Now, if MS were to create and enforce higher standards, you may see better overall quality start to emerge.
That's what they are doing now, setting strict hardware requirements for their new products so you don't end up with legitimate crappy low end devices like some of the cheap Android tablets and you only end up with decent performing ones (like the Google-branded Android tablets).
MS will still be at a disadvantage in terms of complexity as they will continue to support nearly infinite hardware configurations with their OS, with lost of legacy support built in as well.
With Windows 8 yes, but the break from that is Windows RT (though at this time i'm not sure i see that product appealing to many people).
Ubuntu, fedora and such may be able to convince *some* manufacturers to install their keys. May. Some. What about all the tiny, specialised distros though?
Do they implement SecureBoot now? No. But if they do want to do it in future for whatever reason then they provide their key and the user installs it, simple.
But why did they want to use Microsoft's key? Because it's only possible to sign a bootloader with one key, no more
That doesn't change who the signing authority is, any distro or any person can go the actual signing authority (Verisign) to get a key and install it on any motherboard(s) they want (which, AFAIK, is what Canonical are doing), that is if they really want to use SecureBoot for some reason (they don't now). Or even go with Fedora's suggestion.
Microsoft's key is the only key that you can be sure every motherboard is going to recognise.
Microsoft's key will only be installed on UEFI motherboards certified for Windows 8, there is no reason Canonical couldn't supply their key to the same manufacturers that Microsoft has supplied theirs to and have it added, which is evidently what they are doing.
Linux is very much a niche thing on the desktop still - OEMs have no reason to bother adding ubuntu's own key to the whitelist. Much less all the hundreds of lesser distros.
If there's no market for it then obviously OEMs aren't going to bother, but it's not as though there is much involved and they then cater to all Ubuntu users. Otherwise just do as they have before and don't use SecureBoot, just like people will do when dual booting on a Mac (whether that's Windows or Linux).
The fact that mandatory secure boot is a windows 8 requirement for ARM architecture makes it credible to think they would like the same thing in the x86 world. The fact we even accepted in the ARM world is an incredibly sad defeat that will make us waste another 10 years to turn around.
That's because ARM devices aren't viewed like general purpose PCs, they are seen much more like phones, appliances with embedded operating systems. Of course nothing stops an OEM from selling the same hardware as a Windows device and an Android device, but the Windows-branded device can only run Windows and I can't imagine Google would be overly pleased if Google-branded devices were running Windows.
Of course it is 'Digital Rights Management' because it affects your *right* to *manage* your *digital* equipment, there's no two ways about it, secure boot very much affects your ability to use any software you like and to use your machine how you want to. If that's not DRM then nothing is.
So are CPU manufacturers' locked clock multipliers DRM too? Are motherboard manufacturers' voltage settings DRM?
And the reality, as much as we might not like it, is that most people have little use for such a thing and prefer these 'devices' instead. The market was always a niche one but thankfully the solution that catered for the majority catered for this niche also, that seems to be changing.
I'm not an OpenGL expert, but I assume that opengl32.dll that's located in my \Windows\System32 directory came with Windows - who else would put it there?
That's just there so that you can call the hardware accelerated functions from the graphics driver from which the opengl implementation is provided and provides a fallback for when you don't have a hardware implementation - but of course on a tablet device with hardware specifications you most assuredly do have capable hardware. The question is whether those devices will ship with drivers that have an implementation of opengl, that question can't be answered by your link. It's too early to say whether opengl will be ruled out, there's certainly no technical reason it couldn't be there.
Here is a complete list of Win32 APIs that are supported for Metro apps. If you look under "Graphics", you'll notice that it has Direct2D and Direct3D, but not OpenGL.
That's even worse, it shows that MS are willing to drop products and leave users high and dry.
Companies do that all the time (iWork.com,.Mac/MobileMe, GoogleWave), hell there are 3 year-old Macs that can't run Mountain Lion. It's a different product, in fact the marketplace didn't even close until May this year, nearly 2 and a half years after the final release of Windows Mobile.
And now, anyone who bought a window phone 7 device is going to be left high and dry again as they won't be able to upgrade to the latest version, which is a bit poor considering how new some of the handsets are.
That's the reason for WP7.8, which is to be released around the same time as WP8.
Not only is windows mobile market share declining rapidly, but its been fragmented...
It hasn't been fragmented, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone are different products, that's why they have different names (that should have been your first clue).
First with the incompatible windows phone 7 replacing previous versions
Windows Phone 7 was the first version of Windows Phone, the 7 is just to tie it to the desktop OS version number, nothing more.
and now it looks like version 8 will break compatibility yet again.
WP8 is compatible with all WP7.x apps, WP7 devices will all be upgradeable to WP7.8 (which is not released yet) and future devices will be WP8.
I had a WP7 device for a while and TBH i found it to be great (very fast, the social integration is better than iOS, i liked the live tiles and XBox live stuff was pretty cool), it was a Samsung Omnia 7 so it lacked things like DLNA (which they brought later on) and a front-facing camera also the Zune Desktop software is fucking awful IMO. My main work system (a laptop) is a mac, my lounge system is a mac mini (with AirServer) and in the other entertainment room there is an Apple TV so a key area where WP fell down was integration with that setup. I could install a DLNA receiver on the mac mini and use the built in DLNA on the other TV then use the WP Connector on Mac but then iOS obviously works far better with that setup and the remote XBox stuff on iOS is not that far behind WP. WP8 has the potential to be really good if they can integrate with the core Windows OS and with XBox a lot better (AppleTV-like functionality on the XBox).
but MS does not get a pass on 6 and 6.5. Saying MS doesn't have fragmentation because their OS versions are too incompatible with each other to count isn't really a valid argument.
Saying that would be wrong anyway, 6 and 6.5 are Windows Mobile not Windows Phone, it's not just that they are incompatible, they are different products, the naming convention was simply to sync with the desktop OS version number. As a commenter below said, it's like complaining about fragmentation because Meego and Symbian aren't compatible.
I would buy a Macbook over the equivalent but less expensive PC laptop for this exact reason. Apple touchpads are the best on the market bar none.
I've got a Pro and an Air but having also used a Samsung Series 9 ultrabook I wouldn't say the Apple trackpads are better, in fact they might even be the same part.
Yeah, most reports are that they're scrubbing the launch because the reviews have been pretty bad.
It only does Google content out of the Play store and YouTube videos. You have to use a second screen device as a remote. It was going to be $300.
I agree, it just doesn't do enough out of the box. Though hopefully getting the current iteration into the hands of devs will yield some actual usefulness when the device does ship to consumers even if Google don't change much between now and then. Hopefully they add DLNA natively (it would nice, though highly unlikely, to have AirPlay too).
First off I'm not the one polarizing the two communities, the data is.
And that's my point, the data just says a large portion havent upgraded, and since a large portion is corporate (unlike OSX) which you don't generally expect to upgrade in any reasonable timeframe that data is pretty much exactly what you would expect.
That's there is a large group of windows systems owners who buy with the intention of not upgrading quickly, with no corresponding group on the Mac side.
And there is every chance that that group is made up predominantly of the corporate market and they have a slow upgrade cycle we already know that. If a large percentage of OSX marketshare was corporate you would see the same thing there.
The percentages are so large that even if one were to exclude corporate purchases entirely you still see a difference in behavior.
Well that's the key thing, that's what would actually make this a somewhat interesting comparison, we already know that corporate tends to have extremely slow upgrade cycles and that a large part of Windows' marketshare is corporate, slow upgrades are an attribute of the corporate sector, we already know that, if OSX was predominantly corporate you'd see the same thing there. If you want to draw an interesting comparison you have to exclude the element that obviously skews the results.
The Apple community isn't like the Windows community.
You do realize Macs can run Windows, and have been able to for years, so a significant portion of the 'Apple community' is also the 'Windows community'. If you want to polarize OSX and Windows you can clearly do it on the Mac platform and you would get a far more accurate result than trying to compare 2 different markets of significantly different size. Windows is used hugely in the corporate market - where OSX isn't used nearly as much - and corporate IT is well known for being slow-moving on upgrades so naturally you would expect the take-up to be slower as a percentage, which doesn't really tell you anything you couldn't already infer.
If Apple had just noted the serial numbers of all the computers sold after June 11th
They did, that's why to redeem it you verify with your serial number.
they could have just enabled the App store to set the purchased flag to true for that apple account.
What apple account? Serial number for a computer is not tied to an Apple ID or vice versa, the app store account is though as is the license for the software.
Not to mention that everyone who downloaded it either by purchasing it or by getting a free copy through the up-to-date program is entitled to download it multiple times on any of their personal machines. I'm in the category of having bought a new retina MBP and having downloaded and installed it on all 3 of my other Macs, so I may represent 4 downloads of the software.
I bought the upgrade and installed it on all 4 of my macs, so there's one license but 4 downloads.
Yes clearly Apache, Webkit, the BSD kernel, etc... aren't sustainable.
Your list would be a lot more convincing if two of those three weren't licensed under the Apache 2.0 and LGPLv2.1 (at least the parts it still has that came from KHTML) licenses respectively.
Firstly Apache 2.0 is a permissive license (so BSD-style) and secondly the part of Webkit that is under LGPL is not the part that is being primarily developed by one of the worlds largest and most closed technology companies, the BSD licensed part is, and it's still open source.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't you forgetting the small fact that any OEM that tried that would quickly be Microsoft's least favorite OEM?
That's kinda the whole point of doing that, if you want to be a Microsoft OEM you wouldn't be going off to create a direct competitor now would you?
Now, if MS were to create and enforce higher standards, you may see better overall quality start to emerge.
That's what they are doing now, setting strict hardware requirements for their new products so you don't end up with legitimate crappy low end devices like some of the cheap Android tablets and you only end up with decent performing ones (like the Google-branded Android tablets).
MS will still be at a disadvantage in terms of complexity as they will continue to support nearly infinite hardware configurations with their OS, with lost of legacy support built in as well.
With Windows 8 yes, but the break from that is Windows RT (though at this time i'm not sure i see that product appealing to many people).
The difference is that 'Cloud' doesn't stand for those things, for example here are two examples of what are apparently 'cloud' products.
Ubuntu, fedora and such may be able to convince *some* manufacturers to install their keys. May. Some. What about all the tiny, specialised distros though?
Do they implement SecureBoot now? No. But if they do want to do it in future for whatever reason then they provide their key and the user installs it, simple.
But why did they want to use Microsoft's key? Because it's only possible to sign a bootloader with one key, no more
That doesn't change who the signing authority is, any distro or any person can go the actual signing authority (Verisign) to get a key and install it on any motherboard(s) they want (which, AFAIK, is what Canonical are doing), that is if they really want to use SecureBoot for some reason (they don't now). Or even go with Fedora's suggestion.
Microsoft's key is the only key that you can be sure every motherboard is going to recognise.
Microsoft's key will only be installed on UEFI motherboards certified for Windows 8, there is no reason Canonical couldn't supply their key to the same manufacturers that Microsoft has supplied theirs to and have it added, which is evidently what they are doing.
Linux is very much a niche thing on the desktop still - OEMs have no reason to bother adding ubuntu's own key to the whitelist. Much less all the hundreds of lesser distros.
If there's no market for it then obviously OEMs aren't going to bother, but it's not as though there is much involved and they then cater to all Ubuntu users. Otherwise just do as they have before and don't use SecureBoot, just like people will do when dual booting on a Mac (whether that's Windows or Linux).
What makes anyone think that UEFI will be any more secure than anything else Microsoft releases?
Anything else? UEFI isn't a Microsoft product.
The fact that mandatory secure boot is a windows 8 requirement for ARM architecture makes it credible to think they would like the same thing in the x86 world. The fact we even accepted in the ARM world is an incredibly sad defeat that will make us waste another 10 years to turn around.
That's because ARM devices aren't viewed like general purpose PCs, they are seen much more like phones, appliances with embedded operating systems. Of course nothing stops an OEM from selling the same hardware as a Windows device and an Android device, but the Windows-branded device can only run Windows and I can't imagine Google would be overly pleased if Google-branded devices were running Windows.
The signing authority is *MICROSOFT!*
Wrong, the signing authority is Verisign.
That's why Ubuntu had to go crawling to them and beg to be signed.
Wrong again, they had to do that because they wanted to use Microsoft's signing key instead of getting their own.
It'd be a lot easier to accept if the task were granted to a company with no stake in the OS market, like Intel.
It's even better than that, it's a CA and better still it's up to the individual motherboard manufacturers as to which keys they include.
Of course it is 'Digital Rights Management' because it affects your *right* to *manage* your *digital* equipment, there's no two ways about it, secure boot very much affects your ability to use any software you like and to use your machine how you want to. If that's not DRM then nothing is.
So are CPU manufacturers' locked clock multipliers DRM too? Are motherboard manufacturers' voltage settings DRM?
We used to call them "general purpose computers"
And the reality, as much as we might not like it, is that most people have little use for such a thing and prefer these 'devices' instead. The market was always a niche one but thankfully the solution that catered for the majority catered for this niche also, that seems to be changing.
I'm not an OpenGL expert, but I assume that opengl32.dll that's located in my \Windows\System32 directory came with Windows - who else would put it there?
That's just there so that you can call the hardware accelerated functions from the graphics driver from which the opengl implementation is provided and provides a fallback for when you don't have a hardware implementation - but of course on a tablet device with hardware specifications you most assuredly do have capable hardware. The question is whether those devices will ship with drivers that have an implementation of opengl, that question can't be answered by your link. It's too early to say whether opengl will be ruled out, there's certainly no technical reason it couldn't be there.
opengl isn't bundled with windows anyway
In this context, "Win32 API" means "API normally provided by the OS to a Win32 application" - so, yes, that includes OpenGL.
If you're referring to APIs provided by the OS then what specifically are you referring to when you say 'OpenGL'?
Here is a complete list of Win32 APIs that are supported for Metro apps. If you look under "Graphics", you'll notice that it has Direct2D and Direct3D, but not OpenGL.
OpenGL isn't part of the Win32 API.
That's even worse, it shows that MS are willing to drop products and leave users high and dry.
Companies do that all the time (iWork.com, .Mac/MobileMe, GoogleWave), hell there are 3 year-old Macs that can't run Mountain Lion. It's a different product, in fact the marketplace didn't even close until May this year, nearly 2 and a half years after the final release of Windows Mobile.
And now, anyone who bought a window phone 7 device is going to be left high and dry again as they won't be able to upgrade to the latest version, which is a bit poor considering how new some of the handsets are.
That's the reason for WP7.8, which is to be released around the same time as WP8.
Not only is windows mobile market share declining rapidly, but its been fragmented...
It hasn't been fragmented, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone are different products, that's why they have different names (that should have been your first clue).
First with the incompatible windows phone 7 replacing previous versions
Windows Phone 7 was the first version of Windows Phone, the 7 is just to tie it to the desktop OS version number, nothing more.
and now it looks like version 8 will break compatibility yet again.
WP8 is compatible with all WP7.x apps, WP7 devices will all be upgradeable to WP7.8 (which is not released yet) and future devices will be WP8.
I had a WP7 device for a while and TBH i found it to be great (very fast, the social integration is better than iOS, i liked the live tiles and XBox live stuff was pretty cool), it was a Samsung Omnia 7 so it lacked things like DLNA (which they brought later on) and a front-facing camera also the Zune Desktop software is fucking awful IMO. My main work system (a laptop) is a mac, my lounge system is a mac mini (with AirServer) and in the other entertainment room there is an Apple TV so a key area where WP fell down was integration with that setup. I could install a DLNA receiver on the mac mini and use the built in DLNA on the other TV then use the WP Connector on Mac but then iOS obviously works far better with that setup and the remote XBox stuff on iOS is not that far behind WP. WP8 has the potential to be really good if they can integrate with the core Windows OS and with XBox a lot better (AppleTV-like functionality on the XBox).
but MS does not get a pass on 6 and 6.5. Saying MS doesn't have fragmentation because their OS versions are too incompatible with each other to count isn't really a valid argument.
Saying that would be wrong anyway, 6 and 6.5 are Windows Mobile not Windows Phone, it's not just that they are incompatible, they are different products, the naming convention was simply to sync with the desktop OS version number. As a commenter below said, it's like complaining about fragmentation because Meego and Symbian aren't compatible.
I would buy a Macbook over the equivalent but less expensive PC laptop for this exact reason. Apple touchpads are the best on the market bar none.
I've got a Pro and an Air but having also used a Samsung Series 9 ultrabook I wouldn't say the Apple trackpads are better, in fact they might even be the same part.
Yeah, most reports are that they're scrubbing the launch because the reviews have been pretty bad.
It only does Google content out of the Play store and YouTube videos. You have to use a second screen device as a remote. It was going to be $300.
I agree, it just doesn't do enough out of the box. Though hopefully getting the current iteration into the hands of devs will yield some actual usefulness when the device does ship to consumers even if Google don't change much between now and then. Hopefully they add DLNA natively (it would nice, though highly unlikely, to have AirPlay too).
First off I'm not the one polarizing the two communities, the data is.
And that's my point, the data just says a large portion havent upgraded, and since a large portion is corporate (unlike OSX) which you don't generally expect to upgrade in any reasonable timeframe that data is pretty much exactly what you would expect.
That's there is a large group of windows systems owners who buy with the intention of not upgrading quickly, with no corresponding group on the Mac side.
And there is every chance that that group is made up predominantly of the corporate market and they have a slow upgrade cycle we already know that. If a large percentage of OSX marketshare was corporate you would see the same thing there.
The percentages are so large that even if one were to exclude corporate purchases entirely you still see a difference in behavior.
Well that's the key thing, that's what would actually make this a somewhat interesting comparison, we already know that corporate tends to have extremely slow upgrade cycles and that a large part of Windows' marketshare is corporate, slow upgrades are an attribute of the corporate sector, we already know that, if OSX was predominantly corporate you'd see the same thing there. If you want to draw an interesting comparison you have to exclude the element that obviously skews the results.
The Apple community isn't like the Windows community.
You do realize Macs can run Windows, and have been able to for years, so a significant portion of the 'Apple community' is also the 'Windows community'. If you want to polarize OSX and Windows you can clearly do it on the Mac platform and you would get a far more accurate result than trying to compare 2 different markets of significantly different size. Windows is used hugely in the corporate market - where OSX isn't used nearly as much - and corporate IT is well known for being slow-moving on upgrades so naturally you would expect the take-up to be slower as a percentage, which doesn't really tell you anything you couldn't already infer.
Really mods? Obvious flamebait is being marked as +1?
Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess (Score:2, Funny)
by tsa (15680) Alter Relationship on Monday July 30, @02:56PM (#40820753)
If Apple had just noted the serial numbers of all the computers sold after June 11th
They did, that's why to redeem it you verify with your serial number.
they could have just enabled the App store to set the purchased flag to true for that apple account.
What apple account? Serial number for a computer is not tied to an Apple ID or vice versa, the app store account is though as is the license for the software.
Not to mention that everyone who downloaded it either by purchasing it or by getting a free copy through the up-to-date program is entitled to download it multiple times on any of their personal machines. I'm in the category of having bought a new retina MBP and having downloaded and installed it on all 3 of my other Macs, so I may represent 4 downloads of the software.
I bought the upgrade and installed it on all 4 of my macs, so there's one license but 4 downloads.
Yes clearly Apache, Webkit, the BSD kernel, etc... aren't sustainable.
Your list would be a lot more convincing if two of those three weren't licensed under the Apache 2.0 and LGPLv2.1 (at least the parts it still has that came from KHTML) licenses respectively.
Firstly Apache 2.0 is a permissive license (so BSD-style) and secondly the part of Webkit that is under LGPL is not the part that is being primarily developed by one of the worlds largest and most closed technology companies, the BSD licensed part is, and it's still open source.