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Windows 8 Is Ready
New submitter drinkydoh writes "In an announcement today, Microsoft has finally said that Windows 8 is now complete. Microsoft has begun delivering RTM versions to manufacturers and the general availability of the tablets and computers using Windows 8 will be on October 26th. 'Microsoft's final milestone concludes almost two years of development for its new Metro-inspired Windows 8 software and marks the beginning of the release phase. Microsoft says MSDN and TechNet customers will be able to download it from August 15th. Windows Store will go live on August 15th. Developers will be able to access the final tools and submission process for Metro style apps at the Windows Dev Center later this month.'"
Microsoft seems to repeat mistakes don't they? DOS 4.0, Bob, ME, Vista; the public reaction to all should have been predictable enough that somebody in a corporation their size should have been able to see it coming and delay or abort the release of those turds. But no, they dropped em all and took the abuse and ridicule while apparently learning nothing. Now comes Windows 8.
Maybe they will have time to get Windows 9 right, maybe not. That is what has changed, before they were an unstoppable monopoly and now? We shall see. They have offended their OEM partners with the Surface tablet, the Developers, Developers, Developers! with the knifing of Silverlight and apparently the beginning of the end for both Win32 and .NET and I'm not convinced customers are going to be all that happy with what is about to be rammed down their thoat. All at a time when their monopoly is threatened like never before. The desktop PC itself is being questioned for most users, Office is threatened by Cloud apps and even the long standing stranglehold of Blackberry + Exchange is not looking very healthy about now.
Netcraft hasn't confirmed it yet but Microsoft just might be dying. And after hating on them for decades I'm not entirely sure I'm going to applaud when they exit the stage. The PC is likely to go with them, by which I mean the open platform anyone can write programs for and create add on hardware, etc. The post Microsoft future looks like a grim world of sealed media consumption devices for most and a return to 'workstations' for the select who can afford machines costing as much as a car.
Few will question anymore that Apple is a dark force of DRM and lockin. And the release of the Nexus 7 shows Google to be fast getting in touch with their Evil side. The only major difference (other than a model years' worth of hardware refresh) between it and the equally sealed up Amazon Fire is which app/media ecosystem it is bundled to.
Democrat delenda est
and posted at the exact same time as the artice, without the asterisk of "I saw this before you"
As if the UI is the worst thing about it...
Valve isn't lambasting windows 8, and porting all their games to Linux because of the UI
Ok...
I also like Windows 8 too. I am not sure why this is at -1. I guess moderators are Rabid Windows Haters today.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Of course there are many, many factors leading to the downfall of Microsoft. We've been reading about them for years as the 800 Pound Gorilla from Redmond has been slowly breaking its bones under its own weight.
Most people will point to the fact that Microsoft's failures have ensured that more people are using Linux worldwide than ever before... in the form of Android smartphones. MS *could* have had that market, but they continued to present shit products in the face of (at least perceived) quality goods from Apple and Google.
We've also heard in the last few days and weeks about how serious Valve is about getting their products to be 'Native' for Linux. We're going to see more of that, especially as more and more game designers want to develop for smart-phones.
Going forward, Microsoft's plans for smartphone development look pretty dismal. They're not even supporting their own technologies or frameworks, like Silverlight.
Ultimately, however, I think that shipping an WindowsME-bad desktop OS while this massive paradigm shift is happening is going to have long-reaching and long-lasting effects. Unlike when WinME shipped, there are some pretty darn good alternatives for development on both phones and PCs right now. When Win8 starts flopping around like a hooked carp, it's not going to be just the developers looking for an exit. It's going to be gamers and home-users as well. This time that exit is pretty darn visible.
And today is the day that flopping carp was hooked.
Captcha: resisted. How oddly apropos...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Killing the Start Button is like building a house without a front door. Sure, I use the garage door 99% of the time. According to Microsoft, this is reason to get rid of the front door.
Everyone on slashdot is about to become a UI expert.
Because it requires an expert on bovine biology to recognize bullshit.
Everyone complains about the new Metro interface. I've been running Win8 preview for a while now and while I've adapted to the new interface, it does still bugs me. But complaining about it is like arguing about KDE vs Gnome; you can castrate the Metro interface to look like Win7 with 3rd party software. What really matters is the kernel. It may break some applications and for those people Win8 is a bad choice. But from my experience, the new kernel is runs better than Win7 (which is saying a lot given how much better 7 was than Vista). Several games I tested got a nice frame-per-second boost (or at least performed equally) under Win8 vs Win7. So for me it's worth it to upgrade but I suppose your mileage may vary and as benchmarks come out we can see more about how the kernel performs on different systems.
Announcing Windows 15!
Or you can wait two weeks and upgrade directly to Windows 19!
Severely limiting new/anonymous accounts in any way would benefit the majority of threads. I still don't understand how new/anonymous accounts can start threads.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Before Windows 7 came out, almost everyone I knew (that ran Windows) was *genuinely* excited about it and was planning to upgrade to it. And they did.
I don't know a single person that even considers Windows 8 (either as a desktop OS, or a phone OS). Many people don't even realize it's going to be a desktop OS, they assume it is a smartphone/tablet only OS.
I can only wish Microsoft good luck, because I don't think they understand what they're doing.
But one thing's for damned certain: their days of dominance are over. OVER! YES!!!!!!!!!
Win 2008 can run headless. Here is now to do it.
The more interesting thing is that Microsoft now requires all server apps be able to run without a GUI. There was also a /. story about it.
BTW, nice 4 digit /. UID. :)
Sig Return: 204 No Content
So yeah, you still press Start to Stop your PC.
What is people's beef with starting a shutdown process?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!