably does and probably 80% wouldn't mind having one at home.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Buzzword Bingo veteran Davide Marney brings us this contemporary rendition of word salad without mentioning any of our three Buzzkills "vertical cloud synergy." Congratulations Davide! Please step up and claim your prize: a free download of Windows 8 Developer Preview (applause)
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That and the ability to support arbitrary functions of arbitrary hardware is where it first came from. Back in the NT days, nearly the entire graphics layer got put in the kernel to speed things up. These days they've managed to move more things in to user space, there are a number of kinds of drivers that are mostly either mostly user mode with a bit of a shim in the kernel, or entirely user mode and they talk to the hardware via something like a class driver in the kernel. It's helped a lot, but you can still have problems.
This is not only because there are still plenty of kernel mode drivers, but because hardware can go nuts on the system. All PCIe (and PCI) devices have DMA which means the whole memory of the system is fair game for them. So if they go apeshit they can break the computer. Even that aside if they went really apeshit they could just flood the bus with noise or something like that and cause a hard lock.
With things like IOMMU this will probably get a little better in the future, but I doubt it'll ever go the route that high end, RTOS type stuff does for performance reasons.
As it stands the situation is much better than it used to be. For example I recently got a new graphics card that was defective. It would crash under 3D load (acted like a thermal issue). Didn't BSOD or hard lock teh system though, the driver could reboot the card and continue on. Would crash the 3D app, but the system survived.
Still though, drivers account for most BSODs I see. IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is the one I see all the time which more or less means "A driver was written incorrectly and tried to do something it can't." More specifically, it means a process that was running at an elevated IRQ level, which drivers do (that's how they get control of the system), tried to touch pagable memory which isn't allowed.
Ultimately there's only so much you can do with regards to hardware and driver faults if you want a high performing OS. Even in the case of a full microkernel RTOS situation like QNX, you still have to jump through some various hoops to have a hardware setup where a failure doesn't take the system down. Worth it for communications satellites, not worth it for a desktop.
Wow, uh are there really people out there who have used an ipad for more than 30 minutes that think you are going to be doing data entry, document creation, coding, or anything else that requires a keyboard for 8 hours a day on an ipad? I mean we're using them more than many businesses because we've found a value for field employees, mobile sales guys, and busy executives that are mostly consuming reports and following up via quick emails. The other ~88% of the company would not find significant value in an ipad.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
One tactic I have noticed firsthand from early evaluations of pre-release Microsoft products is that they hype you up on lots of stuff, then tell you "it's just a preview release." So you get all excited, then you start to notice flaws... things seem a little half-baked... you have questions. Criticisms, even. But you kind of convince yourself "it's only a preview." Maybe you mention your reservations on some online forum, but someone immediately shouts you down: "Look you asshole, it's just a preview, everything will be fixed when it ships!" Or maybe your excitement gets the better of you, and you post, "It's going to be AWESOME when it ships and these minor issues are fixed!"
And then it ships... and not only are the issues you were concerned about not fixed, they turn out not to be so minor after all. But by then it's too late, because everyone has spent months talking about how awesome it is/has been/will be.
It's a tactic that has worked well for Microsoft on a few occasions. The Office 2010 Web Apps are one example. When they showed a preview, everything looked great. The Word documents on the screen looked exactly like they did in desktop Word. The catch? You couldn't edit them. Well that was no big deal -- they wouldn't ship it without editing capability in there, obviously. They just don't want to show it yet. So everyone was all pleased by how awesome it was going to be when the Word Web App shipped, and how worried Google should be because Microsoft's online word processor was so much better than Google Docs. But guess what? When they shipped it, documents were editable all right -- but the editor was a completely different component that nobody had seen yet. The view where the documents looked identical to desktop Word was just a file viewer. The editor was something completely different, and it handled Word documents only about as well as Google Docs -- and in some cases worse. But by then all the salivating reviews of the preview release had already been published, and Microsoft's marketroids had earned their bonuses for the year.
Breakfast served all day!
It depends on what exactly you mean by "security". One fairly big thing of note that is directly relevant is that new-style ("Metro") apps run in a sandbox, quite similar to what you see on iOS and Android. By default, they don't get access to your entire FS - even for read - only to their own little corner ("isolated storage"). No network, either, nor cameras and most other hardware. App developer has to explicitly list features he needs in the app manifest when packaging it, and user needs to confirm that, yes, this SexyTits4Free app really does need "Internet Server" permission with such and such port opened when running it.
The article linked from TFA has got quite a few things regarding WinRT wrong. Point by point:
Windows Run Time, WinRT- a C++ object-oriented API.
It's not a C++ API. It's a COM-based API/ABI that can be accessed from any language that knows what a raw function pointer is. It's relatively easier to do that from C++, because COM vtables map nicely to C++ vtables. But WinRT ABI itself is intentionally designed to be projected to different languages, adapting along the way. C++ has its own projection, but so do .NET and JS.
Applications can choose to use either the old Win32 API or the new WinRT but not both.
Wrong. You can use Win32 APIs in Metro apps - some of them are not available (largely because they are pointless in the sandbox, or deal with the old UI concepts), but some are. If you open windows header files - "windows.h" and friends - they now have blocks of code that look like this:
Desktop partition is what's available to non-Metro apps running on the classic desktop. App partition is what's available to Metro apps.
Furthermore, classic apps can actually use WinRT (while retaining full access to Win32 APIs). Not all of WinRT will work - specifically, most of UI stuff won't - but huge chunks of WinRT are not UI-related and are accessible. Examples include I/O and networking libraries, XML parser, XSLT engine, new device and multimedia APIs etc.
Of course WinRT is delivered to the programmer via XAML (or HTML)
WinRT is not "delivered via XAML", and most definitely not "via HTML". WinRT includes a UI library (Windows.UI.* namespaces), which allow you to use XAML as a declarative markup language for your UI (but you don't have to, strictly speaking). This is what is normally used by Metro C++ and .NET apps. JS apps don't use WinRT for UI at all - they use HTML5/CSS3, rendered by chromeless IE. They do get access to non-UI parts of WinRT, but they don't have to use it, and in any case it's completely orthogonal to their (HTML5) UI.
There is also no more need for P/invoke. As Win32 isn't being used there is nothing to invoke. There is no API lurking beneath the covers. So anything that you used to do via P/Invoke you will now have to find a way to do via WinRT.
You absolutely can P/Invoke from a .NET Metro app. For one thing, you can P/Invoke to call any of Win32 API functions that are available to Metro apps, as described earlier. Furthermore, you can write a C++ DLL (e.g. for perf), bundle it with your app, and call it from C# as usual via P/Invoke.
Now, in practice, you probably won't, for the simple reason that pretty much everything that a Metro app can do is covered by WinRT APIs. So why would you mess around with P/Invoke declarations when you already have an object-oriented API that can be used directly? Mixed C#/C++ scenarios are also better supported that way - you can make a private WinRT component DLL in C++, and reference it from C#. Your WinRT C++ classes automagically become visible as .NET classes, no P/Invoke declarations needed.
In fact, you could even go the other way around - write a WinRT component DLL in C#, and reference it from C++. And then both of those can be used in JS, so you can really mix all three if you want.
When you create a Page object with WinRT and run it then it expands to fill the entire screen real estate
By default, yes, but you can have two Metro apps run side by side.
If you want overlapping windows and dialog
We're really spamming the Windows 8 articles recently. Yeah no thanks, Windows 7 works just fine.
Oh, admit it. You're desperately wanting to upgrade just for the new, revamped BSOD!
In other news, Win8 still BSODs.
What's a vamp again?
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
But how exactly does Windows suck for gaming? I don't see what's bad about it.
Resisting change, did you even test it or try to see the good and bad points? You know, get a balanced view ...
I've got a high UID, so I'm not crusty in my ways: I know what works for me, I've been working on my computer for 25 years, so I damn well know how I work. I know that EVERY single other PC OS or DE has window overlap as a default behavior for a damn good reason. I'm not sure what was broken about it. I'm not even convinced its easier for "normal" users, both my Mom and Dad have no problem with windows overlapping, and neither of them are at all close to being expert.
Earlier today, using my computer for fun, I had over 6 windows open. I had a torrent client open, and squeezed down so I could just see the progress bar, I had iTunes open, I had Steam open, I had both a Firefox and two Chrome windows open, I had three explorer windows open as well. This is normal use. I'm sure Microsoft knows what best though, obviously I meant to buy a tablet and not a desktop. Yes, I have the option of not using a gimped interface, but why should I jump through hoops? When I'm actually working this will be infuriating, I don't need extra steps, I don't need Microsoft telling me how to do things, I just want to forget all about my OS and focus on the task at hand. Sometimes that task requires tons of extra windows arranged in such a way that suits my work flow, which might not be a way that MS approves of. I'm imagining this in a corporate environment, where using multiple windows is the norm, as is users of all abilities and experience levels.
Hell, I don't understand why I can't have a start menu. Whats wrong with being able to quickly access another program without losing focus on whatever task your doing? I don't understand why a tablet interface makes any sense on a desktop, either. I have a large monitor, plenty of real estate, so I don't need to focus on one thing at a time. A tablet is a toy, I use a real computer. If I wanted the tablet experience, I'd be using a damn tablet. I have nothing against tablets, or OSs on tablets, but they don't work for me.
I've noticed that the trend in OS design of late is to try to kill the idea of multi-tasking, and try to force the user to focus at single tasks. This is all well and fine, but it doesn't match many peoples actual work flows. Sure, I'm doing one task, but this generally leads to needing to have multiple other things working at the same time. I'm editing a file, thats my single task. For this I need an email program open to see what the customer/boss wants, I might need a chat window or Skype to actually communicate, I need a PDF viewer or browser to see documentation, I need some music to keep me sane, I need a text editor to scribble notes and documentation, I need multiple file browsers to keep track of other files and documents, etc... Rarely can I do my job with a single, or a few, windows.
But marketing departments decided that ALL computers should now be toys made for mere media consumption, and not tools.
I don't need to test it, just watching the videos and reading the reviews tell me that I get to skip a version of Windows.
If it isn't broke, don't fix it.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
" I am not an expert on OS economics but I think the pushing of win8 is just some haste. It has been less than two years since win7 has become main version of windows on the market. Also I don't think that win8 does provide changes enough to justify a dedicated release"
The rush to bring out Win8 has little to nothing to do with desktop/laptop users or their wants/needs and everything to do with tablets (and to lesser degree touch screens). Just desktop users get to suffer because MS want a common platform/experience across desktop/tablet/phone
I find linux to be a lot better at multitasking, specially with IO