Features like this tend to creep their way in slowly.
- It's something you can turn on.
- It's on by default, but you can turn it off easily.
- It's on by default and you need a CS degree to turn it off.
- It can only be turned off by hacking your system.
- It can only be turned off by hacking your system, and this is illegal to do.
out of interest, where has such a thing followed that progression?
they have conditioned people into seeing the difference between the "home" version and the "business" version of the OS as nothing more than a license upgrade
Probably because the 'home' and 'business' versions of modern desktop OSes are the same thing, it's not that they've 'conditioned people' into seeing it that way, it's that that's the way it is. Windows XP Pro was Home with a few extra features, same deal with 7, OSX only has one version for both markets and with Ubuntu you'd choose an LTS-stamped version in the workplace (and many would choose that for home use too).
But it's what I'm suggesting, since the existing hardware is based on pretty standard hardware (DirectX GPU, eDRAM, pretty standard PowerPC *not* something like the Cell processor's PPU/SPU arch) it's not hard for them to just integrate more powerful versions of those into a new SoC.
He's also saying the development costs of the next generation are small.
And he's probably right, they don't need to develop a new OS, new frameworks, new accessories, new developer tools, etc... They only need to upgrade the internal hardware, which is mostly existing hardware re-packaged, just like the XBox S SoC.
Kinect wasn't developed at Microsoft, was it? I thought they bought that in from an third party?
The hardware was developed by a third party but all of the skeletal tracking, associated APIs and voice functionality was developed by microsoft. Kinda like apple, pretty much all the innovative hardware was developed by other companies, but it's being able pull that all together to produce a final product and get it to market that is the hard bit.
Getting a bunch of PC chips would seriously hamper backwards compatibility which would destroy any software advantage as their current hardware relies on cell processors not x86.
The current generation of XBox doesn't use the Cell processor, they use a tri-core PowerPC chip and upgrading that is hardly a costly process. Assuming they stick to a PowerPC chip and a DirectX-compatible GPU (and there's no reason to think they wouldn't) they can easily maintain all their software and hardware compatibility.
Xbox is still a billion-plus money-sink as far as I'm aware, and they'll have to spend billions more releasing a new one soon.
Why would they have to spend billions to release a new xbox? Consoles are no longer offline disconnected devices, they are hardly going to abandon the huge platform, OS and connected ecosystem they have developed, they'll simply upgrade the hardware and that doesn't cost billions.
Unfortunately that's not going to appeal to the masses, I really am genuinely interested in what exactly they have in mind to differentiate that will give them traction in the market.
Gotta love all the "it'll never have market share comparable to current incumbent x, y or z" comments.
I'd say they are likely based on the fact that there is no specific standout feature, no thing that says to the average end user 'this is why we are better than the competition, choose us over the existing products'.
So, Linux certainly has the opportunity to at least heavily compete with Windows mobile.
It already does, in the form of Android. How many general consumers are going to say 'well i like linux but i just don't like the android userland so i'm going to switch to ubuntu instead.'?
If they want to compete they need to offer something that differentiates them from the competition, a feature that consumers will want, i don't see such a thing in the 'press release', same as ubuntu on the desktop doesn't really offer much to the average consumer. Just to clarify though, im not saying in any way that Ubuntu is a bad OS, it's great but it doesn't offer end users a compelling reason to change.
so, no-one claims that you cannot replace Safari in OSX, but on Windows they do say that you *need* IE10 installed in order to use the OS.
That's the difference, MS using the underlying component to push their web browser (and therefore the default Bing and MS advert engine) to the users.
They don't use the underlying component to push their web browser because the component they use the rendering engine, which is not the web browser, it is no different from Apple using webkit in their operating system. You can remove IE, as in not see it as an installed program, but if just knowing it is there will cause you to seek out the.exe file and use it as your browser anyway then maybe you just like IE as a browser.
Ah, so basically, they've cannibalized another standard, and then abuse the dead corpse as an excuse for leveraging their monopoly yet again, yes?
No, im not sure how you would come to that conclusion unless you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a standard is, Metro is not a standard and they haven't cannibalized HTML5.
That they do what HTML5 is supposed to allow - not worry about which browser is used for them?
Because Metro isn't pure HTML5, so WinRT needs to use a HTML5 renderer and of course they chose their renderer, just like Opera choose their renderer and you can't change it.
Win8 will certainly detect if a "default browser" has been set up, just like Win7 and previous do. So it could easily find upon launching a "Metro" app if no default browser is installed and complain then. And if a default browser is set up use that.
Metro apps don't launch in the browser, and they aren't web apps.
there's a difference - you can use photoshop without QT, you can't use windows without trident.
Ok so how do i run photoshop elements with no windowing library? You know you can't use Dashboard or Mail in OSX without webkit either, that doesn't mean Dashboard and Mail are webkit, they just use webkit libraries.
maybe the point is that IE is just a few dozen lines of code that put Trident in a window and that all the functionality we'd all recognise as a browser is part of the underlying 'shared' library.
So? That works in the same way as WebKit works in OSX, you can't just remove it and expect it to work, it has core functionality that OS applications have come to depend upon. What's the problem with this sort of a situation anyway? If you have some reason that you really don't want the IE libraries then you don't want Explorer either so you just replace the shell.
Actually, yes. A lot of people "bother with that". In the scientific computing world, it means you don't have to care *whose* BLAS or LAPACK library you use.
No, BLAS and LAPACK are not HTML rendering libraries, so that is clearly an invalid basis for the idea that anyone cares about replacing the HTML rendering engine in Explorer.
So, yes, every company -- barring Microsoft -- already gives the option to substitute ALL shared libraries.
What a load of rubbish. Can i swap out Opera's rendering engine? No. Can i change Photoshop's windowing libraries? Sure can't.
Does anyone care? Well, define "care". They care that their programs "just work" and that they don't need a billion essentially identical libraries to get them to do so.
They care that their programs 'just work' rather than swapping out different rendering engines to make different programs work because that program was designed to work with a specific rendering engine even if that is a shared library. I can't swap out statically linked code but for some reason you see a difference between code that is statically linked and code that is in shared libraries.
They care that they can tune and tweak.
No, an extreme minority care about that, most people couldn't care less about it.
Who cares if the rendering engine is shared? Well, if it's the rendering engine that is shared, take it out of IE and make it an independent shared
component.
It is an independent shared component, how do you fail to understand that?
Then people can uninstall IE if they want.
They already can, but you can't remove libraries that other applications depend upon, obviously. If they statically linked the rendering engine code to both IE and Explorer separately you could remove everything installed by IE completely because there would be no co-dependencies.
Tying the rendering engine into IE
The rendering engine is not tied to IE, IE is tied to the rendering engine.
Internet Explorer is a web browser. The Desktop, Control Panel, etc... are not Internet Explorer, they use components that are Internet Explorer.
FTFY
FTFY doesn't work when you're wrong, to illustrate why you're wrong: If you re-wrote internet explorer to use the webkit rendering engine instead of trident then Desktop, Control Panel, etc... would still have a dependency on trident and wouldn't magically use webkit for the very simple reason that they are not dependent on Internet Explorer, they are dependent on shared components that are themselves NOT internet explorer.
What part of "it uses IE components" fails to make it IE?
The part where it's using components that are also used by IE (like MSHTML, which is obviously not Internet Explorer)...duh. Photoshop uses Qt components, that doesn't mean Photoshop is Qt, pretty obvious huh.
Having the HTML5 rendering engine in a standalone DLL that could be replaced by anyone else's HTML5 rendering engine would NOT be an OS tie-in.
Why would they bother with that, in fact why would anyone in the world actually care? Do you suggest every company give the option to substitute all shared libraries in any software? Does it magically become ok if they just statically linked that code? And who really cares if the rendering engine used in Windows is also used by IE? No-one.
The difference is in Linux you can uninstall Firefox and It's not required for some of the new toys to work.
Both IE10 and the 'Metro' apps depend on certain libraries, if for some reason you consider those dependencies to be part of any one application that depends on them then removing everything that you understand that application to be would also mean removing those dependencies thus any other applications that depend on those libraries will cease to work. They could statically link the dependencies to the Metro runtime and IE10 but that just then means binary duplication and update duplication and in the end the code that is shared will still be there anyway just duplicated in binary form so what's the point?
Yes, when you open a file panel or a network browser under Windows, you are using IE. The desktop is IE. The control panel is IE. Friggin' everything is IE! Even if you install another browser, you CANNOT tell those components to use it. So, yes, if you use Windows, you MUST use IE.
Internet Explorer is a web browser. The Desktop, Control Panel, etc... are not Internet Explorer, they use components that are shared with Internet Explorer.
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For now.
Features like this tend to creep their way in slowly.
- It's something you can turn on.
- It's on by default, but you can turn it off easily.
- It's on by default and you need a CS degree to turn it off.
- It can only be turned off by hacking your system.
- It can only be turned off by hacking your system, and this is illegal to do.
out of interest, where has such a thing followed that progression?
they have conditioned people into seeing the difference between the "home" version and the "business" version of the OS as nothing more than a license upgrade
Probably because the 'home' and 'business' versions of modern desktop OSes are the same thing, it's not that they've 'conditioned people' into seeing it that way, it's that that's the way it is. Windows XP Pro was Home with a few extra features, same deal with 7, OSX only has one version for both markets and with Ubuntu you'd choose an LTS-stamped version in the workplace (and many would choose that for home use too).
That's not what he's advocating.
But it's what I'm suggesting, since the existing hardware is based on pretty standard hardware (DirectX GPU, eDRAM, pretty standard PowerPC *not* something like the Cell processor's PPU/SPU arch) it's not hard for them to just integrate more powerful versions of those into a new SoC.
He's also saying the development costs of the next generation are small.
And he's probably right, they don't need to develop a new OS, new frameworks, new accessories, new developer tools, etc... They only need to upgrade the internal hardware, which is mostly existing hardware re-packaged, just like the XBox S SoC.
Kinect wasn't developed at Microsoft, was it? I thought they bought that in from an third party?
The hardware was developed by a third party but all of the skeletal tracking, associated APIs and voice functionality was developed by microsoft. Kinda like apple, pretty much all the innovative hardware was developed by other companies, but it's being able pull that all together to produce a final product and get it to market that is the hard bit.
Getting a bunch of PC chips would seriously hamper backwards compatibility which would destroy any software advantage as their current hardware relies on cell processors not x86.
The current generation of XBox doesn't use the Cell processor, they use a tri-core PowerPC chip and upgrading that is hardly a costly process. Assuming they stick to a PowerPC chip and a DirectX-compatible GPU (and there's no reason to think they wouldn't) they can easily maintain all their software and hardware compatibility.
Xbox is still a billion-plus money-sink as far as I'm aware, and they'll have to spend billions more releasing a new one soon.
Why would they have to spend billions to release a new xbox? Consoles are no longer offline disconnected devices, they are hardly going to abandon the huge platform, OS and connected ecosystem they have developed, they'll simply upgrade the hardware and that doesn't cost billions.
Unfortunately that's not going to appeal to the masses, I really am genuinely interested in what exactly they have in mind to differentiate that will give them traction in the market.
Gotta love all the "it'll never have market share comparable to current incumbent x, y or z" comments.
I'd say they are likely based on the fact that there is no specific standout feature, no thing that says to the average end user 'this is why we are better than the competition, choose us over the existing products'.
So, Linux certainly has the opportunity to at least heavily compete with Windows mobile.
It already does, in the form of Android. How many general consumers are going to say 'well i like linux but i just don't like the android userland so i'm going to switch to ubuntu instead.'?
If they want to compete they need to offer something that differentiates them from the competition, a feature that consumers will want, i don't see such a thing in the 'press release', same as ubuntu on the desktop doesn't really offer much to the average consumer. Just to clarify though, im not saying in any way that Ubuntu is a bad OS, it's great but it doesn't offer end users a compelling reason to change.
so, no-one claims that you cannot replace Safari in OSX, but on Windows they do say that you *need* IE10 installed in order to use the OS.
That's the difference, MS using the underlying component to push their web browser (and therefore the default Bing and MS advert engine) to the users.
They don't use the underlying component to push their web browser because the component they use the rendering engine, which is not the web browser, it is no different from Apple using webkit in their operating system. You can remove IE, as in not see it as an installed program, but if just knowing it is there will cause you to seek out the .exe file and use it as your browser anyway then maybe you just like IE as a browser.
Ah, so basically, they've cannibalized another standard, and then abuse the dead corpse as an excuse for leveraging their monopoly yet again, yes?
No, im not sure how you would come to that conclusion unless you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a standard is, Metro is not a standard and they haven't cannibalized HTML5.
That they do what HTML5 is supposed to allow - not worry about which browser is used for them?
Because Metro isn't pure HTML5, so WinRT needs to use a HTML5 renderer and of course they chose their renderer, just like Opera choose their renderer and you can't change it.
Win8 will certainly detect if a "default browser" has been set up, just like Win7 and previous do. So it could easily find upon launching a "Metro" app if no default browser is installed and complain then. And if a default browser is set up use that.
Metro apps don't launch in the browser, and they aren't web apps.
there's a difference - you can use photoshop without QT, you can't use windows without trident.
Ok so how do i run photoshop elements with no windowing library? You know you can't use Dashboard or Mail in OSX without webkit either, that doesn't mean Dashboard and Mail are webkit, they just use webkit libraries.
That there would be a rendering engine used both by the Metro-stuff and the IE.
So exactly what they are doing then, both Metro HTML5 apps and IE share the MSHTML library.
maybe the point is that IE is just a few dozen lines of code that put Trident in a window and that all the functionality we'd all recognise as a browser is part of the underlying 'shared' library.
So? That works in the same way as WebKit works in OSX, you can't just remove it and expect it to work, it has core functionality that OS applications have come to depend upon. What's the problem with this sort of a situation anyway? If you have some reason that you really don't want the IE libraries then you don't want Explorer either so you just replace the shell.
Just like WebKit on OSX which is depended upon by Mail, Dashboard, etc...
Crying 'no, no, no and no' doesn't change the fact that I'm right, it just shows that you aren't capable of comprehending what was written. Grow up.
Actually, yes. A lot of people "bother with that". In the scientific computing world, it means you don't have to care *whose* BLAS or LAPACK library you use.
No, BLAS and LAPACK are not HTML rendering libraries, so that is clearly an invalid basis for the idea that anyone cares about replacing the HTML rendering engine in Explorer.
So, yes, every company -- barring Microsoft -- already gives the option to substitute ALL shared libraries.
What a load of rubbish. Can i swap out Opera's rendering engine? No. Can i change Photoshop's windowing libraries? Sure can't.
Does anyone care? Well, define "care". They care that their programs "just work" and that they don't need a billion essentially identical libraries to get them to do so.
They care that their programs 'just work' rather than swapping out different rendering engines to make different programs work because that program was designed to work with a specific rendering engine even if that is a shared library. I can't swap out statically linked code but for some reason you see a difference between code that is statically linked and code that is in shared libraries.
They care that they can tune and tweak.
No, an extreme minority care about that, most people couldn't care less about it.
Who cares if the rendering engine is shared? Well, if it's the rendering engine that is shared, take it out of IE and make it an independent shared component.
It is an independent shared component, how do you fail to understand that?
Then people can uninstall IE if they want.
They already can, but you can't remove libraries that other applications depend upon, obviously. If they statically linked the rendering engine code to both IE and Explorer separately you could remove everything installed by IE completely because there would be no co-dependencies.
Tying the rendering engine into IE
The rendering engine is not tied to IE, IE is tied to the rendering engine.
Internet Explorer is a web browser. The Desktop, Control Panel, etc... are not Internet Explorer, they use components that are Internet Explorer.
FTFY
FTFY doesn't work when you're wrong, to illustrate why you're wrong: If you re-wrote internet explorer to use the webkit rendering engine instead of trident then Desktop, Control Panel, etc... would still have a dependency on trident and wouldn't magically use webkit for the very simple reason that they are not dependent on Internet Explorer, they are dependent on shared components that are themselves NOT internet explorer.
What part of "it uses IE components" fails to make it IE?
The part where it's using components that are also used by IE (like MSHTML, which is obviously not Internet Explorer)...duh. Photoshop uses Qt components, that doesn't mean Photoshop is Qt, pretty obvious huh.
Having the HTML5 rendering engine in a standalone DLL that could be replaced by anyone else's HTML5 rendering engine would NOT be an OS tie-in.
Why would they bother with that, in fact why would anyone in the world actually care? Do you suggest every company give the option to substitute all shared libraries in any software? Does it magically become ok if they just statically linked that code? And who really cares if the rendering engine used in Windows is also used by IE? No-one.
Fair enough, last thing i want is that referenced in response to a [citation needed] regarding metro app capabilities ;)
Yes i could be pedantic and go to the nth degree about where and when HTML5 dependencies occur but of course that would have no impact on the point.
The difference is in Linux you can uninstall Firefox and It's not required for some of the new toys to work.
Both IE10 and the 'Metro' apps depend on certain libraries, if for some reason you consider those dependencies to be part of any one application that depends on them then removing everything that you understand that application to be would also mean removing those dependencies thus any other applications that depend on those libraries will cease to work. They could statically link the dependencies to the Metro runtime and IE10 but that just then means binary duplication and update duplication and in the end the code that is shared will still be there anyway just duplicated in binary form so what's the point?
Yes, when you open a file panel or a network browser under Windows, you are using IE. The desktop is IE. The control panel is IE. Friggin' everything is IE! Even if you install another browser, you CANNOT tell those components to use it. So, yes, if you use Windows, you MUST use IE.
Internet Explorer is a web browser. The Desktop, Control Panel, etc... are not Internet Explorer, they use components that are shared with Internet Explorer.