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Windows 10: Can Microsoft Get It Right This Time?
An anonymous reader shares this article about what Microsoft needs to accomplish with Windows 10 in order to make gains in the mobile market and everywhere else. "Later this week Microsoft will provide more details of Windows 10, most likely focusing on how the new operating system will look and feel on smartphones and tablets. According to Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is likely to unveil a version of Windows 10 that's expected to work on Windows Phones and smaller Windows tablets running ARM and perhaps Intel processors. Microsoft will be hoping that by making it easier for developers to build for tablets and smartphones it can take some of its dominance of the desktop world and port that to the mobile world. That may help a bit, but will not in itself create the breakthrough that Microsoft wants: when it comes to mobile, Microsoft's Windows Phone is still a distant third in a two-horse race."
No.
They took the Windows 8 'core', upgraded it a bit, rejiggered some window effects, and re-added the desktop as primary for a desktop/laptop experience.
The only thing people hated about Windows 8 on a PC was the interface. If this gets rid of that it will not be as bad as Windows 8 which means they did something right...
Right now, as the underdog, their focus should be marketshare. But right now, their mobile stuff is too damn expensive. I looked at a Surface tablet over Christmas. Nice piece of tech, but at $800 I just laughed and walked away. Similar Android tablets are less than $200.
They need to be pretty much giving this stuff away right now to pry the market away. Maybe do something like when they gave all MSDN subscribers a Pocket PC (I think that was around 2002) to get it out there. But they also need to make it competitive with Android stuff. Cheaper even.
After they capture market share, then there will be more people developing for it which will lead to more apps for it. But first they've got to get it into people's hands. That's not happening right now. There's a huge potential for Windows on all devices, PC and mobile, but they are acting like they already own the mobile space and instead they are a weak third party in the mobile game. They really should be questioning the wisdom of cannibalizing their desktop OS in a mad gamble to build mobile marketshare. I think they are going about it backwards.
"Getting it right" goes against their business model, they make more money selling you an expensive piece of crap OS, because they know it will be obsolete in a few years and they can sell you another copy of a new version of the same old piece of crap OS again
Like shooting at a moving invisible target = ReactOS will never win trying to catch up to running windows
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
In what way? Internally maybe. From a user perspective on a PC? Absolutely not.
Even if Windows 10 does correct the major UI issues from Windows 8 (as expected), the memory of Microsoft trying to ram Metro down users throats wont soon be forgotten. The fact that Microsoft was willing to sacrifice its desktop users on the alter of winning a new market (Tablets) will leave them wondering what surprises await them if they stay on with the Windows ecosystem.
It just has to be a lot less wrong than Windows 8.x. Enough so the corporates will eventually install it. Thats all that matters.
Microsoft brought back, I mean, Microsoft is incorporating the start menu for the consumer in Windows 10, so with that kind of technological advancement underway, they've clearly managed to catapult themselves 20 years ahead of the competition.
The worst thing that ever happened in computers was that we had one monopoly, being Microsoft in the desktop market. Microsoft didn't even see the Internet coming when it was pushing MSN. If not for Trumpet I don't know how else you could connect. There was no native support. Still today I say the one think that is holding most companies back is Microsoft. Exchange and MS Office as two examples. Most people believe that these are the best of the best. but trying to have this discussion will just produce a flame war.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
It's not about mobile. Windows 8, as a purely mobile, touchscreen OS, was okay. No major complaints there. The problem was that Windows 8 on Desktops, or even laptops with a touchscreen, tried to enforce an extremely oversimplified interface onto desktop users. Then to add insult to that, they had two parallel paradigms (Windows and Metro) and half the settings are in one place and half in the other. The solution is simple: they have to support both. The reason is just as simple. Right now I'm using my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro as a laptop. So I want it to behave as a full featured desktop OS with all the power, control, widgets, bells and whistles I need to do all the things I need to do. As soon as I flip the screen around into a tablet mode, I need to be able to use it as a tablet.
I pretty much am at that state now with some 3rd party software, although again, half the settings are in Metro and half in classic Windows. So it's not like it would be all that hard for MS to get this right. They've just done the same thing they've done over, and over, and over. They take a paradigm or design philosophy, and push one or two steps too far.
The other big issue with Windows 8 is it had to bridge the divide between classic laptops, and the next generation laptops that have touchsreens. Metro with only a mouse? Awful. They force that on people, and the users hated it. Personally, I've only ever ran Windows 8.1 on my own machine that also had a touchscreen, so it wasn't nearly as bad.
Better known as 318230.
Can you explain how an OS geared towards "Apps" is a better fit for the desktop? Or how treating relatively large screens like they have a lack of real estate is an improvement?
Windows 8 is just OS for consumers. Hopefully Windows 10 will be useful for things other than Facebook.
And with good reason: the default user interface of Windows 10 on desktop and "conventional" laptops is the Desktop user interface, not the "Modern" tiled interface that frustrated users transitioning to Windows 8.x to no end. As such, users of Windows 7, Vista and XP will be able to transition to Windows 10 quickly, and that means much higher consumer end user and corporate user acceptance this time around, meaning likely a much more "normal" upgrade cycle.
They've never managed to fuck up Windows 10 before!
It's better on the inside, especially the DLL sharing. (Rather than each running app having a separate in-memory copy of a DLL, now if separate apps have the same DLL dependency, then there's only one copy in memory. Probably my favorite feature of Windows 8)
But the interface still sucks. I've used 8.1 as my primary desktop OS for almost a year now (Stock install, no Start Menu third party add-ons), and while it's a solid OS, there's still so much missing from the Metro interface.
Recently used documents is the thing I miss the most.
And just exploring through the tree-based Start Menu is something I really miss. I end up with so much stuff installed I forget some of it. Would occasionally just surf thru the Start menu to re-discover stuff. But with 8.1, if you don't remember it, you're not going to find it. Sure you can go page by page through all the listed stuff, but that's far more inefficient than being able to walk through a tree-based menu.
Wasn't Microsoft making noises about releasing a single OS which would be the same for a mobile device and a desktop?
In which case I expect a "one size fits some" approach, which will lead to a bloated mess on smaller devices.
Mobile devices aren't the same as desktops, don't have as much resources, and need to be a little more slimmed down -- like apps which weigh in at 10s of megs instead of gigs.
I'm just not sure Microsoft is going to hit the mark and not end up with something which is useless on at least one platform.
I don't want my tablet or my phone running the same OS as my desktop -- because that makes no sense unless you're just going to force the mobile devices to get even bigger.
Sometimes, I just think Microsoft has no real understanding of the markets they're chasing.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I agree really. My dev laptop from work runs 7. My two home laptop run 8.1. 7 feels old now to me.
If Windows 10 doesn't use the same installer for phones and desktops, then it's not the same OS.
Ah, I guess that means using a web installer vs. ISO gets you two different operating systems.
Gotcha.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Windows 10 will just be another spyware ridden OS, it wont let you uninstall OneDrive, the Camera app, or the Windows Store. It seems like it'll have at least 2 browsers again, at least 2 calculator apps, and default search is "Everywhere" (sending your search queries to MS).
Not the original author, obviously, and your question was probably rethoric, still as someone who uses Win8.1 daily and totally hates getting back to 7:
1) it's sensibly faster, feels lighter
2) better task manager
3) better file copy
4) better start menu. Yes. I always customize my start menu to have the shortcuts to all programs I use, having a full screen at my disposal is so much better than a small section on lower left. the only thing I was worried is that it distracted me too much - it actually distracts me less as I spend less time looking row after row in the start menu.
5) keyboard shortcuts everywhere
biggest defects:
1) you can't totally disable UAC without breaking apps. It's not a big issue either way.. I don't use win 8.x apps, neither does UAC get to much in the way at the lowest setting
2) on dark themes the caption text of windows is unreadable
And in the darkness, spit up the blue screen of death.
Rather than each running app having a separate in-memory copy of a DLL, now if separate apps have the same DLL dependency, then there's only one copy in memory. Probably my favorite feature of Windows 8
Huh? DLLs are shared libraries. They've been shared between all applications that use them since 16-bit versions of Windows. The only time that wasn't the case was when you couldn't locate them at the same virtual address (win32 dlls are not position-independent code, because PIC is slower, so are statically relocated for a particular address), but in 64-bit apps DLLs are PIC and so that's not an issue.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You probably shouldn't. Do you ask that question for every piece of software that you don't use?
What?
I'm not sure you understand how Linux distributions are updated. They have major releases and patches just like Windows.
... take some of its dominance of the desktop world ...
Outside of the enterprise world, is Microsoft really dominant on the desktop anymore?
.
Anecdotally, it looks like Microsoft is losing its dominance in the consumer desktop world to Apple, i.e., Microsoft no longer enjoys the 90+% marketshare on the consumer desktops that it once had.
That they finally start with a package manager (or package manager manager) : OneGet which will integrate with Chocolatey is a big "right" in my book. As a Linux user for a decade, one of the strangest things in Windows-land has been that users still need to go to web-pages and download installers manually - which in it self poses a security risk since the average user might not verify that the web page is genuine. With an efficient software management (keep everything up-to-date) and installation eco-system, we can hope that a lot of the crapware littering download sites will go extinct (I have had to clean up various computers for friends and family running Windows - those running Linux did not need much support apart from the occasional upgrade). As a GUI front-end I find Chocolatey Explorer user friendly enough, but other options will most likely pop up later.
> Windows 10: Can Microsoft Get It Right This Time?
Outlook not so good
That's not QUITE true. The requirement for CPU and firmware features changed between Windows 8 and 8.1, even if the actual performance requirements did not. That mostly means that 10 year old+ Athlons and Pentium 4s aren't going to be running Windows 8.1, but it's entirely possible to find machines as new as Core 2s that can run 8 but not 8.1 because they're on a motherboard with an older Intel chipset
only the patches actually work.
Microsoft had the window of opportunity to gain a foothold in the mobile market, but Ballmer screwed it all up.
The mobile ship has sailed. Microsoft had already admitted defeat by (grudingly?) porting Office to iOS and Android. Supposedly a Windows-exclusive killer app that could tempt people to Windows phones and tablets.
I have a Surface Pro and while it's nice it's still clunky as hell, Windows 10 will not fix this because honestly Windows is 100% crap for a touch interface. The software and OS are not designed for touch and therefore will be clunky.
Windows 10 for laptops.
Windows Touch for touch devices.
Stop trying to unify the two because IT WILL NOT WORK. windows 8 sucks horribly on a laptop but works nice on a tablet. windows 10 is awesome on a laptop but SUCKS on a tablet. (Yes I tried living with it on my surface pro for 4 weeks. it sucks as much as windows 7 does and windows 8.1 does when using non touch apps)
So unless they fire all their management and design teams and start over with people that understand that the two ecosystems are different and need to remain separate nothing will change.
Proof that your touch UI and OS is crap when your users of your flagship device use a mouse and keyboard with it most of the time.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Later this week Microsoft will provide more details of Windows 10, most likely focusing on how the new operating system will look and feel on smartphones and tablets (emphasis mine).
Or, in short, NO.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why should I waste my time with Windows 10?
Why? Well, if you want to run Windows Applications :-)
And it's Windows 7, I haven't even looked at Windows 8.
Short Answer: No, you should not upgrade.
Long Answer: If you're interested in kernel side stuff, like most OS releases kernel changes are incremental. Here are a few :-
0) Secure Boot - With a chained OS boot you can be sure (well, its microsoft :P ) that your kernel mode components have been cryptographically verified. IIRC they started using this 10 years ago with the xbox 360. Ofcource the 360 security was promptly broken after people figured out how to patch the firmware, but I still think it is a nice-to-have feature.
1) Client side Hyper-V runs all OSs, including host OS on a thin hypervisor with minimal performance impact (Intels SLAT tech)
2) Native USB 3.0 , I've found that on Windows 7 third party usb 3.0 drivers are a hit/miss in terms of maximum performance.
3) Stricter LFH (Low fragmentation heap) Internals (guard pages, less determinism, etc) -Result - You're better guarded against buggy drivers and potentially malicious kernel mode components.
4) Newer API for driver mem alloc (NonPagedPoolNx) - IIRC windows kernel components have switched to using this. Result - Stability boost, Security boost - all kernel memory objects are in non excutable mem, etc
5) Uses Intels new-ish RDRAND instruction for a higher quality random number gen as the basis for ASLR
They crippled Windows RT so badly, and so deliberately, there was no way it could be successful. And the same marketing geniuses that were responsible for that disaster are still in control. The best thing that Microsoft could do is fire everyone anywhere near the top, and they haven't done that, so, no, it will be a failure.
As many have mentioned, Windows 8 failure was purely from a UI standpoint. Any Windows users who have used it with Start8 or Classic Start can attest that it's faster, more stable and overall better than Windows 7. This is also the first Windows release under Satya Nadella (Ballmer Free!) as well as with a new lead for the Windows faction of the company (I have read many an issue with Sinofsky being a terrible lead for Windows 8) so I think 10 will likely be the "best" Windows we have seen yet.
Now to speculate, my belief is MS will continue its cheap/free licensing of Windows 10 for tablets and phones. They will also offer a free/cheap upgrade for Windows 8 users to upgrade to Windows 10, and unlike Android tablets MS can push that right to users without having to go through the OEMs (not sure about Windows Phone 8) so we'll quickly see Windows 8 market-share plummet and 7 and 10 will be the majority of users.
Now despite all this Windows will likely still drop marketshare on the desktop and will gain a bit on the mobile side. Linux folks will still use Linux. Apple folks will not be dropping their Macs and iPhones to get Windows 10, but that doesnt really matter. If Windows 10 is technically as good/better than 8 and get' the interface right (which it seems like they are doing enough to satisfy desktop users) then they will keep their Windows userbase happy and likely Win10 will be the one we see business move off Win7 and right now that's likely job #1 for them.
Kinda right, kinda wrong...
See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/arc...
It needs to be smooth, it needs to be organized. The OS needs to stay out of the way and not over-complicate things. We are there to run applications, not Windows. Windows needs to run and organize files and applications, that's it.
A simple file copy shouldn't take several minutes to start. When I say copy, start copying! We need Windows, not tiles. Windows is the name of the OS after all, and IMO the Windows paradigm still works. They need to preserve backward compatibility except when it would too badly affect performance or security. And I don't think it would or else MS themselves wouldn't be recommending DOSBOX to run 16-bit applications.
>Windows 8.1 isn't in need of being fixed, really. It's better than Windows 7, which was better than Windows 2000 (windows XP was a heaping pile of dung).
Huh? Your UID is not so high that you should be making such comments. But lets deconstruct it for the lols.
XP was a heaping pile of dung? XP had its issues, like every OS, but compared to having to run the OS on top of DOS like Windows was previously doing it was a huge improvement. Further the staying power of XP alone is a good indicator that it was not bad at all.
Next you say that 8.1 is better than 7. Why? What exactly does 8 (or 8.1) offer in technical terms beyond what 7 offers? There are a few things I'll grant it does offer but it does not offset the fact the awful UI that it has. A UI not designed with a desktop workflow in mind but rather a power play by MS, that failed, to force people into accepting such a UI for all devices.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Correction. The "Modern" tiled interface didn't frustrate users "transitioning to Windows 8". It is simply bad. Horrible. The worst UI in the history of Windows, and since that history includes Windows ME and Vista that's saying quite a bit. It would be more appropriate to say that the UI in question is what PREVENTED the transition of users to Windows 8--not because they couldn't figure it out, but because they simply deemed it garbage.
Look at your own experiences with governments, phone companies, cable companies, banks.
The kind of focused, reasonable analysis needed to produce workable products seems to end when the greatest concerns in the organization are self serving personal behavior and organizational preservation.
Which means that Microsoft is at the mercy of some dimwitted manager who's had a brainwave and somebody's ear. The results are usually disasterous (e.g. Windows 8 interface, Powershell interface instead of VBScript.net, the lack of realistic automated language migration from something like Winforms to ASP, WPF, etc. which could have been avoided with forethought and better design...). Somebody wanted their good review and their bonus. That's all it's about now at Microsoft, or any large organization.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
IMO, Microsoft has a big hit on their hands with Windows 10, from the looks of the developer preview. If it continues as planned, it should be the upgrade all of the Windows 7 holdouts have been waiting for. It has package management from the command line (a real plus for I.T. folks supporting these systems on a network), and native support for the latest hardware technologies like USB 3. The problems with the Metro UI in Windows 8 should hopefully be worked out, too.
But Windows Mobile for phones? They've tried and tried again and it's pretty much a non-starter. People simply aren't that interested in a Windows UI on a cellphone. IMO, they need to cut their losses and quit trying to have Microsoft everywhere. Focus on what works and build on that. EG. Move forward with such things as Office for iOS, because that's being smart. (It costs too much to try to convince everyone to ditch an iPad and buy a Surface tablet instead. Make your money off selling apps for iOS instead.)
You can rage all you want, but the abysmal market share of Windows 8 tells a different story.
Given that Microsoft has skipped Windows 9, it will be interesting to see how things pan out. Will the established pattern of good release, bad release, good release, bad release continue? Or, will it see the missed version number and think "hold on a minute, I need to make this release a bad release, because they've skipped the good one"?
And in most cases if an update does bork things, you just reinstall over the top without too much issue. Just make sure you have a list of all the programs you installed and a back up of your home directory and possibly /etc, and the process mostly handles itself.
If only MS would get a clue and make it that easy to reinstall the OS without having to use their cumbersome process for exporting and inporting the users' profiles.
Businesses have still been buying Windows 7, AFAICT. Once Windows 10 is out, they may well be more receptive.
This one is not difficult for Microsoft to get right. They had the right interface w/ Windows 7 on desktops/laptops. That needs to be the Windows 10 interface for those devices. For tablets, one could be given a choice of the 7 or 8 interface, and for phones, the interface is just fine.
The issue that MS has in the Tablet/phone space is that Windows RT/Windows Phone is a late entrant to the market, and alien to the ARM platform - Windows CE notwithstanding. Also, MS doesn't have the Wintel apps to leverage that space, and is therefore at a disadvantage. I have a Lumia, and the main issue for me has never been the interface. It's the fact that most of the apps suck, and also, most of the popular apps in the market are present on iOS and Android, but not on the Windows Phone. As a result, the phone is partly useful for professionals (has Skype, Office, OneNote, ADP, Concur, and a few useful apps) but pretty poor as a general purpose phone.
While Microsoft has done a good job in having a common development platform, it would do well to regulate what goes into its app store. Right now, too much of it is crap, in sharp contrast to iOS. Not sure about Android
...Until you try to do something like manage your files, or administrate your own OS. Then the pain starts. It gets even more painful if you have to do this for a living, and the UI is fighting you all the way.
MS of course can get it right if they just design a solid desktop OS. They have come a long way in stability while maintaining pretty much their desktop monopoly. All they have to do is update the OS for the current tech and continue to polish the desktop UI that has been progressing for years.
But they don't want to do that. They want to use that desktop monopoly to force their way into the mobile market and thus we had Windows 8. And even with that failure they can't just let it go. And I've used the Win10 preview and it still is not as good a UI as Windows 7. It does make a fair amount of concessions to getting back to more of a Windows 7, non-mobile UI, desktop but it still sucks compared to Win7.
And the real thing that I don't understand it this obsession with trying to merge two different UI formats into one. When I'm using a mobile device that has no keyboard/mouse then of course I want a UI that is designed for that. But when I am on a computer with a keyboard and mouse I freaking want a UI designed for that!
I'll finish with an obligatory car analogy. When I'm driving a car I expect that the controls reflect what I'm trying to do. But when I'm in a boat, while similar, the controls are changed to suit that vehicle's needs. UI's should be the same way. And there is no reason why MS should accept that they can have two UI's for their OS.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
And just exploring through the tree-based Start Menu is something I really miss.
That is so sad.
Most of the complaints I hear about Window 8 come from people who've bought a new PC, booted it up, and have no freaking clue how to use it. 'WTF?' they say, 'I thought this thing ran Windows?'
Everyone knows that an even-numbered Microsoft release is no good, starting with DOS 2.0.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Yeah, because my PC is as interactive and important as my dishwasher!
Indeed, we shouldn't concern ourselves with options outside of that which Microsoft provides. Doing so is stupid, and makes you stupid. Right?
If not, we can only assume that he'd rather waste our time than his own.
But the interface still sucks. I've used 8.1 as my primary desktop OS for almost a year now (Stock install, no Start Menu third party add-ons), and while it's a solid OS, there's still so much missing from the Metro interface.
Recently used documents is the thing I miss the most.
And just exploring through the tree-based Start Menu is something I really miss. I end up with so much stuff installed I forget some of it. Would occasionally just surf thru the Start menu to re-discover stuff. But with 8.1, if you don't remember it, you're not going to find it. Sure you can go page by page through all the listed stuff, but that's far more inefficient than being able to walk through a tree-based menu.
Does "Start Menu Classic" still work on Win8.1 ? I remember using it on Win8 for a little while before I went back to Win7 on my gaming box.
I think the main question on everyone's mind, though, is whether Win8.1 counts as a major "release" or not so we'll know where Win10 falls in the "good / shit" cycle: http://www.globalnerdy.com/wor... .
Though I guess we're damned either way... if Win8.1 counts as the "good" release, then Win10 will be "shit". If Win8/Win8.1 collectively count as the "shit" release in the cycle, then MS might have just skipped Win9 "good" to get to Win10 "shit".
because Windows 10 == Windows X
No an OS with a giant blackbox (Modern) smack dab in the middle of it is not better.....Win 7 is a proper true enterprise OS, Win 8 is not.
Good-bye
I understand a end user saying something like this but if you are an IT professional I'm surprised to hear that. As an IT professional you life will always involve learning new software and technology. The day that isn't true you're probably are out of a job or at the bottom of your field.
That is the problem with Windows 10, you don't know what will still run on it.
When I downgraded to Windows 8 from 7 I could not play The Sims Medieval, Diablo 2 and a few other games. My Blu-ray player no longer worked, even though it was supported on Windows 8. The Blu-ray player problem turned out to be a missing system DLL caused by me upgrading to Windows 8 instead of doing a fresh install.
My prediction for Windows 10 is that more games and software will not work. Will it be something you use? Who knows.
The other fun thing was with Windows 8 my boot time increased from about 45 seconds to 90 seconds. Probably to do with upgrading instead of fresh install, but it takes a long time to get everything setup after a fresh install.
My computer died and I am happily running Windows 7 on the new one.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
"run the OS on top of DOS like Windows was previously doing" - you're aware that there were Windows versions between 3.11 and XP, right? None of them ran on top of DOS. Hell, I'll even ignore the fact that the GPP explicitly called out Windows 2000, which (being NT-based) was *exactly* as DOS-based as XP.
The 9x family (95, 98, ME, and their various releases/service packs) booted up through some DOS code, but DOS was basically no more than a bootloader for them. This OS family ran 32-bit protected-mode kernels (DOS was 16-bit Real Mode; no virtual memory, user/kernel separation, or process address space isolation). 9x ran on the FAT filesystem, like DOS, but supported long file names and Unicode, whereas DOS was limited to 8.3 names and 8-bit characters. 9x had a preemptive multitasking scheduler, unlike DOS which had no multitasking support at all (some previous software, such as Windows 1.x-3.x, had a cooperative multitasking scheduler on top of DOS but could not pre-empt a long-running process). 9x could and did run background processes (what a Unix user would call daemons), which was impossible on DOS. 9x had a hardware abstraction layer, allowing processes to share access to hardware such as mice and sound cards without requiring each program to have its own hardware drivers and take total control over the hardware the way DOS programs did.
Claiming that Windows pre-XP ran on top of DOS is just false. It used some DOS code in a few places and used DOS to bootstrap itself, much like a modern bootloader, but that's it. All of the core functions of an OS - the hardware interface, task management, memory management, and file management - were handled by Windows-specific code. The UI was 32-bit and Windows-specific. The 16-bit APIs were still present but the system call interface (kernel32.dll) was 32-bit and Windows-specific. It's true that you couldn't start 9x without DOS, but DOS was not running in any meaningful sense once 9x was.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Why? Well, if you want to run Windows Applications :-)
I'm wondering why we need a new Windows version every couple of years, just to run some applications.
My understanding is that many corporations just recently moved off XP to Win7. That's probably going to be fine for a number of years. I understand that Microsoft needs to release something in the consumer space for marketing reasons, but what does 10 accomplish other than as advanced field beta testing for the next corporate version?
I might run 10 on a test machine just to see what we're in for, but I plan to run 7 on my workstation for as long as practical. 7 was a nice bump from XP, 8 was nasty, 7 is where it's at for now.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I left my phone at home by accident Saturday, and had to borrow someone's phone to make a call. Oh, hey, a Windows phone -- the first I've seen in the wild that wasn't on a TV show. I commented "Hey, it's a windows phone" and she responded "I needed a phone and it was the cheapest one they had." Ok, then. Could Windows be the new Symbian? (Would that necessarily be a bad thing?)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The UI and being used to it or not is something that time can change. The suckiness of certain aspects of how the OS works (or doesn't) day in and day out is what I'm talking about when I say win2k was nice, win 7 better, and win 8.1 an improvement on that (with winxp being the biggest dud of those 4). Vista wasn't even all that bad, except for some mistakes MS made related to UAC. I spent 6 months thinking about whether to build a new PC with win7 or win8, and decided on win8. Kids didn't have trouble. I didn't have trouble. Wife didn't have trouble. Upgraded the in-laws and they even get along fine with win8. If the UI differences bug you enough for it to be a deal-breaker, then I can understand your disagreement, but they give me no trouble at all.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
The Start menu really never went away in Windows 8.x. It was hidden. Open File Explorer. Under View make sure Hidden Items is checked. Then navigate to Program Data\Microsoft\Windows. There you'll see the Start Menu folder. Right mouse click on it and select Pin to Start. You now have the classic start menu tree available on the Start screen. Or you could drag it to the desktop and select Create Shortcut Here. It's been this way since Windows 8 went gold.
Yeah. 99% of all users don't care about stability (3, 4) or security (5).
Just because he uses ugly computer terms doesn't mean that those don't translate into improvements that a mother could love.
Just enough already.
The OS for a smartphone/tablet and a desktop/laptop should NOT ever be the same. Especially not the UI, stop trying to make them the same.
Give me a quad core Atom phone, with an intel GPU (none of the powerVR bullshit), running DESKTOP WIN10 when docked and a phone environ when not...and I'll buy fucking 5 of them.
Not wrong. Windows has shared DLL pages since Windows *95*. The change in Windows 8 is that the OS can now collapse modified and non-DLL memory.
But I doubt they will get back the market share they lost to Android and iOS in the home users market. People who switched to mobile platforms proably don't have any serious productivity needs for their home computer and use it primarily for email, social networking, Youtube, etc. So why come back to Windows and have to deal again with anti-virus subscriptions, crappy app updates that installs third-party toolbars and all the complexity of running/managing a Windows PC?
Sorry, I know that sounds slightly hostile, so let me try and explain before I'm simply filed in with the rest of the people who still type things like "macro$haft" in these threads. :)
I've used Windows 8...it was fucking terrible. No getting around it. Switching between Metro and Desktop when you click the start button? You need to go to your PC settings to shut it down manually? Oh, and by the way, PC settings is actually just a subset of the control panel, which you'll only even be presented as an option in desktop Mode? You actually have to _search_ for Control Panel in Metro to get to it there?
Some of it has since been fixed...some of it hasn't. I think just about everyone, including Paul Thurrott and the astroturfers at Neowin, would agree that WIndows 8 was fucked on release. Now? At this point I don't really think it's any better (or worse) than GNOME 3 on the same touchscreen laptop that I use...and the laptop isn't fast enough to run games decently, so whether or not I have Windows or Linux on the laptop really doesn't make any difference...as long as the hardware is supported I'll be using it for roughly the same things. I'm sure Windows 10 will fix a lot of what's wrong with Windows 8.1 at the moment...I'm also sure, having ran Windows from 3.0 up to the present in various iterations, that Windows 10 will have a metric fuckton of bugs and other issues when it's released, it's kind of Microsoft's pattern at this point. They'll probably be fixed, for the most part, after a while...and oddly enough, this is where Fedora 21 is currently edging it out for me. I've actually experienced less problems and fewer issues configuring GNOME 3 than I ever have with Windows 8.1, installing all the crapware from the manufacturer and others, untying my Outlook account from the system login, ad nauseam. Unless Windows 10 does something for me in addition to 1) watching the occasional video and 2) fairly light internet usage (maybe Youtube or Netflix on a really good day)...well, it's probably going to cost $200-299. It'll cost that much and be broken. Fedora 22 will be free, it'll probably be broken when it first comes out as well, but at least I'm not out a third of what I make a month to use it...and it's less "broken" than some of the alternatives. Windows 10 would have to either do those things better, or at the very least Microsoft could take an actual step toward user privacy and have all of their sync nonsense disabled by by default. Even if they showed some semblance of being not just like every other tech company with their own OS out there currently, I'd at least be encouraged...but Microsoft would easily make up in volume what they lost in pricing if they were selling one version of their desktop OS, in one package, for like $40. Less than the price of a top tier game. Just about every business out there who's not using valid licenses (but are big enough to worry about it) are going to think twice with a price drop like that...all of a sudden they're legit for several tens of thousands less than otherwise. As for the average person, like me? I'd buy WIndows 10 on release day for 40 bucks. To paraphrase Adam Osborne, at $40 if it doesn't work then hey, I've learned something. :)
At this point though? Windows 10 looks like it's going to be a (mildly) less fucked version of Windows 8.1...and currently that doesn't do anything for _me_ than a good GNOME3-based distribution can. In some cases it can actually do less (like give me some options to safeguard my privacy...as opposed to Windows 8.1 Pro, an upgrade that would give me freely-available encryption for the bargain bin price of $150. At this point, unless you're using a very industry specific program that only works well on one platform (a lot of CAD and 3D modelling/rendering programs spring to mine) and you don't want to play games...install Linux or something similar. Whichever one that supports your hardware and the software you want to use. If you want games...use Ubuntu, because from my own experience the majority of games only work well under the most recent version of Ubuntu available...Wastelands 2 wouldn't even start in Fedora :( ).
Because developers choose to use newer features that are by-definition unavailable on previous versions.
Except of course that searching files has been completely fucked up since Vista.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Windows RT was a fiasco b'cos Microsoft tried using a non-Intel CPU as their platform and failed. Better CPUs have failed before this - MIPS and Alpha. ARM is even more anemic than these other 2. Microsoft should have stuck w/ the cheapest and most battery efficient offerings from Intel and AMD.
What is the biggest selling point of Windows? The gazillion Wintel applications out there, which are NOT there on other CPUs, even ones that Windows has been ported to. When poised against an existing well established market of iOS and Android apps, Wintel had a chance, but RT or Windows Phone was bound to fail.
5) Uses Intels new-ish RDRAND instruction for a higher quality random number gen as the basis for ASLR
The ones that FreeBSD de-emphasized due to security concerns?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Win95 will run (walk) on a 386, NT4 uses LOCK XADD and you need a 486 for that.
Wish I had points to mod you up. Makes me want to rent this again.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
The other day, I booted up a new-in-the-box Acer laptop (or Asus, maybe) and was pleasantly surprised that it was already set to boot to desktop.
There's a fuckton of good stuff under the hood of Win8; the start menu just went fullscreen.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Nope.
Windows 9.x ran on top of DOS the same way Netware did, which is not at all.
But were TSR programs not background tasks? I had a CD player that was TSR, so no matter what I was doing, I could pull it up and play my CDs, though I suppose it may have been idle the entire time, and only sending commands to the drive when active (if memory serves correctly, CD ROMS were semi autonomous like that, and would simply stream audio to the soundcard, I think some even had a built in headphone jack).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Yeah. 99% of all users don't care about stability (3, 4) or security (5).
Just because he uses ugly computer terms doesn't mean that those don't translate into improvements that a mother could love.
because windows 7 crashes so much?
Security? People don't care about security, they go to wal-mart and buy a copy of norton or mcafee or kapersky and put it on and they no longer care about security because "I put on the antivirus so I'm safe" so no, no-one is going to care about windows 10.
Sorry, 99%. 99% won't care.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Businesses have still been buying Windows 7, AFAICT. Once Windows 10 is out, they may well be more receptive.
Not if Windows 10 is as tied to using OneDrive and other Microsoft services as the Development Preview is now.
And Live Tiles has got to go, too. Such distracting, marketing, productivity-killing click-bait has no place in the office (or the start menu).
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Sort of how different Linux kernels use different amounts of RAM?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
They skipped the good one...
http://Anveto.com - Web Design, SEO, Marketing, Analytics & Security
You are correct and I stand corrected for saying/implying/everything about Win9x running "on top of DOS".
I was looking for some way to talk about how the Win9x series had its own set of issues due to the way it worked vs the transition to the NT mechanics of WinXP and everything else that is of that ilk. And I did so by saying something that was not correct.
I still do stand by my points about how XP was, and still is, a decent OS and I'm no MS fan either. Was right here on /. during those years slamming them for all the crap they did and will do so moving forward. None the less it felt really dishonest to speak poorly of XP given what it was/is.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
The trick to the Betteridge law is that when a journalist writes a headline as a question, the question is suggesting what most people find improbable; and the improbable rarely happens.
There's some of that. But that's more about choice of subject matter. A journalist ALWAYS needs to write something that is SOMEHOW different from what the reader believes. (If he's just reinforcing what the reader believes, why should a reader bother reading his output?)
The real trick that leads to qusetion-headlines (that are almost always implying something that's wrong) is different.
When a journalist writes a juicy headline as a question, it's because he couldn't find evidence to support the conjecture, but wants to run it anyway.
Usually this is because he guessed wrong. The deadline is approaching, he's got to publish SOMETHING to stay employed, and he just wasted a bunch of time researching something that didn't pan out. Oops! So he runs his orignnal conjecture and the workup he did on it before finding out that it was either wrong (usual) or maybe right but couldn't be supported in the time available (rarely). He just phrases the headline as a speculation rather than an assertion.
That way his credibility isn't wrecked for the future, he gets to publish something, it's interesting and plausible (even though probably totally bogus), and in those rare cases where it WAS right he's scooped his competitors. However it comes out it's a win for the journalist - though it's a bunch of noise for the readers.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I know. I use Agent Ransack now because I cannot figure out how to get Windows to do a text search that can find text I know is there. It doesn't do what it says it does. I understand there's some kind of arcane syntax but I've never been able to get that to work. Grep on Unix is far more user friendly.
Windows has always been like a cheaply made off road vehicle made in a former Soviet-bloc country. The controls were a little weird, and it broke down a lot, but otherwise it could drive on a lot of really sketchy roads, and you probably knew a guy who knew how to fix it for you when it broke down.
Then Windows 8 came along. To continue the analogy, it was like a new model year of that same cheaply made Eastern European off-road vehicle suddenly came with a few well-needed under-the-hood improvements so that it wouldn't break down as readily, along with a big 8" spike sticking out of the centre of the drivers seat. Aficionados who have never driven another car in their lives rave about the spike (it's painted some very nice colours), and continue to flood forums trying to convince people who have stayed away from the newer model because of the spike that if they just tried it long enough, they'd get used to having a giant spike up their asses.
Now Microsoft is coming out with Windows 10, the biggest benefit of which is that it now features a slightly shorter spike. And Windows zealots will try to convince everyone else that it's a major improvement. But you're still taking it in the ass every time you get in for a ride.
Yaz
The problem is that all the programs install system files. So if you reinstall, rather than update, you have to reinstall all your applications anyway. Though with the new app store in 8, maybe we'll move to user managed apps, rather than system managed apps. Very few apps run in user space anyway. Without installing as admin, many won't run. There needs to be a separate API space so that a user can run something (under DirectX or whatever), though when MS tries something like that so you can run games without installing or running as an admin, people complain about DirectX.
So I don't see how they can make anyone here happy. If they make it more open, it'll have more malware. If they make it more closed, it'll be harder to use. I think some people are just permanently unhappy.
Learn to love Alaska
So far I have been running the 10 Preview for months. On my main PC. With no overlays/hacks. It's a quad-cure gaming rig. I'll be happy with the Release Version if it's the same or better than this...
*core
Why should I waste my time with Windows 10?
Why? Well, if you want to run Windows Applications :-)
Well, or as an alternative to gouging my eyes out with a rusty spoon. Though I have to admit, that one is a close call.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Do they really? Which new features are those? I thought, these days new versions of Windows are mainly about frog marching the customer base to some wacky new user interface model that is somehow supposed to result in more and bigger transfers of hard earned cash into offshore bank accounts somewhere in Redmond, Nigeria.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Windows 3.0 shared DLL code segments in memory. It's the whole point of DLLs.
The problem with alternate crap releases at MS is the common one of losing experienced people over time and the new people having to come up to speed.
You see it in other industries with things like safety, where there are utterly ridiculous fuckups, then ten or more years of smooth running, then another utterly ridiculous fuckup because the people that had even heard of the earlier mistake are long gone.
The MS culture at one point meant the disposal of the weakest link in every team, no matter how good the team was, so that was a barrier to continuity. Apparently that has changed, but there appear to be a few practices in the place that still limit continuity so that every few years completely new teams have to learn how to reinvent wheels and make their mistakes in the process.
It's common in software in general and large software companies in paticular.
What about the applications which are the entire reason to use the computer in the first place? You've just thrown all of those away as a consequence of a vunerable system and they have to be set up again.
Even without malware infections I've had to re-install MS Office twice on a users MS Win8 machine due to it getting configuration information messed up. MS Win7 doesn't seem to have that problem, so it appears that there are even incompatibilities between the current MS Office and the current MS Windows!
XP had its issues, like every OS, but compared to having to run the OS on top of DOS like Windows was previously doing it was a huge improvement.
Windows 2000 was not based on Windows 9x, so did not run on top of DOS. It was instead an upgrade to Windows NT 4, with some added integration to allow Windows 9x programs to run, so it was the first OS that unified both the enterprise branch (NT) and consumer branch (9x) of Windows. So Windows XP was not new in that regard. Think of XP as Windows 2002, or Windows 2000 with a candy-like interface on top and a few other improvements. Here's an NT history for reference, showing the version progression from NT 3.1 up to Windows 10: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
The Windows 8 improvements over 7 are worth it. Speed and security to name a couple. Especially when you consider that if you really can't handle the interface you can easily download free utilities to make it look like Windows 7.
The fact is that even though people like to gripe and moan, every version of Windows on the NT branch as outlined in the Wikipedia article above has been an improvement over the previous version.
Unfortunately, in this interim bullshittery, I've discovered that Ubuntu is actually much nicer than windows once you get past the learning hill (no longer a cliff).
The only thing that keeps me on windows is video games. I'll be sticking with Windows 7 on my desktop until it goes EOL or I otherwise need to reformat it, and then I'll be moving to Ubuntu on my desktop as well.
Sure they do. All the time. The only reason we don't notice (especially on Windows) is because people don't start using the newer APIs unless enough people are actually using the newer version to make it worth the effort. For e.g.. DX11/DirectCompute (Vista+) - Better texture decompression, Core Audio (VIsta+) - lower audio latency , WSAPoll - (Vista+) allowed Windows sockets to work more like UNIX ones making cross platform networking software a bit easier to write. Anyway, anyone interested can go spend their own time and find a list longer than I care to type.
OneGet is a generic powershell framework ("package manager manager") which is open for and designed for 3rd party repositories (most notably : chocolatey.org )
Hopefully there will be an easy list with "trust scores" for 3rd party repositories easily available to users (and with the chocolatey already activated, the need for addotional repos for FOSS might not be needed). Btw OneGet is also open source and on github ... Not the same MS that we love to hate...
So the better alternative is to dowload and install everything manually? Yeah... That makes sense... As long as there are alternative and open distribution (I like the AUR for low contributor thresholds) I can not see your point.
The main thing you have to do is...
* Turn on indexing service
* Configure it to index unknown file types
* Turn it off again (presuming you have it off)
Now the basic file search will look in files with extensions it doesn't grok when searching for text. Insane that this option isn't in the advanced search panel.
In civilized countries, medication is free.
The people who pay the bills don't care about wizzy directx features, they want the computer to be better at what they use it for, and they're getting repeated burned on that front.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Where are your numbers that show that PIC code is slower?
Macrobenchmarks that I've run show about a 10% slowdown for PIC on i386 when tested on Sandybridge and Haswell. Feel free to run your own. It used to be more significant, but 10% is still quite noticeable on jobs that take an hour or two...
Ever since CPU manufacturers have started throwing around the word "pipeline" this hasn't been true. On an AVR an RCALL costs 3-4 cycles and CALL costs 4-5, I doubt a deeper pipeline like an Intel reverses this.
The big cost is the lost of a GPR to the register allocator. You have to store %eip (or whatever %eip was when you did your one-instruction-forward branch followed by pop) in a GPR. The call-pop sequence is usually subject to micro-op fusion on modern x86 CPUs and so is transformed into a single get-eip operation that doesn't screw up store forwarding for the top few stack slots like a normal pop, so it's almost free.
On x86-64, you do not have this issue for two reasons. The first is that you have a lot more registers, so losing one doesn't hurt the register allocator so much. The second is that %rip can be used as an operand directly, so you can compute the target address without needing to copy it to another register.
Saving a few hundred KB here and there with pagetable punning is worth fuck-all when the user is staring at a crashdump
Saving a few hundred KB of i-cache is often a very large performance win on modern CPUs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's called "memory combining".
It's called 'memory deduplication' in other operating systems that implemented the feature (earlier) and in the research literature, but I can understand why Microsoft would not want to use a term that indicates that they're one of the last OS vendors to implement a feature.
It's not always a clear win. Memory deduplication increases the number of CoW pages, which increases the number of TLB faults. It also requires periodically scanning memory that hasn't been recently referenced, which introduces a lot of cache churn (you need to build a hash table of all pages, look for collisions, and then update pages, which introduces hash collisions.) The calculation also requires a lot of locking in the VM subsystem, which can harm performance on SMP machines. Unless you're so memory-constrained that you're about to start swapping, you'll generally get better performance by turning it off. The only place where you get a really big win is where you have a load of VMs which each have a few hundred MBs of identical OS code that can be deduplicated and is read-only so will never cause a fault.
You also don't reduce TLB pressure (one of the top causes of performance degradation on modern systems), because even systems with tagged TLBs don't usually have a way of specifying a bitmask of ASIDs that a page belongs to, so even if it's mapped at the same address you can't share TLB entries.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Thanks that's very useful to know. This doesn't work for searching for text using a UNC though unfortunately.
If you're saying Windows XP was a decent OS because the UI was consistent, then you will never understand why I'm saying that Windows XP was horrible. It was a kludgy, buggy, security-hole-riddled skinned refresh of Windows 2000 (most of those changes they thankfully left out of Windows Server 2003).
Windows Vista was a decent comeback with it's own personality problems, and Windows 7 fixed most of the perceived issues. Windows 8/8.1 has metro/modern silliness, but it works very well, is less crash-prone than Win7, which was less crash-prone than Win2K (no need to mention windows XP in that list), and has pretty good performance, as well.
Your points about how XP was a good OS are points I find generally unimportant to the way in which I judge operating systems, although I understand why they might be important to you.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
....Monkey Do. Their new motto.
The problem is--this doesn't work in general. A desktop system is REALLY a completely different animal from phones/tablets.
Microsoft has only made incremental improvements to the UI that it pretty much perfected with XP-Pro. (we will say nothing of the Vista debacle). Seriously--on Linux and other unix like systems, the KDE desktop, Gnome, XCFE, etc, ALL have similar features to XP (or vice-versa, according to how you wish to interpret it)
Windows 7 is GOOD, and internally has much better technology than XP (I have become quite enamored with PowerShell, if I DO say so) . And INTERNALLY, there is nothing majorly wrong with WIn8. But the Win8 user experience took a left turn into the Twilight Zone as far as I'm concerned. It's FINE for Tablets and Phones, but is completely asinine on a desktop.
And then there's Server 2012. MS went OUT OF ITS WAY to hide functions that system admins ABSOLUTELY NEED (and usually need QUICKLY) on a server.
Windows 10 has a few neat features for Enterprise like some of the new management capabilities and more cloud integration. Although my role at work is more behind the scenes, server infrastructure, I do look forward to taking a look at being able to authenticate with Azure Active Directory or Windows Active Directory. Things like that.
I'm sure I'm not the only one. It makes sense for those that already have an investment in Microsoft infrastructure.
Home users, maybe they won't appreciate it so much, and that's fine, they can run what they like. That's their choice. I run a couple of Linux boxes, a Mac and a Chromebook in addition to Windows in my home, they all have their strengths and their weaknesses.
For work though, we're a Microsoft shop (long before I arrived) and that's fine by me. With adequate change control in place, regular maintenance and good infrastructure decisions, we have very little downtime. I expect performance and reliability to remain that way, or even improve as we deploy Windows 10 and its server equivalent in our environment after sufficient testing.
No! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
But Windows Mobile for phones? They've tried and tried again and it's pretty much a non-starter. People simply aren't that interested in a Windows UI on a cellphone.
Except that Windows Phone is growing in non-US countries, and is well over 10% in certain places. Wouldn't surprise me if we got to 2016 with WP being 20% in places such as Brazil or India, and some European countries, with iOS relegated from close to distant third.
My company has started issuing official WP work phones. iOS and Android cannot be managed properly. Windows 10 can only improve in that area.
Eh, biggest objection to XP post-SP2 was that it hung around for too long, while the rest of the world moved on. 32-bit only (the 64-bit version is actually Server 2003 without the Server-y bits, and not fully compatible with 32-bit XP even aside from driver issues), no ASLR (at the time XP launched, DEP support was pretty cool; by the time it went out of support an OS without ASLR couldn't be called "secure" with a straight face), one-way firewall (Vista added bi-directional filtering and a lot more control, though at least XP had *a* firewall), running as a daily user was a total pain if you weren't an Administrator (I know, I did it for months), and so on. Yes, these are mostly security concerns, but that's a pretty critical aspect of an OS for me. With that said, in the spectrum of Windows releases, XP SP0 was pretty much a bad skin on top of 2000 (which had plenty of its own issues, but XP SP0 didn't really *fix* most of them). SP1 helped a little but SP2 was really where the difference was made. Unfortunately, SP3 was little more than a roll-up of previous updates, and Vista was delayed again and again, then shipped as a reasonably secure but pretty buggy OS. There really needed to be an SP4 (or a real SP3) for XP that back-ported some of the important stuff from work on Vista, or an earlier and less-ambitious Vista (or at least NT5.3) release to fill the gap.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...