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Microsoft Launches Windows 8 Consumer Preview
suraj.sun writes "Microsoft on Wednesday made the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 available for download to the general public. Built with touch computing and apps in mind, Windows 8 is crucial to Microsoft's efforts to make inroads against Apple and Google in the red-hot tablet market, where the company is significantly behind rivals. Windows 8 marks the biggest change to the OS since the aforementioned 95 flavor (which, shockingly, turns 17 this year). With Windows 8 comes the introduction of a Metro-style interface, inspired by the lovely and intuitive presentation found in Windows Phone. In it, apps and functions are pinned to tiles and, to interact with those apps, you simply tap those tiles. The former Start Menu has been replaced by a full-screen view of tiles that you can scroll through horizontally. You can pin applications, shortcuts, documents, webpages and any number of other things, customizing the interface in any way you like — so long as what you like is rectangular and only extends from left to right."
MrSeb wrote on with info on generating a USB stick installer from the available images, and itwebennet with details about IE10.
We called iconic borderless buttons "tiles"!
Aren't we cool and relevant and creative and all that shit?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Yes. It's somewhere between "helpless end-user" and "grazing cattle".
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
Huh. So Microsoft hired the ghost of Piet Mondrain as their lead designer?
It looks... really... straight and... yeah. It sure is a thing.
(sudden panicked thought) They still have the Ribbon, right? How will I live without the concentrated awesome of Teh Ribbon?!
I was just watching the Developer's Preview. They were touting "a new kind of copying files ... you don't have to copy files to your hard drive anymore, they can just stay in the cloud".
Well how nice! Why have the tedium of being sure your files will be there when you go for them, when you can suddenly become dependent upon a third-party service? It's not like they've ever ratcheted up the price on their customers before.
I'm just waiting for them to abandon the hard drive entirely, in favor of a coin slot. Using your computer will be just like internet video poker.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
And it's a bad interface in both cases. I love Star Trek but the Federation's UI designers should be shot with a phaser on maximum, and everything they ever touched sanitized. Colored tiles are a really bad interface model.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer" in regedit, set "RPEnabled" to "0". Haven't tried it myself (don't have Win8), but supposedly it completely disables all the Metro and Ribbon stuff in Explorer.
all of this low-level technical registry mumbo-jumbo that Grandma could never handle is why we will never have the Year of the Windows Desktop...
Next year is the year of Nerds On Steroids.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
As such I will not buy any computer with Windows 8 on it. Hope Apple realizes this before the next OS X is released, but I doubt it.
I'm pretty sure Apple is quite happy to sell you a computer with no trace of Windows 8 on it.
EVERYONE copies Apple. Prior art be damned. If Apple does it, it is then an Apple original idea, do not try to challenge the truths and visions of the Prophet Jobs!
Blasphemer!
It's always been this way.
I suspect Windows 9 will bring orgasmic joy to those who opt to suffer through 8.
Also, the conspicuous lack of 2000 is intentional; while it is unarguably the best Windows ever(tm), it (like NT before it) was not targeted at the LOL I M USING TEH INTERNETS crowd.
And we have Gnome3, which is the only pile of shit worse than Windows8.