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Microsoft's CEO Says He Wants to Unify Windows

Posted by samzenpus on from the by-your-powers-combined dept.

Deathspawner writes A lot of people have never been able to understand the logic behind Microsoft's Windows RT, with many urging the company to kill it off so that it can focus on more important products, like the mainline Windows. Well, this is probably not going to come as a huge surprise, especially in light of mass layoffs announced last week, but Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that his company will be working to combine all Windows versions into a unified release by next year.

62 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Best Wishes ! by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hope that he has a better luck in unifying Windows than those who wanted to unify Unixes

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:Best Wishes ! by mythosaz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Unices? Who knows.

      Anyway, it'll be a little easier since they have full control of all Windows production. Nobody has to convince another distribution.

      I'd love to see a single UI that works across 4" phones and 7" tablets with gorilla glass, and 13" laptops and 10" convertibles with membrane keyboards, and 24" desktops with 101-keyboards, and 60" XBox Ones with controllers but I'm not holding my breath.

    2. Re:Best Wishes ! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      History isn't encouraging, though. They've been pursuing the dream of one windows to rule them all since the days when that involved smearing a crude layer of flayed win95 across winCE and pretending it was a good fit for PDAs.

      Now that hardware has advanced they have a much better shot at architectural unification (if memory serves, NT has basically edged out everything else except for whatever CE support they provide for legacy customers); but UI? That won't go well.

    3. Re:Best Wishes ! by Cryacin · · Score: 5, Funny

      Meet the new boss. Same as the boss before the old boss.

      --
      Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
    4. Re:Best Wishes ! by techno-vampire · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'd love to see a single UI that works across...

      You might, but I, at least, wouldn't because what you'd end up with was a UI that worked equally badly on all types of screens and wasn't really right for any of them. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, preferring to use Linux, but I will say that they're right in not trying to shoehorn a One True UI onto everything.

      --
      Good, inexpensive web hosting
    5. Re:Best Wishes ! by Bugler412 · · Score: 2

      Um, Win95 predated NT4 by a pretty significant amount of time. I remember beta'ing the wn95 interface on the released NT 3.51 though

    6. Re:Best Wishes ! by roc97007 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      As a practical matter, Linux is the unified Unix. Or as unified as its a-gonna get.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    7. Re:Best Wishes ! by techno-vampire · · Score: 4, Funny

      From what I've heard, the current UI for Windows was designed for a tablet, then forced onto desktops, but that's just hearsay because, as I wrote above, I only use Linux.

      --
      Good, inexpensive web hosting
    8. Re:Best Wishes ! by Sable+Drakon · · Score: 2

      Are you stoned? A single UI for all isn't going to work. It's been tried again and again, and failed miserably each time. Why? Diferent formfactors do different things. What works on a tablet doesn't work on a PC or a Console. Case in point: Windows 8/WP8/Xbox Dashboard. It's a relatively consistent experience from device to device, the problem is the mode of usage has changed. There's your hangup right there.

      --
      The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
    9. Re:Best Wishes ! by Bugler412 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Chicago was what became Windows 95, DOS was present as something vaguely like a "kernel" although that definition doesn't fit well. The 32 bit mode stuff was layered on top of DOS. NT4 was the first shipping version that used the NT kernel with the Win95 interface, that was codenamed "Cairo" and was really mostly a shell update using the NT 3.51 underpinnings.

    10. Re:Best Wishes ! by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'd love to see a single UI that works across...

      Microsoft have already done that. In Windows 8 they unified the Windows interface around the design for the vast number of Windows cellphones out there, leaving the totally insignificant Windows desktop/laptop market to wither. The overwhelming market response has justified this decision, in as little as twenty years Windows 8 could even overtake XP.

    11. Re:Best Wishes ! by bondsbw · · Score: 2

      A single UI experience (fixed and fluid layouts) isn't the right way to think about it. Doing that ends in apps that work well for one device but not others.

      Web design has already solved this problem in the form of adaptive and responsive design. Make your app conform to the space it is given. Windows 8 apps have this capability, where many provide a somewhat different (phone-like) UI when in snap view, i.e. when the horizontal space is limited.

      Going one step further, I really like ideas like those promised in Ubuntu for tablets (http://www.ubuntu.com/tablet). It goes a step further by having the UI respond to the type of input that is available. Using a touchscreen gets a full-screen UI, add a mouse/keyboard gives you windowed UI, putting it on a TV gives yet a different UI.

      (I'm thinking Windows Threshold is going in the direction of Ubuntu for tablets. But legacy apps will remain for many years, and that limitation will unfortunately stall some of the efforts to build an OS based on adaptive design principles.)

      --
      All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
    12. Re:Best Wishes ! by Miamicanes · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yes... and no. In theory, if you did a virgin installation of Windows 95 onto a pristine new computer whose peripherals ALL had genuine Win32 drivers capable of running in 386Enh protected mode, and you ONLY ran "true" Winapps that bent over backwards to have no dependencies on realmode, DOS was basically a Grub-like stage 2 bootloader invoked by the BIOS that loaded Windows, kicked the PC into 386enh Protected mode, and handed it over to Windows. And you probably had a pet unicorn living in the back yard ;-)

      From what I remember, the compelling feature of Windows 3.11 that distinguished it from Windows 3.1 was native Win32 code for reading & writing (V)FAT filesystems on IDE hard drives (which gave it a HUGE performance boost compared to 3.1).

      I believe that one of Win95's launch-time features was that Microsoft re-implemented the VESA BIOS extensions (and original VGA BIOS) as proper win32 drivers, so that manufacturers like Tseng and S3 only had to provide them with "miniport" drivers that did the grunt work that would have otherwise required them to fall back to realmode. I'm pretty sure the 386enh hooks for video BIOS emulation existed in 3.11, but the actual Microsoft-written code was given to vendors to distribute on their own disks & wasn't directly used by any video cards the day Win3.11 went to manufacturing. In a sense, Windows 3.11 existed to give videocard manufacturers a prototype platform so they could develop and test their protected-mode drivers on a released operating system.

    13. Re:Best Wishes ! by daver!west!fmc · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You've got a pretty good memory. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in 386enh mode runs its own filesystem code in a virtual device driver instead of calling down to the 16-bit real-mode DOS. It isn't Win32, but it is 32-bit protected-mode code.

    14. Re: Best Wishes ! by rickb928 · · Score: 2

      Really. My 5" phone behaves differently than my 7" tablet, and the UI adapts.

      Unified UI from 4" phones to 24" all-in-ones? Why?

      A unified kernel, that might be fun.

      --
      deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
    15. Re:Best Wishes ! by DaHat · · Score: 2

      Unifying the UI is less important and desirable than unifying the underlying OS.

      Which has already been done IIRC.

      While Windows Phone 7 had the underpinnings of Windows CE... Windows Phone 8 had an NT kernel under the hood... ditto for the Xbox One.

      --
      Help Brendan pay off his student loans
    16. Re:Best Wishes ! by Geeky · · Score: 2

      On the server side, yes. On the desktop I believe Apple make a pretty unix variant :)

      --
      Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
    17. Re:Best Wishes ! by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Before Windows 8, they tried the opposite with Windows CE - a desktop UI (start menu and everything) on small devices. That never got popular either.

      Android makes it possible to actually replace the launcher. Windows Mobile didn't do that, and that is where they failed. Windows proper has pretty much the same problem, though. You can replace the Windows Shell (Explorer.exe) but your system will shit itself occasionally. Things just won't work right without an explorer process running. Leastways, this was true through Windows XP. I tried several of the popular shell replacements but all of them had this problem.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    18. Re:Best Wishes ! by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      The 32 bit mode stuff was layered on top of DOS.

      No. It is located after DOS in memory, that is all. And most of DOS is unloaded when Windows is loaded. Unless you are running in 16 bit mode, DOS is not doing anything while you are in Windows 95.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    19. Re:Best Wishes ! by v1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      They've been pursuing the dream of one windows to rule them all since the days when

      No, not really. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

      When you decide it's time to "unify" a single product, clearly you've made a serious, long-running mistake.

      Having a dozen different versions of a single product is just a short-term way to milk a few more dimes out of your customers, and has a pretty severe long-term cost. It's most lucritive in software though, because it doesn't cost a penny more to manufacture the $300 version than the $100 version once you're finished with development. If it were a car for example, that leather interior is going to cost more to produce. But those "better bits" are free to produce. So it's creme, pure profit.

      And eventually the customers get pissed. Which is OK if your'e not in it for the long haul. Which unfortunately is what Windows is. Bad match.

      --
      I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
    20. Re:Best Wishes ! by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Since the tech behind it is DirectX 11 level, with multicore support as a first priority, it makes little sense to use something that old and unsuited.

      Well, I shall attempt to dig through my various archives to see if I've stored the references. I'm not sure if I last looked them up before or after the period where I began using Scrapbook+ religiously. The stuff is hard to find now what with all the people making claims one way or another having taken priority in Google's database.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    21. Re:Best Wishes ! by MasaMuneCyrus · · Score: 2

      I'd love to see a single UI that works across 4" phones and 7" tablets with gorilla glass, and 13" laptops and 10" convertibles with membrane keyboards, and 24" desktops with 101-keyboards, and 60" XBox Ones with controllers but I'm not holding my breath.

      There are many benefits of a unified OS. If Xbox, Windows desktop, and Windows tablet all run under a single, unified OS, security updates can be pushed to all simultaneously, you can significantly reduce the amount of labor required to support all three, and developing cross-platform becomes much easier.

      Buy why, oh why, do we need a unified OS? Desktop, Phone, Tablet, and TV all require different UI's. With Linux, we have essentially, a unified OS with different window/desktop managers and systems running on top. Why can't Windows be the same? You start your phone, Xbox, desktop, or whatever else, and the Windows kernel loads, and then it launches explorer.exe, xbox.exe, mobile.exe, or what have you, after that. It seems to me that it would be a lot easier to deal with a unified Windows like that. Such an approach would be future-proofing the OS, too, because when we inevitably get a new user environment in the future that Microsoft may want to expand to (e.g., automobiles), Microsoft can keep the core OS but just add a new window manager tailored for the specific environment. With our current approach, if Microsoft wanted to expand into automobiles, they'd have design a single, unified OS that works well enough for phone, tablet, car, tv, desktop, and laptop. Ridiculous!

    22. Re:Best Wishes ! by mrchaotica · · Score: 2

      Maybe if Microsoft had made different decisions in the mid-1990s when they had a compact real mode OS with a usable GUI running atop it, they could have ended up with something unified or unifiable. But that was then and this is now and the intervening two decades are water under the bridge or over the dam or something.

      Wait a second, are you actually trying to argue that keeping DOS-based Windows instead of switching to the NT kernel would have been a good thing? That's just crazy talk!

      Now, I can agree that they should have kept the UI decoupled from the rest of the OS, but there's no way I'd trade NT for DOS.

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    23. Re:Best Wishes ! by dimeglio · · Score: 2

      The have the Nadella hammer. Personally, I'd love to see one Windows instead of Home Editions, Professional Editions, N editions, etc. Let's just have one single edition that runs on everything.

      --
      Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
  2. Death bell tolling for thee.... by Lumpy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    People HATE windows 8 because they are trying to force a touch interface on it, most people do not buy touch montiors so it is less than intuitive.. now they want to make it even more touch oriented? unless they are going to send me FREE 27" and 40" 4K touchscreen monitors it's not going to be worth a damn.

    STOP TRYING TO UNIFY THE PC AND TABLET/PHONE WORLDS! I am so sick of companies trying to do this, it's a failure an utter failure.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by lord_mike · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Here's a real life car analogy... GM in the 80's "unified" all their drivetrains. The same engines/transmissions were available in the Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Chevrolet, etc. The only differences were in the style, body, and nameplate. It didn't particularly go over well with auto enthusiasts or consumers in general. The GM brands became rather superfluous, and consumers were quite lukewarm to the generic "all-in-one" options for GM cars. GM cars from the 80's are considered to be the worst built and least desirable of the company's history. You don't see any of those models still driving around with classic plates on them. Few consumers wanted them then, even fewer want to preserve them now.

    2. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by FuegoFuerte · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I think/hope you misunderstand. Where Ballmer really wanted to have one Windows to rule them all, with one crappy UI on all of them, I'm hopeful Nadella is talking more of a unified base with UI adjustments/differences as needed for each device type. You can have a unified release of the base OS with one style interface for tablets, another for desktops, and possibly another for servers. Windows Server has been doing this for a while, with some versions coming with full UI and others with just the CLI. They're a unified release - they come out at the same time and use the same base, but there are different UIs available, similar to one release of Slackware coming with multiple window managers and it being the user's choice which one to use (if any).

      So, to give people their "bad car analogy" it's like selling an International DT466 engine in a school bus, a semi tractor, a very large pickup truck, a combine, and a tractor. It's the same engine ("unified release"), but the user picks the chassis/body appropriate for their need. If Microsoft can successfully pull that off, it will be a big win for both the company and consumers.

    3. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I haven't logged in in ages but anyway...

      I don't really think this is all that stupid. I heard elsewhere that the OS will detect (will this need a new API and drivers?) what input methods are available and adjust the UI accordingly. In which case the UI will be different on different devices for intents and purposes. On the other hand all this is doing is making the products all use the same kernel and support the exact same run times. Linux has been doing something similar-ish for quite a while. After you can find Linux on the biggest HPC setups down to a smartphone and cheap ARM uCs. And along with Linux you will find the same OS API and sometimes even the same managed environment like java. So if done right I don't really think it's all that stupid but then again...

    4. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by Dracos · · Score: 2

      Three letters: GNX.

    5. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by plopez · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If it was a good idea Apple would have done it long ago ;)

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    6. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by Yunzil · · Score: 2

      They're not talking about the interface. They're talking about the underlying nuts-and-bolts stuff.

    7. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by roc97007 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      > I think I understand why they want to do this: Only one code base, less overhead and more profit.

      Not if nobody buys it.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    8. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Insightful

      People HATE windows 8 because they are trying to force a touch interface on it, most people do not buy touch montiors so it is less than intuitive.. now they want to make it even more touch oriented? unless they are going to send me FREE 27" and 40" 4K touchscreen monitors it's not going to be worth a damn.

      STOP TRYING TO UNIFY THE PC AND TABLET/PHONE WORLDS! I am so sick of companies trying to do this, it's a failure an utter failure.

      They certainly can unify the PC and Tablet. They just have to give up on the insane idea that the UI will be identical between devices. The mouse didn't work on a small screen so they put the touchscreen on my 52" TV?!?! Seriously, who thought that was a good idea?

      This is a very easy thing to fix... XP/Win7 style desk for PCs, Android style for anything smaller than 10", Remote/MediaPC controlls for TVs. And... wait for it... Alt-windows key toggles between UIs for those that like different ones at different times. Eeegads! Am I the next Wozniak with my insanely brilliant ideas or what? Oh wait... no, it's just that obvious.

    9. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by PCM2 · · Score: 2

      They're not talking about the interface. They're talking about the underlying nuts-and-bolts stuff.

      No, they're really more talking about the interface. The underlying nuts and bolts are already pretty much the same, in that Windows, Windows RT, and Windows Phone all share the same NT kernel. But above that there is plenty that's different from platform to platform. What Nadella wants to do is unify the development model and allow developers to create apps with UIs that react and readjust depending on the screen size of the device they're running on, much like how modern websites can support multiple screen sizes. All this talk about "one version of Windows" stems from a single, oversimplified comment Nadella made on the earnings call. When asked about it later, he completely backtracked and said there would not be any such thing.

      --
      Breakfast served all day!
    10. Re:Death bell tolling for thee.... by TangoMargarine · · Score: 2

      The mouse didn't work on a small screen so they put the touchscreen on my 52" TV?!?!

      You need to buy the Finglonger peripheral, yeesh.

      --
      Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
  3. Yay.. This is easy to imagine by brxndxn · · Score: 5, Funny

    In typical Microsoft "All heads in our asses" fashion, they release Windows 8 with two completely separate UI's.. One doesn't work at all for desktop.. and the other barely works for desktop. Hell.. opening a PDF in Windows 8 is still a goddamn nightmare.

    Now that they're unifying Windows, we know exactly what the customer wants:
    1. UI separate from kernel (vector graphic UI for desktops, 2d UI for battery-powered devices)
    2. Ability to customize installation (ie.. Windows embedded version, Windows business edition, Windows uber Gamer edition, Windows "I install Weatherbug and other stupid applications" edition, Windows "Gimme the shitty Widnows 8 UI" edition)
    3. Ability to control data usage (ie.. Windows "I'm being charged for the amount of data because AT&T and Verizon are shitty companies edition")

    What will we get:
    1. METRO 80's colors EDITION
    2. Cannot multitask edition
    3. Super fucking bloated edition
    4. We changed shit because we wanted to change shit and good fucking luck finding it edition
    5. We give you errors if you're not connected to the Internet edition
    6. We update your computer when you're trying to turn it off and take it with you edition

    Bleh.. this was a minimal effort bitch session.. Microsoft already knows they suck and we only buy Windows because it's pretty much forced on us

    --
    --- We need more Ron Paul!
    1. Re:Yay.. This is easy to imagine by rasmusbr · · Score: 2

      7. Ha ha ha did you think you could launch a long-running task and not babysit it to prevent Windows from restarting edition...

      Oh wait, I have that one on my laptop.

    2. Re:Yay.. This is easy to imagine by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 2

      Perhaps grandparent commenter works for Adobe, which would explain why he described it as a nightmare.

    3. Re:Yay.. This is easy to imagine by jd2112 · · Score: 2

      Definitely a lot of truth there. But... come on - opening a PDF is a breeze (in win8) -- it's just is a full-screen "app". At least we *CAN* open a PDF without Adobe or yet another 3rd party tool.

      I'd rather run Adobe Reader, He'll I'd rather run Adobe Flash, than the Windows 'Modern/Metro' interface.

      --
      Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
    4. Re:Yay.. This is easy to imagine by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 2

      Or perhaps he wanted to open the PDF in a window. One would think that should be fairly easy. You know... in Microsoft Windows.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    5. Re:Yay.. This is easy to imagine by Ihlosi · · Score: 2
      3. Super fucking bloated edition

      Actually, that's the job of the PC manufacturer. You know, stuffing the recovery partition with four dozen marginally useful programs that make you spend two hours to remove them after a Windows reinstall.

    6. Re:Yay.. This is easy to imagine by Simulant · · Score: 2

      You'd think someone would have thought to allow separate default apps for desktop/tablet mode. Launching a file from one mode only to have it open in the other is aggravating hell... desktop windows controls don't work well with touch input.. not on my 8.1 tab/laptop anyway. And if you went the other way, you find yourself in a crippled metro app that doesn't have the function you were looking for.

  4. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think you must have heard this when reading the writings of Isildur, after the battle of Dagorlad.

          Windows Three for the Elven-kings under the sky,
            Windows Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
            Windows Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
            One Windows for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
            In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

            One Windows to rule them all, One Windows to find them,
            One Windows to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

            In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

  5. Better Information Here by dmbrun · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.zdnet.com/what-one-...

  6. bulllllshit by slashmydots · · Score: 3, Interesting

    BULLSHIT! What he wants is to make ongoing costs just like Xbox Live, skydrive, Office 365, and all the other crap they've tried to push. No thanks, I don't want to pay $1200 a seat over a decade to use Office, thanks. EVERYONE is copying Call of Duty and the DLC era. The new CEO of MS was in charge of cloud services! I am NOT paying a subscription to use ANYTHING from Microsoft. The end. He needs to get over that or get the fuck out.

  7. Server 2012 already looks like Windows 8. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I had to use Windows Server 2012 for the first time a few days ago. Jesus Fucking Christ, I had no idea they had brought the Windows 8 Metro Hipster UI over to their server line of OSes. I couldn't belive it. It was damn near impossible to use.

    Those are the only two Windows OSes that people actually use. It looked to me like they have already been fully unified. Both Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 are equally impossible to use effectively.

    1. Re:Server 2012 already looks like Windows 8. by Penguinisto · · Score: 2

      Well, there's always the Core Installation... well, if you really like PowerShell.

      (...and seriously, bash is 10 miles more flexible, effective, intuitive...)

      --
      Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
    2. Re:Server 2012 already looks like Windows 8. by Chas · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Wait until you have to REMOTELY administer the beast.
      The active areas in the corners of the screen function on the "Maybe" principle (Maybe it'll work, Maybe it won't.) So if you don't clutter up your desktop like thousands of idiots do, and stick umpty-bajillion shortcuts on your taskbar, there are times when, if the RDP+Metro session just "ain't feelin' it" and becomes a useless mess as you try to click around to get it to work.

      So yourself a favor NOW and install a Start Menu replacement. You'll thank yourself later.

      I've been steering clients clear of Windows 8 and Server 2012 for nearly 2 years now.

      If Nadella fucks the next-gen stuff up and continues with "Tablet Interface 4 Every1", I'm going to be converting a bunch of clients off Windows and onto VMWare and Linux with some form of locked down VM solution. Because that'll be easier and cheaper than the Metro interface retraining costs for my clients.

      --


      Chas - The one, the only.
      THANK GOD!!!
    3. Re:Server 2012 already looks like Windows 8. by Zenin · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm sorry, PowerShell is a trainwreck of a language. Extremely unintuitive, inconsistent, cryptic.

      Using a function? Call it as function($arg1, $arg2). Oh, did you write the function? Sorry, you'll have to call it as function $arg1 $arg2.

      Want to pass a path to something? It's easy: -Path $path. Oh wait, $path is actually a real path and not a glob? You'll have to use -literalPath...if it's supported. Yep, we kept the same failed idea of CMD and decided argument expansion should be done by each command/function/program/cmdlet independently so that we can make damn sure nothing at all is ever consistent. There's a reason why every Unix shell, bash much included, handles argument expansion in the shell.

      Sane variable scoping? Not from PS.

      Want to use something from .Net? It's built in, a major selling point! Oh...sorry if the syntax is so incredibly buggered that it makes real world PowerShell/.Net code look like a bid for the Obfuscated Perl Contest. And once you get it "right", PowerShell can't grok anything beyond trivial. God help me, I had to craft and populate an IEnumerable of Tuple of String, String in PowerShell to pass to a .Net method (from DacServices). Finally crafted (looked like a spell incantation), it couldn't get through PowerShell to the method call in one piece. Flat out broken. Finally had to give up and just code a real C# console app to handle the 10 lines of code.

      Want output/trace to display in the order you actually write it? When it actually happens? Better | Out-Default all of it or strange things happen.

      Most sane languages, especially so-called "OOP" languages, actually stop when an exception is thrown by default. Typically with a default global catch that offers you a nice stack trace, or something. PowerShell? By default it keeps on trucking, not even a peep (bad old habits of CMD are hard to break I guess).

      Misspell a variable somewhere? Or a method name? Not even a warning until runtime when it fails (but then keeps on trucking right along, happy to double down on the fail). Even Perl isn't that bad (at least with "use strict;").

      PowerShell is better than CMD/Batch. But then, so is a swift kick to the head. It's a horrid language and a bad shell. Bash via Cygwin is a hell of a saner and more powerful way to use a shell on Windows. And if you ever need .Net something, do yourself a huge favor and do it from C# as a console app and call that...1,000,000,000 times better than trying to use the fugly hack of a .Net interface that PowerShell provides.

      --
      My /. uid is better then your /. uid
  8. I know I'm not expected to RTFA... by MtHuurne · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The third link is not actually a link, since the <a> tag is missing the href attribute. I wanted to check what the CEO actually said, since "unify" could mean a lot of things.

    Are they going for x86-64 only, killing the ARM-based WIndows RT, as Hot Hardware is reporting? They'd still have to keep ARM support for Windows Mobile. Perhaps they should have put Windows Mobile plus some tablet extensions on the low-budget tablets, that would have fit people's expectations a lot better.

    Are they going for a single code base? In that case there would be multiple products created from that code base, so that doesn't tell us anything about the fate of Windows RT or any other specific products.

    Are they going for a single product named Windows? While I think it would be good to drop the artificial home/pro/ultimate differentiation, having a different Windows for client and server use is still useful. Although that could be handled by having a different default configuration rather than an entirely different product.

  9. Linux Mint 17 by RudyHartmann · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How about natively booting Linux Mint 17 and putting 7 in Virtualbox if you must have this POS.

    --
    Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
  10. Very old saying by jklovanc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Jack of all trades master of none.

    1. Re:Very old saying by jklovanc · · Score: 2

      No, I am saying that it tries to be too many things, does all of them poorly and ends up being useful to none.

  11. No to a unified interface yes to unified software by Harlequin80 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If I could have a Win 7 style interface on my desktop / laptop. I really good touch interface for my tablet / phone and a really good lounge room interface for my xbox that could run the same software across all 3. Now that would be cool! RT wasn't crap because it was a different interface it was crap because it felt like it should run the same stuff as normal windows but didn't

  12. Windows Godzilla ! by gelfling · · Score: 4, Funny

    Only 1.5 TB and it will run on ANYTHING (with 8x8 core processors and 32GB of RAM). Of course it still comes in 24 different variations that all licensed differently.

  13. Re:OK MS bashers. by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

    They tried that with FX-32 on Alpha (NT4). It wasn't worth it.

    I think Nadella is talking about a unified codebase, like Apple with OSX/iOS and Linux/*BSD, heck even Solaris (a few poor saps are still using that - those with Stockholm Syndrome might even comment here). It's really unlikely that Microsoft will drop the ARM arch - there are too many opportunities there.

    Say what you want, but Nadella seems to be making decisions like an engineer, not a fat marketing stooge or a conniving aspie beancounter.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  14. Microsoft's strategy summed up in one link by gweilo8888 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.google.com/trends/e...

  15. Server 2012 already looks like Windows 8. by slaker · · Score: 2

    The special magic thing is to hit the Windows key + X. That brings up a menu that has pretty much everything you'd want to do from a start menu. Win + X also works on desktop Windows 8.x.

    The hilarious thing to me is that the Windows 8/Server 2012 line is ironically the most keyboard centric version of Windows I've used, but all people want to do is bitch about the Modern (Tile) interface that you can completely, totally ignore if you're on something that has a real keyboard and mouse.

    Also, Windows RT? It's not awful. Printing and scanning work great and they have real USB and storage support. Surfaces ship with Office pre-installed. RT is missing a lot of media consumption tools that are present on other mobile OSes, but as a device for doing work they're credible. I'd rather have an RT-based Surface than anything that runs iOS, though I'd prefer a good quality Android device to either.

    --
    -- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
  16. Re:Waiting for Windows to come full circle by Miamicanes · · Score: 2

    What if Microsoft released a commercial "Window Manager" for Linux?

    What if they made KDE for Windows to use as an alternate desktop environment and window manager?

    Oh... wait a minute... http://windows.kde.org/

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (demo video of KDE running under Windows 7)

  17. Re:OK MS bashers. by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

    This may actually be a killer OS. It is the next version after a bad one!

    Actually, all versions of Windows are bad, if you have ever experienced something decent. It's just amazing the crap that Windows users put up with, because they have never known anything else and think that computers are supposed to be flaky with fiddly controls. You have bad versions of Windows and really bad versions of Windows, that is the range, there is no such thing as a good version of Windows. So maybe a bad version of Windows will follow this really bad version, and maybe that will be enough to slow down Microsoft's slide into irrelevance for a while.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  18. Re:Unified Windows... by geekoid · · Score: 2

    Good think that's not what they are doing then, isn't it?

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    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  19. Unify the OS, but not the UIs by Stolpskott · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So many negative comments here... as if people think that a unified OS must also mean a unified UI.
    A single core codebase for the OS will have a few problems with performance on different hardware, but that is a separate discussion... and who expects Microsoft stuff to run quickly anyway?
    However, incorporating a different UI for each target device means that you should not need to see the craptastic Metro UI on a desktop system or workstation, while touchscreen and small screen systems are not compromised by a need to develop elements for discrete keyboard and mouse input.