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Windows 8 Release Date: October 26th
Several readers sent word that Microsoft has selected a release date for Windows 8: October 26th. Steven Sinofsky made the announcement today at the company's annual sales meeting. The new version of the operating system will be sent to manufacturers next month, giving them plenty of time to prepare for general availability.
Work for an OEM call center, check.
I have a feeling October 27th, the switch will be melting from frustrated users foaming at the mouth with WTF did you do to my computer! Or what I thought this was a laptop not a tablet?
If you can take the abuse I imagine the support centers will be hiring left and right to keep up with demand.
http://saveie6.com/
Years after the release of the product. Mostly around service pack 2 or 3 time frame.
Shit, people are angry that Office 2013 is not compatible with Exchange 2003.
The catch? It has not been supported or patched in years! Corporations will just use XP until 2019 and get infected over and over again. XP wont die and it will make tech support people rich in years to come after 2014
http://saveie6.com/
Will they be clearanced on October 26? Or should I grab one earlier. (When do the computer makers phase-out old models and bring-in new ones? August?)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I'm not so sure about Windows 8 myself either. I think I will just see how it goes after the realease and decide whether to get it or Windows 7.
The lines would be huge!!!! Everyone I know who has tried 8, including myself, can't get enough of Metro and those amazing apps! I'm sure in the release version the apps won't blow, right?
Fuck Metro, and fuck Windows 8.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Just in time for Ubuntu 12.10, eh?
and i can get me a free copy of Windows 8 that i can turn around and sell on craigslist, like I did for Windows 7 release.
Be seeing you...
It seems odd to hear you say that, because Vista 6.0 was a pile of bugs, but Seven (6.1) is actually quite good. My company did a long jump from XP to Seven, and I would expect most companies to do the same.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
...consisting of people who still want to grab a copy of Windows 7 before it's too late.
If rumors are an indication, the last Windows 7 license will be sold on December 21, 2012.
Is there anyone out there who still cares what MS releases next?
I have not seen anyone using windows for years now.
I wish people would upgrade but most including yourself, my family, and most client sites have no reason to switch from XP.
Equipment, intranet apps, and other things being right now in 2012 only work on XP. People resistant to change and the comments down here show that are average Joes are astounding! My pessimism grows but hell, it might help do support more after 2014 if they keep getting infected. That means more demand which means more money just like what webmasters charge for IE 6 development these days.
http://saveie6.com/
Wise words indeed.
Windows 8 is not Vista and is not Windows ME. By all accounts so far, performance is the same or better than Windows 7. The problems are with the lack of a start menu, Metro, and the odd windows 3.1-esque flat UI.
>>>MS is onto something...
Can I have some? I'll just roll it in my ZigZag paper hear and light up.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I have no intention of upgrading my desktops to Windows 8. From everything I've used and read on and about Windows 8, the start menu is a desktop PC disaster...but for touch, holy cow is it beautiful. I will keep my desktops/laptop running Windows 7 and grab a Windows 8 RT Surface. I think Microsoft wants this to be the reaction of most users. The start menu is just to grab developers attention of "hey this is going to be on every PC shipped out until Windows 9 hits, you have huge app exposure now." Those apps run on Windows Phone & Windows RT and the New Xbox...Microsoft then almost overnight has a platform that will be expansive and cross platform putting a fight up against Apple's appstore. Then in Windows 9 they can dial back the Metro start menu, make it more intuitive for the desktop and they suffer no loss. They might even GAIN share thanks to the tablet market. Windows 8 sells as bad as Vista did, big deal, Vista sold millions upon millions of licenses & the PC market is flat...and Windows 7 is the best desktop environment (in my opinion.) This is all about Microsoft flanking Apple in the tablet & phone markets. Nothing more, nothing less. I'll buy a Windows Phone 8, a Surface RT, and keep my desktops on 7. Yet Microsoft still wins.
Why not wait until December 21, 2012?
It's a much more fitting date.
I'm very skeptical, but I think people should give it a chance at least. There's plenty of radical changes that people balk at that end up catching on.
I'll just roll it in my ZigZag paper hear and light up.
What exactly would you hear? do you anticipate auditory hallucinations after inhaling?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Check again?
Exchange has not been supported in several years. If you have it at work I hope you do not get infected. Time to upgrade ASAP.
http://saveie6.com/
I guess I'll never find out.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I've been running the Windows 8 Release Preview since it was available. I'm not that impressed. I've been in IT for almost 15 years and have tried and used every OS out there. This one feels like a letdown. As savvy as I am with tech, perhaps I'm jaded now that I've "seen it all". The last time I experienced a "wow factor" with an OS was back in 2000 with BeOS. Since then, only BSD and Linux have kept me somewhat excited about tech.
The notion that everyone is enamored or wants an interface resembling a tablet/phone device is nonsense, despite recent successes with the iPad and Android devices. I have always preferred a smallish laptop to anything else and likely always will if they keep the form factor.
Getting back on track... the Metro interface is... awkward. It feels like a suit that doesn't quite fit right no matter how good it looks.
I'm waiting for another BeOS myself. The current paradigm in all it's flavors is boring and leaves little to the imagination. BeOS didn't get any traction because it was ahead of its time. Written from scratch. Beautiful, but alas no "supply train" behind it and no one willing to un-entrench themselselves from the Wintel/Mac world. I can only hope...
Well, I can sum it up the revulsion in one word: Unity.
If you've ever had to use it, you'll know why Metro is (at least IMO) the suck.
Don't screw with my desktop paradigm by simplifying it too damned much - you introduce too much complexity that way.
(and to think - my favorite WM of all time is fluxbox.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
He probably suspects that he'll hallucinate that Windows 8 is actually usuable instead of the worthless piece of garbage that it is in real life. NEWS FLASH MS: your users* hate Metro. Your Metro phones don't sell worth a fuck and your metro computers won't either
*Yes I get that the PC OEMs are the real customers thus the "users" terminology.
If the 'success' of Windows Phone is anything to go by they will be channel-stuffing their Surface tablets like there's no tomorrow...i don't see this going well.
Um, yeah, if I was going to make an "app", I'd make it for a real tablet. It's called the fucking IPAD.
You mean the Internet Personal Access Device?
If ever there was an opportunity for next year to be the year of the Linux desktop, this is it. Too bad it won't happen.
If only Ubuntu hadn't made so many mistakes in the past 4 versions, then probably many would have moved to it
I wonder if the UEFI unlocking mandate extends to MS' own x86 hardware. The Surface might be a sweet machine to run Linux on! :)
The thing MS is on to, is that they finally started with Win 7 to catch up to the other OSes. Still a decade or so behind, but it used to be worse.
In what regard? If it really were a decade behind everything else people would have switched long ago, OSX has only recently become decent and the major Linux distributions changed direction just when they were starting to be usable. Microsoft cannot afford to pay everyone to use their software so what is your explanation for the lack of adoption of a free alternative that is a decade ahead? Maybe some people would stick to Microsoft for legacy reasons for a while, but not 90%+ for around 2 decades.
That is one of the few nice things about MSFT, as you can just skip the crap releases completely and hope they come to their senses for the next one, or the one after that.
I actually skipped XP for the most part after finding the RTM version crap so i went from Win2K Pro (great OS that was, light and solid) to XP X64 (another great OS, made for an awesome workstation) and then skipped Vista on my main system for Windows 7 which is quite nice, a little more bloat than XP but the features make up for it and its got a hell of a lot better memory management than Vista.
So just skip win 8, hell skip win 9 too if they don't fire that damned Apple wannabe Ballmer and his pet Sinofsky, win 7 is supported until 2020 so either they'll get their collective heads out of their asses before then or they'll bomb hard enough nobody will care for using Windows anymore anyway, no problem. It isn't like Win 7 is gonna suddenly have all the programs dry up, hell most programs still have XP support and that thing is old as dirt so I'm sure you'll still be able to run anything you want (well except for maybe IE, but who gives a crap about IE anymore?) for years to come and can avoid Win 8 like the tweeting twitting FB shitting social mess of an OS it is.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I wonder if the UEFI unlocking mandate extends to MS' own x86 hardware. The Surface might be a sweet machine to run Linux on! :)
Who knows...if i had to guess i'd say probably not, but then again there are better tablets to run linux on...unless you have some sort of x86 requirement.
Win 7 is not "damn fine". It is the first actually acceptable (i.e. mediocre) Windows. Win 8 promises to be worse in a lot of regards, not only the completely borked UI. An what business has an OS anyways to tell the user what GUI to use????
The thing MS is on to, is that they finally started with Win 7 to catch up to the other OSes. Still a decade or so behind, but it used to be worse.
You know XP was a favorite bash of slashdotters. .... then came Vista.
Then all of the sudden it was the best OS ever and people became fanbois and the corps started 10 year release cycles. Funny how a bad product will do that?
Oddly there are XP fanboys today who still wont even switch to Windows 7. If you are stuck with Windows, Windows 7 is ok. Not great and it has its quirks but ok.
http://saveie6.com/
better tablets - such as? One of the few mass marketed android tablets with a keyboard dock is the Asus Transformer. For which I've seen mixed feedback re durability and build quality. Ubuntu porting was from one volunteer NZ hacker.
Battery life may be reduced but going x86 means hardware support may be better e.g. ARM SoC's don't tend to support Xorg well. Plus, being a Windows machine, it should come with plenty of RAM.
Well again it depends on what you want it for, pretty much all the popular linux tablets have keyboard accessories for them. Im sure x86 Surface would be fine hardware but unless you have some specific requirement for it most people would be better off with existing linux tablets.
Except for the keyboard and the TPM chip the Surface is a clone of the Transformer Prime - and the OS was developed for actual Transformer Primes. You can already buy the Transformer Prime and run Linux on it, and you don't want the TPM chip. TPrime has a keyboard option too that has a battery extender and extra ports. Or get the Tranformer Infinity for all that and higher def 1920x1200 as well.
You didn't think they were coding for some new thing of their own design, did you? They don't have the hardware chops for that. They do have the in with Asus to get pre-release Transformer Primes though. Asus should be pretty upset unless they get included in the value chain somewhere.
Why would you wait and pay the extra just to increment Surface sales when you could have the real thing already? You really like that keyboard/cover? It doesn't look all that hot to me.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The Wintel Surface is an inch thick, weighs a bunch more and has a fan and a stylus. The battery life sucks. It's a whole other critter. Everybody knows the fans almost always go out first - especially cat fanciers and dog owners. The stylus thing is self explanatory. No excuse for the battery life. It's just another Wintel tablet and those sell in such great quantity they may as well be handcrafted by guild tablet artisans to customer specification - and priced accordingly.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
No, I think Redmond timed it for Halloween. It won't be the first time they'd be releasing something close to that day.
Win8, as it is, is not ready
If they really launch it in October, well, I for sure won't want to become a paying guinea pig for M$
I'll wait till Win8.1 comes out, or Win8-SP2, or something like that
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Funny thing is about all those Tektronix measurement boxes (o-scopes, signal generators, spectrum analyzers) that run XP. Microsoft wanted to get in on the "ground floor" of that little venture, so they sweetened the deal and got XP on them. Now Microsoft wants to make a graceful exit from the XP world, but you just CANNOT with those devices. They are not ma and pa desktop PCs. Microsoft is going to support XP for longer than it cares to, at least in the O-Scope realm. So much for a "good idea" there, Microsoft. You can't kill an OS on a whim when you're in that market.
Granted, they'll kill it for the rest of us, but it'll take SOME time for the myriad of XP powered boxes to cycle through for upgrades to the OS... they aren't things people just "upgrade" on a whim. :) Getting a "new" o-scope isn't something you do when you're out for beer and ice either... so the "upgrade the hardware" bit wont' fly either. :)
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I struggle to understand the animosity towards Metro. Have any of you spent more than a few minutes trying to learn it? On both the phone and the desktop it works very well. There's a lot more to it than just 'the tiles'. Even on a multiscreen workstation, if you want to keep the traditional desktop you can, it's one click from metro after a reboot and you never have to see Metro again if you don't want to. FFS, MS are, for the first time in ages, shipping interesting, quality products and world+dog is bitching about them...
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
Of course they are. There is so much third party stuff built around MS Exchange (which is in itself a suite instead of a single application) that people do not want to fuck with a complex environment that is currently working for them.
I have had the dubious pleasure to work with Win8 where I'm currently employed. It sucks ass. I wouldn't use it if gave me a full-featured version for FREE, and paid me to install it, it sucks that bad. If I want Playskool toys on my desktop, I'll stop by Toys R Us and pick some up.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I think that's because nvidia haven't given much information on the tegra which is the leading graphics hardware on those things at the moment.
Windows 8 looks cool to me. Decreased memory footprint, UI options.... Microsoft Surface. Not sure what you guys are complaining about. Microsoft is offering Windows 7 users an upgrade for $15!!!!!!!!!! I don't recall Apples last Major OS Revision being free.
I understand people here hate Microsoft, but the hate for Windows 8 on this forum is just over the top. It's an OS, it runs software, the price is good for Windows 7 users. If you run XP then you got the 10 years out of your license key.
http://windowsupgradeoffer.com/en-US/Home/ProgramInfo
Um...no you won't. They kill basically all sales of Windows 7 the next day. All partners have to return their OEM copies of 7. They're going to reach into your wallet with one hand while shoving Windows 8 down your throat with the other. If I had the money, I'd stockpile more copies of 7 (since I'm not a Microsoft partner)
It's exceedingly rare for me to lay any sort of praise on a Microsoft product at all here on slashdot but it does happen once in a great while; maybe three or six times in the past decade out of over 6,000 posts. It's going to happen here for a moment so if you W/E folks want to save a screenshot of a post to throw back at me later, now is the time. If you're hovering over that overrated mod you might just want to hang back for a wee bit and maybe read all the way through and review my comment history before you decide I'm a Redmond astroturfer. If you're one of my /. fans, you may want to turn your head as it's going to get ugly. Let's pause for a deep breath before we dig in.
In my experience in my labs on diverse hardware the most recent W8 demo publicly released is considerably more performant than W7 in every case - and maybe even better than XP, and credible reports anticipate an even more performant and responsive retail product. Specifically the removal of Aero and related chrome speeds up user interaction. The removal of several background tasks and the streamlining of others add other enhancements. Memory footprint is smaller. I/O operations to boot and log on to the domain are consolidated and reduced. Boot time is thereby reduced to something approaching reasonable even on older hardware. There may be some improved things happening in the scheduler too. It should allow the Enterprise System Architect to, for example, budget about 2x as many VDI clients per CPU core, and 1/3 less RAM per VDI desktop, and reduce the storage IOPs budged by 1/3 as well - though storage IOPs are notoriously oversubscribed for VDI because storage IOPs are expensive as hell. For some installations that's millions of dollars in hardware savings.
But wait! There's more! For normal hardware based desktop and laptop users these improvements also apply, but there's more. There are also broad driver enhancements that impact a vast spectrum of historical hardware - offerring improved I/O, better graphics performance, more reliable and performant interaction even with hardware up to five years old. Driver support goes deeper into history I believe than any Windows version has ever gone before, and broader across more brands. Yes, there will still be legacy devices, including some ancient printers and webcams that came in a white box, that don't have drivers - and if you have legacy devices that aren't supported you're out of luck. But generally not only are modern devices supported - they're supported better than any new version of Windows has ever supported them. If all your hardware is supported the $39 upgrade to W8 from even XP or Vista is a performance improvement that might get you out of buying new gear, giving you the performance boost of a 2-year upgrade - and get you the "Pro" version when you've been plodding along with a "home version" or worse and Media Center as a download too! If that's spare money an SSD and a couple Nexus 7 tablets or a Transformer Infinity or SGS III are all great places to put that money you would otherwise give to HP, Dell, Acer or Lenovo, and then you can have both a performant PC and the Pretty Amazing New Stuff!
For once Microsoft remembered to put some bait on their hook. In short, some Microsoft code geeks got retro and started doing stuff everybody else was doing 5-15 years ago. There's some other stuff in the box too and I'll talk about it in other posts. But for once I'm going to give the Microsoft software engineers some praise and not take it immediately away. They found out how to operate a performance analyzer, how to trim some fat, how many legacy devices to support in an OS revision. They figured out what a waste that UI chrome was. They read up on what a framebuffer is. They figured out that 5,000,000 128-byte I/Os at boot time could and probably should be consolidated somehow. They figured out how to get the fixes for that past their management.
I'm not a fan of the
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Wrong. It has a fan.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
MS Exchange itself makes a great argument for the google and similar alternatives, even the MS azure stuff if you don't mind having no access to anything every leap day, or whatever stupid obviously avoidable bug crops up next.
Anyway, my point is you don't muck about with tightly integrated environments unless you have to, and there's no real upgrade path but instead a total replacement path once every little bit is available for the new system (eg. once it all works on the new MS server software with the current MS Exchange you move to that).
I gave all of the Windows' a skip in my personal life. Never once bought one of them for my own use, nor stole it either. Frankly, if you were a Unix admin in 1982 with a graphical Xterm, Windows is still a toy for children. Even back then we were working on cloud, only we called it "grid". On my xterm I could build a dashboard to monitor an arbitrary number of hosts. The aggregate compute of those many hosts now fits in my pocket. Wasn't a big OS/2 fan either.
But these kids at Microsoft, they've at least come closer to honest work than any before them. That's something, right?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Win2K Pro was a godsend after using Win98 for a few years. To go from something that would randomly bluescreen and couldn't be trusted to run longer than 2-3 days tops, to something that I almost couldn't crash it if I TRIED... was a great feeling. I would hear people claim it "wasn't good for games" but I honestly never had any trouble running anything. In the remote cases where something was unresponsive, the ability to just force-quit and relaunch the Explorer shell without rebooting was great.
Around 2006 I was forced into using XP as the video card driver support for 2K became unreliable, but at least by then the power of PCs was such that you could just beast through the bloat of the OS, so it wasn't as much of a liability as it was when it first came out in 2001.
IMHO Win7 is actually a very respectable OS. It's the first one I bought on my own since building my first Windows box in 1998 (which I got at OEM pricing). I can't see any viable reason to upgrade from Win7 in a desktop environment for the forseeable future. And even if/when I do buy a tablet, it still sounds very immature and worth waiting 1-2 years for them to get the kinks out. Especially with how nice I hear Jelly Bean is for Android tablets.
Any home user with a modern system still clinging to XP is a Luddite IMHO.
So in other words. "I am mostly a Linux User, however I keep an XP partition just in case." But because I mostly use Linux, I don't want to be bothered installing a new OS.
I have Windows 8 preview installed on my system (a Convertible Tablet) , and I really don't have too many problems with it. Although I wouldn't recommend it, unless you get a multi-touch screen too.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Ubuntu = Debian + some nice new features + shit ui...
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well being shortly after the release of Windows 7, Apple stopped the I am a Mac and I am a PC adds. In many parts because Windows 7 was up to par with Mac OS. Just because you hate everything "Microsoft". It doesn't mean that Microsoft is making bad products... Only in your head.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Because one-click program launching and two-click access to your most opened files are bad things to have.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
From MS themselves: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?sort=PN&alpha=exchange+server&Filter=FilterNO
Exchange 2003 Extended Support ends 8th April 2014.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Can you get them in a non-fucking version?
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
... and it wants its interface back.
I! Tego Arcana Dei.
While we're on the subject of Windows 8, would someone please explain the Metro interface to me, and the lack of a Start menu?
I'm serious. I tried the W8 public beta, and it felt like I had one hand tied behind my back. I don't understand why the Metro tiles are different sizes, or how to resize them. I don't understand why dragging the interface left/right doesn't 'snap' to the next page like an iPad, but instead lets me see the right half of one page and the left half of another. I don't understand why some tiles are static icons and why others update with information. I don't get why apps now run full-screen one-at-a-time - right now (not in W8) I am typing in this Slashdot window while I have another window open to a Google Search of Metro images, and partially behind that I have a chat window and a notepad open; how is the Metro interface supposed to handle all of this? And a large part of the interface seems to involve wide, sweeping motions with the mouse to simulate dragging a finger back and forth across the interface; I hadn't realized how rarely I do motions like this, so it looks like it's time to lower the mouse sensitivity.
Yes, I can get to the old-fashioned Windows desktop, but ... how do I *do* anything there? I have no access to any of my apps from there, so how do I pin them to the task bar in the first place?
I'm willing to embrace the future, but I just don't understand how people are supposed to use this interface on the desktop.
Fuck Metro
If I were metrosexual I'm sure I would!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I have my money all ready. Just let me know when I can preorder a Surface and take it.
Then turn on 'Use small icons' et voila! All the benefits of the Win7 taskbar, in the same space as the XP taskbar.
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun