One big reason is cost: not only are low-resolution screens cheaper to make, but the manufacturers can use the same line of panels for both HDTVs and monitors.
Another reason is that many users don't know how to properly set DPI scaling in Windows, and until Windows 7, it often didn't work properly even if you did. Some applications on XP would break DPI scaling and result in icons, text, etc. overflowing the window boundaries. Even on Windows 7, there are a few applications that lie to the system, saying that they're DPI-aware when they are not, and give broken results. (We ran into one of these at work – a library system front-end where the icons appeared all black if any DPI except the default was used. A bug fix for that was finally put through, but it took some time.)
The problem with the T221 is that it has a very low refresh rate (so you can't play most video games on it, even older 2D stuff in emulators). Having to use multiple connections and having to buy used monitors off of eBay will also be a deterrent to many buyers. I'd like to try one but I am not sure I'd feel comfortable shelling out $600-$900 for a business-used monitor that in some cases has screen burn-in (according to the descriptions). We need to get smaller and much cheaper 4K TVs in the mass market, then we can use those as monitors.
Can your average onboard video card drive monitors at that resolution?
Most of the silicon supports it, even if the connections might not. Intel's Ivy Bridge supports 4K output, but this requires dual-DisplayPort. Haswell will support it through a single port.
The early adopters for 4K will probably be using at least midrange graphics cards, which do this resolution just fine (though of course the framerate on Crysis may be less than stellar). By the time the monitors are widely available, standard integrated graphics should be able to support it.
I still have a hard time understanding why Microsoft even plays along with this. I would be like "It's my OS, it will have my browser. Suck it or don't use it."
Because Microsoft cares about making money, not about proving some ideological point. As long as doing business in the EU is a substantial net profit, they will keep doing so.
Excel has tons of legacy baggage that will probably never go away, for compatibility reasons. MDI is one of those things. It's the same reason you can't open 2 spreadsheets at once if they have the same file name, even if they're in different directories.
I know this is an on-going flame war, but with Expression Software and Visual Studio 2010/2012, Microsoft has some of the best tools out there for building mobile applications. Throw in testing tools, and you are at the top of the class.
I can't speak to mobile applications, but from what I've seen of Microsoft developer tools on the desktop, I'm not impressed. I got a chance to try Expression Web (for ASP.NET web page development) at work, but quickly found I could operate quicker and easier by just editing the pages in Notepad2. Elsewhere, I've tried Visual Studio 2010 Express – only to find that the vast majority of open-source projects I tried to build were made on Visual Studio 2008, and unbelievably, the project files are not forward compatible. When you open the project, it insists on "converting" it, and then the conversion always fails. I don't plan to use a development tool that will break all of my projects when I upgrade the IDE.
Lastly, I think the main problem is traditional Microsoft fear/hatred. I have talked to more "hip" iOS teams that make cooler apps for android and iOS. They showed zero desire to even make an effort to make any apps for Windows Phone. The attitude I saw a lot was just pure bandwagon hatred. "Meh"
Did you consider that they aren't making apps for Windows Phone because it simply isn't worth the trouble? Android and iOS, combined, make up the vast majority of the smartphone market. Windows Phone is a tiny niche player. It has nothing to do with "bandwagon hatred" or "fear" – they just don't think it is a cost-effective use of their resources. Why should they change their mind now? Developers don't have an obligation to play along with what is best for Microsoft; rather, Microsoft needs to show developers what's in it for them.
VB6 dead? My VB6 apps, with my updates to support registry and file virtualization, run flawlessly under Windows 8.
Yes, binary backwards compatibility on Windows is very good (and this is one of the reasons why they've managed to stay on top of the desktop market for so long, especially in businesses). But what happens if you need to add developers to that application? Do you have to go trawling eBay for old copies of Visual Studio 6? I mean, if you're a hobbyist you could just download it from "various sources" and not worry about the niggling legal issues, but in a real business that generally won't fly. And I don't even know how well Visual Studio 6 runs on modern versions of Windows. It's probably workable, but the IDE and everything else must look way out of date.
The fact remains that deprecating Visual Basic (and replacing it with another language that was called the same thing but not really compatible) was a boneheaded move on Microsoft's part. Heck, they could have sold VB6 individually as a separate product, and plenty of businesses would have bought it.
Not going to happen. Read about how the "restoration" literally replaced the original film. The Theatrical versions only exist in memories now.
That is a very interesting link, but upon reading the article, it seems to contradict the claim you make. From the article:
As a result, the negative for Star Wars is filled with CGI-laden modern alterations. When Lucas says that the original version physically does not exist, this is what he really means--the negative is conformed to the Special Edition. Of course, it would be very easy to simply put the original pieces back and conform it to the original version, or use the separation masters and IPs, or simply scan the old pieces for a digital restoration, but I digress.
And, incidentally, this applies only to the changes made in the 1997 Special Edition release. Additional changes made in the 2004 DVD release (such as the replacement of Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christiansen in the final Force ghost scene) were done entirely digitally; none of these affect the original film negative.
As the article notes, fully restoring the original film could be done – it would just take additional work:
In Star Wars' case, using scans of the separation masters is perfectly viable, and though IPs and Technicolor prints are not ideal for masters they could be usable if cleaned up digitally. Perhaps the easiest option would be to simply follow the 1997 restoration pattern but in the digital realm: scan the negative in 8K, then scan the stored pre-SE shots or re-comp them, and fill in any damaged areas with IPs or separation masters, reconstructing the original cut, then digitally remove dirt and damage, and finally use a Technicolor print as a color reference for the Digital Intermediate created. Such a product would be theatrically viable, as pristine as when it had been shot, and 100% faithful in image and color to the original release.
Disney has done other film restoration jobs in the past which are at least this complex and expensive, if not more. And while Lucas really cared about his new vision of the original trilogy, Disney executives only care about what will make them more money. And there are enough Star Wars enthusiasts to make a project like this financially worthwhile, especially if the Blu-Ray set was sold at a premium price.
I disagree. Many developers who snubbed Vista and then Windows 7 and only supported XP are having their customers switch to competitors!
First of all, Windows 7 was (and is) actually popular. Secondly, making an application support Vista/7 is not that difficult; in many cases, no changes at all are needed from XP, even at the binary level. The only major issue was UAC prompts, and those would only be triggered if your application was already doing stuff that it shouldn't have been doing from a security standpoint (e.g. saving settings to Program Files instead of the local user profile).
Windows 8 sucking or not is too large of a marketshare to ignore. The customer determines what you support. Not yourself. Windows 8 mobile maybe crappy in terms of marketshare but every new pc that most people and businesses buy will come with it. Most employers are small believe it or not and do not have a dedicated IT departmetn with images of ancient platforms like yours does. They buy a pc at Staples and install the software themselves and get to work. If your corporate app wont support them they will simply buy from someone else who will.
All this is irrelevant, as Windows 8 for desktops/laptops will continue to support the same software as before. There is no reason to think that businesses will demand specifically "Metro" apps. If your app was well-designed and ran on Windows 7, it should run on Windows 8.
That leaves Windows RT (Surface) and WinPhone8. These systems do lack backward compatibility. But they also have essentially zero market share at this point, and there's no reason to think they will make a big impact, either among consumers or among businesses. That's why I said the wise move for developers was to sit and wait. If and when they start to pick up (and I doubt that is going to happen) then, and only then, would it make sense for developers to spend the time/effort/money to port their application to Metro.
In what way has Disney actually interfered with Marvel? I haven't noticed any substantive difference in the storylines. It was grim-and-gritty heroes fighting heroes in annual story arcs that will "change everything" before the acquisition, and it still is.
""Microsoft has promised that cross-platform development across the 8s â" from Windows 8 on a desktop to Windows Phone 8 â" will be a simple matter, but that's still not enough to get some developers moving on Windows Phone 8 support."
Bah. Microsoft can't just declare Year Zero and expect everyone to drop everything and follow them. If you are targeting desktop/laptop users, you'd have to be crazy to write for Metro at this point, when the overwhelming majority of your users are still on Windows 7 or even Windows XP. If you want to pitch your software to mobile users, then you can get a much larger audience by targeting iOS and/or Android.
In other words, writing for Metro will give you access to three platforms... all of which have virtually nonexistent market share at this point. And Microsoft has shown on several occasions in the past that they're willing to pull the plug on various developer technologies if they're falling behind, or just if the business strategy has changed. Ballmer and company can't see this because they are in love with their products, themselves, and the sounds of their own voices. But from the point of view of an independent developer, jumping into the Windows 8 pool now doesn't pay off – the most rational move is simply to wait and see what happens.
I suspect that Microsoft's actual response to this will be to bribe certain developers to port particular desirable applications to Metro. To an extent this may have already happened.
They managed to cram some awesome hardware into the Nexus 10. 2560x1600 at a $399 price point is very, very good.
But the physical design of the tablet – there's no way to sugarcoat this – is butt-ugly. Why did they have to make the bezel so huge? And asymmetrical? (I suppose that latter factor may have been a precaution against being sued by Apple.) Even though the hardware inside is great, the exterior just looks cheap. It looks like what you'd find on a $99 Archos tablet. Samsung's other designs are much more elegant than this.
I'm not at all impressed by the lack of a SD card slot. I loathe the "cloud" (and since this is a Wi-Fi-only device, it's not a viable solution anyway), and I'm not going to spend an extra $100 for 16GB extra of flash memory that cost the vendor under $10. Admittedly, this doesn't make Google/Samsung any worse than Apple on this front, but I had hoped they might actually do better.
Also, is there a physical home button? I can't tell from the photos. A tablet needs at least that one physical button.
There's no good gaming APIs to use. Where is the DirectX equivalent?
Developers have had no trouble with OpenGL on iOS and Android. Why would PCs be different? Direct3D benefits Microsoft due to lock-in, but I have a hard time seeing how its use benefits developers. And even Microsoft's usual advantage of legacy compatibility isn't really an issue here, since the market for Doom clones and WoW clones (the only PC games that the gamer crowd cares about as far as I can tell) moves so fast that everything is being rewritten every year anyway.
Linux does have other problems with its graphic subsystem: the lack of open drivers for nVidia, the lack of any decent drivers for AMD/ATI, and most of all the 20 layers of legacy crap that the typical Linux desktop staggers beneath. But this has nothing to do with the underlying API for 3D games, which is clean and simple OpenGL.
From my point of view, Windows 8 is just as open as the last decade of Windows OSes. I think the "windows store only" nature of Windows RT is being abused to imply that Windows 8 will not run your old applications. Windows 8 and Windows RT have the same code base but are separate products.
Windows RT is where they want Windows to go in the future. They are trying to deprecate the desktop as "legacy" so that they can force everyone into the App Store model. Metro applications, even on x86, *must* be purchased through the App Store; there is no sideloading. This is why the trend needs to be stopped *now*, not after Microsoft has already moved past the point of no return. Windows 8 must be made a failure in order for computing freedom to endure.
By this interview, Ballmer proves what I had suspected: that Microsoft doesn't understand why tablets are popular, and what tablets are for. And this failure to understand is why they are ruining Windows, by trying to make it a "universal" OS.
Tablets are not a substitute for a laptop or desktop PC, nor do most people want them to be. They are a more convenient and portable way of surfing the Web, listening to music, watching videos on YouTube or Netflix, playing simple games, doing Facebook, reading e-books, and so forth. They are, in short, content consumption devices. They aren't good at producing stuff, and aren't supposed to be. A tablet is not a "junior laptop" and when Microsoft tried to treat it as such with their previous attempts, they failed miserably. But nor is a desktop or laptop a scaled-up tablet; if it was, no one could ever get any work done.
Ballmer doesn't seem to understand that for the average home user, firing up MS Office is a rare use case, and one that is easily enough satisfied by a 6-year-old system running Windows XP that the buyer sees no reason to upgrade. As for businesses, they like things the way they are; many of them would still be running Windows 2000 if they were able to. Microsoft doesn't see that the fact that they would benefit by people spending more money is irrelevant; what matters is if the buyers see the benefit in spending more money. And when it does come time to spend, they have to demonstrate why their product is better than the competitor's. It's not enough any more just for them to show up.
But they would have saved everyone, including themselves, a huge amount of time and money by using something more UNIX-like as the design basis of Windows NT in the early 1990s.
The Windows NT security model is basically the UNIX security model (with a few additions and refinements). The problem isn't that NT-based operating systems are inherently insecure. The problem is that (as you allude to in your post) NT had to be backwards compatible with existing applications, especially when it was rolled out to home users in the form of Windows XP. Since existing applications were not security-aware, this usually meant running as administrator. Unfortunately, this led to a vicious circle: since everyone was assumed to be running as admin, there was no reason ever to change things, so people kept running that way, and even the security-minded individuals who wanted to do otherwise would have a hard time since most software expected to be able to write to anything it wanted. Microsoft did tell people how things were supposed to work during the XP era (only write to restricted folders/regkeys during install, after that do everything in userland) but developers didn't listen since there was no consequence to not doing so. UAC in Vista was Microsoft's attempt to break that circle, by basically shaming the applications that wouldn't follow the rules, letting the user continue to use them but making it more annoying. And as much of a pain in the ass as it was at first, it worked. By now, most major vendors do produce software that only requires admin access during the install, not during regular usage.
That said, the UNIX security model has plenty of problems of its own. Its fundamental flaw is the assumption that the program IS the user and will do what the user wants it to. This may have been a sensible assumption back in the 1970s on shared-time systems where all the users were coders, but it makes no sense now, when most code is being downloaded from the Internet by non-techs. When you run a program from an unknown source as non-admin, it can still do all kinds of nasty things: steal your personal information, delete your files, send spam, and so forth. What is needed is a security model that is manifest-based. A program should have to say in a manifest exactly what it needs to do, and should be restricted to the OS to only doing those things and no others. And the user should be able to veto specific manifest settings (e.g. if a solitaire game says it needs Internet access, the user should be able to refuse that while still letting the game run). It should be possible to force apps to only read/write user files through an OS-controlled dialog box, not on its own initiative. Android is actually closer to a sensible security model on this front than conventional UNIX is.
Rather than try to cram modern features into the creaky old pile of bloat that is X11, that ancient technology needs to be relegated to server-only usage, and replaced with something modern that can talk more closely to the hardware without going through half a dozen abstraction layers.
Yes, network transparency, I know. 99% of users don't give a shit, and just want things to display and animate smoothly – which X11 fails miserably at. Keep that on servers, where it matters, and drop it on desktops, where it doesn't. There is a reason why, when Google borrowed parts of Linux to make Android, they dropped the X11 layer without a second thought.
Judges generally don't like it at all when people try to skirt around their rulings by barely acknowledging the letter while flagrantly disregarding the spirit.
Apple is just begging for a contempt citation here.
Fanboys are a plague to any platform. If you want your product not to suck, you can't drink your own Kool-Aid. You need to look at the product with a very skeptical eye and work hard on picking out the flaws. And you need to take criticism from your users seriously.
Most computer users don't want a Wild West computer experience. They want a safe, functional one where the computer interface is as inobtrusive as possible. They want as little burden on their consciousness as possible, so they can focus on what they want to use the computer to do in the first place.
That's true of the average home user, which is why the walled-garden experience has been accepted on the iPhone and iPad. It is not true of power users, and is also not true of most businesses. These users expect to be able to install whatever they want. (In the case of businesses, the control over what gets installed generally rests in the hands of the IT department, not end-users – but they want to have this control internally, not beg Microsoft for permission to run the programs they need.)
Microsoft is going to have Windows 8 embedded into businesses all around the world
No, they won't. Businesses tend to be very conservative about OS upgrades. A lot of them are still on Windows XP. Relatively few businesses ever used Vista – they correctly figured that they were better off sticking with XP until Microsoft came up with something better. Now, Windows 7 is looking to be the new XP – many businesses have upgraded recently, and don't plan to upgrade again (at substantial time and expense) any time in the future. And Windows 7 will be supported with security patches through mid-2020.
Slashdot Mirror
One big reason is cost: not only are low-resolution screens cheaper to make, but the manufacturers can use the same line of panels for both HDTVs and monitors.
Another reason is that many users don't know how to properly set DPI scaling in Windows, and until Windows 7, it often didn't work properly even if you did. Some applications on XP would break DPI scaling and result in icons, text, etc. overflowing the window boundaries. Even on Windows 7, there are a few applications that lie to the system, saying that they're DPI-aware when they are not, and give broken results. (We ran into one of these at work – a library system front-end where the icons appeared all black if any DPI except the default was used. A bug fix for that was finally put through, but it took some time.)
The problem with the T221 is that it has a very low refresh rate (so you can't play most video games on it, even older 2D stuff in emulators). Having to use multiple connections and having to buy used monitors off of eBay will also be a deterrent to many buyers. I'd like to try one but I am not sure I'd feel comfortable shelling out $600-$900 for a business-used monitor that in some cases has screen burn-in (according to the descriptions). We need to get smaller and much cheaper 4K TVs in the mass market, then we can use those as monitors.
Can your average onboard video card drive monitors at that resolution?
Most of the silicon supports it, even if the connections might not. Intel's Ivy Bridge supports 4K output, but this requires dual-DisplayPort. Haswell will support it through a single port.
The early adopters for 4K will probably be using at least midrange graphics cards, which do this resolution just fine (though of course the framerate on Crysis may be less than stellar). By the time the monitors are widely available, standard integrated graphics should be able to support it.
I still have a hard time understanding why Microsoft even plays along with this. I would be like "It's my OS, it will have my browser. Suck it or don't use it."
Because Microsoft cares about making money, not about proving some ideological point. As long as doing business in the EU is a substantial net profit, they will keep doing so.
Excel has tons of legacy baggage that will probably never go away, for compatibility reasons. MDI is one of those things. It's the same reason you can't open 2 spreadsheets at once if they have the same file name, even if they're in different directories.
A tile is just a chromeless application window. What's novel about it?
I know this is an on-going flame war, but with Expression Software and Visual Studio 2010/2012, Microsoft has some of the best tools out there for building mobile applications. Throw in testing tools, and you are at the top of the class.
I can't speak to mobile applications, but from what I've seen of Microsoft developer tools on the desktop, I'm not impressed. I got a chance to try Expression Web (for ASP.NET web page development) at work, but quickly found I could operate quicker and easier by just editing the pages in Notepad2. Elsewhere, I've tried Visual Studio 2010 Express – only to find that the vast majority of open-source projects I tried to build were made on Visual Studio 2008, and unbelievably, the project files are not forward compatible. When you open the project, it insists on "converting" it, and then the conversion always fails. I don't plan to use a development tool that will break all of my projects when I upgrade the IDE.
Lastly, I think the main problem is traditional Microsoft fear/hatred. I have talked to more "hip" iOS teams that make cooler apps for android and iOS. They showed zero desire to even make an effort to make any apps for Windows Phone. The attitude I saw a lot was just pure bandwagon hatred. "Meh"
Did you consider that they aren't making apps for Windows Phone because it simply isn't worth the trouble? Android and iOS, combined, make up the vast majority of the smartphone market. Windows Phone is a tiny niche player. It has nothing to do with "bandwagon hatred" or "fear" – they just don't think it is a cost-effective use of their resources. Why should they change their mind now? Developers don't have an obligation to play along with what is best for Microsoft; rather, Microsoft needs to show developers what's in it for them.
VB6 dead? My VB6 apps, with my updates to support registry and file virtualization, run flawlessly under Windows 8.
Yes, binary backwards compatibility on Windows is very good (and this is one of the reasons why they've managed to stay on top of the desktop market for so long, especially in businesses). But what happens if you need to add developers to that application? Do you have to go trawling eBay for old copies of Visual Studio 6? I mean, if you're a hobbyist you could just download it from "various sources" and not worry about the niggling legal issues, but in a real business that generally won't fly. And I don't even know how well Visual Studio 6 runs on modern versions of Windows. It's probably workable, but the IDE and everything else must look way out of date.
The fact remains that deprecating Visual Basic (and replacing it with another language that was called the same thing but not really compatible) was a boneheaded move on Microsoft's part. Heck, they could have sold VB6 individually as a separate product, and plenty of businesses would have bought it.
Not going to happen. Read about how the "restoration" literally replaced the original film. The Theatrical versions only exist in memories now.
That is a very interesting link, but upon reading the article, it seems to contradict the claim you make. From the article:
I disagree. Many developers who snubbed Vista and then Windows 7 and only supported XP are having their customers switch to competitors!
First of all, Windows 7 was (and is) actually popular. Secondly, making an application support Vista/7 is not that difficult; in many cases, no changes at all are needed from XP, even at the binary level. The only major issue was UAC prompts, and those would only be triggered if your application was already doing stuff that it shouldn't have been doing from a security standpoint (e.g. saving settings to Program Files instead of the local user profile).
Windows 8 sucking or not is too large of a marketshare to ignore. The customer determines what you support. Not yourself. Windows 8 mobile maybe crappy in terms of marketshare but every new pc that most people and businesses buy will come with it. Most employers are small believe it or not and do not have a dedicated IT departmetn with images of ancient platforms like yours does. They buy a pc at Staples and install the software themselves and get to work. If your corporate app wont support them they will simply buy from someone else who will.
All this is irrelevant, as Windows 8 for desktops/laptops will continue to support the same software as before. There is no reason to think that businesses will demand specifically "Metro" apps. If your app was well-designed and ran on Windows 7, it should run on Windows 8.
That leaves Windows RT (Surface) and WinPhone8. These systems do lack backward compatibility. But they also have essentially zero market share at this point, and there's no reason to think they will make a big impact, either among consumers or among businesses. That's why I said the wise move for developers was to sit and wait. If and when they start to pick up (and I doubt that is going to happen) then, and only then, would it make sense for developers to spend the time/effort/money to port their application to Metro.
So does this mean we might finally get high-definition releases of the original Star Wars films without all of Lucas's later alterations?
In what way has Disney actually interfered with Marvel? I haven't noticed any substantive difference in the storylines. It was grim-and-gritty heroes fighting heroes in annual story arcs that will "change everything" before the acquisition, and it still is.
""Microsoft has promised that cross-platform development across the 8s â" from Windows 8 on a desktop to Windows Phone 8 â" will be a simple matter, but that's still not enough to get some developers moving on Windows Phone 8 support."
Bah. Microsoft can't just declare Year Zero and expect everyone to drop everything and follow them. If you are targeting desktop/laptop users, you'd have to be crazy to write for Metro at this point, when the overwhelming majority of your users are still on Windows 7 or even Windows XP. If you want to pitch your software to mobile users, then you can get a much larger audience by targeting iOS and/or Android.
In other words, writing for Metro will give you access to three platforms... all of which have virtually nonexistent market share at this point. And Microsoft has shown on several occasions in the past that they're willing to pull the plug on various developer technologies if they're falling behind, or just if the business strategy has changed. Ballmer and company can't see this because they are in love with their products, themselves, and the sounds of their own voices. But from the point of view of an independent developer, jumping into the Windows 8 pool now doesn't pay off – the most rational move is simply to wait and see what happens.
I suspect that Microsoft's actual response to this will be to bribe certain developers to port particular desirable applications to Metro. To an extent this may have already happened.
Then maybe they should pay them enough that this isn't a problem in the first place.
They managed to cram some awesome hardware into the Nexus 10. 2560x1600 at a $399 price point is very, very good.
But the physical design of the tablet – there's no way to sugarcoat this – is butt-ugly. Why did they have to make the bezel so huge? And asymmetrical? (I suppose that latter factor may have been a precaution against being sued by Apple.) Even though the hardware inside is great, the exterior just looks cheap. It looks like what you'd find on a $99 Archos tablet. Samsung's other designs are much more elegant than this.
I'm not at all impressed by the lack of a SD card slot. I loathe the "cloud" (and since this is a Wi-Fi-only device, it's not a viable solution anyway), and I'm not going to spend an extra $100 for 16GB extra of flash memory that cost the vendor under $10. Admittedly, this doesn't make Google/Samsung any worse than Apple on this front, but I had hoped they might actually do better.
Also, is there a physical home button? I can't tell from the photos. A tablet needs at least that one physical button.
There's no good gaming APIs to use. Where is the DirectX equivalent?
Developers have had no trouble with OpenGL on iOS and Android. Why would PCs be different? Direct3D benefits Microsoft due to lock-in, but I have a hard time seeing how its use benefits developers. And even Microsoft's usual advantage of legacy compatibility isn't really an issue here, since the market for Doom clones and WoW clones (the only PC games that the gamer crowd cares about as far as I can tell) moves so fast that everything is being rewritten every year anyway.
Linux does have other problems with its graphic subsystem: the lack of open drivers for nVidia, the lack of any decent drivers for AMD/ATI, and most of all the 20 layers of legacy crap that the typical Linux desktop staggers beneath. But this has nothing to do with the underlying API for 3D games, which is clean and simple OpenGL.
From my point of view, Windows 8 is just as open as the last decade of Windows OSes. I think the "windows store only" nature of Windows RT is being abused to imply that Windows 8 will not run your old applications. Windows 8 and Windows RT have the same code base but are separate products.
Windows RT is where they want Windows to go in the future. They are trying to deprecate the desktop as "legacy" so that they can force everyone into the App Store model. Metro applications, even on x86, *must* be purchased through the App Store; there is no sideloading. This is why the trend needs to be stopped *now*, not after Microsoft has already moved past the point of no return. Windows 8 must be made a failure in order for computing freedom to endure.
By this interview, Ballmer proves what I had suspected: that Microsoft doesn't understand why tablets are popular, and what tablets are for. And this failure to understand is why they are ruining Windows, by trying to make it a "universal" OS.
Tablets are not a substitute for a laptop or desktop PC, nor do most people want them to be. They are a more convenient and portable way of surfing the Web, listening to music, watching videos on YouTube or Netflix, playing simple games, doing Facebook, reading e-books, and so forth. They are, in short, content consumption devices. They aren't good at producing stuff, and aren't supposed to be. A tablet is not a "junior laptop" and when Microsoft tried to treat it as such with their previous attempts, they failed miserably. But nor is a desktop or laptop a scaled-up tablet; if it was, no one could ever get any work done.
Ballmer doesn't seem to understand that for the average home user, firing up MS Office is a rare use case, and one that is easily enough satisfied by a 6-year-old system running Windows XP that the buyer sees no reason to upgrade. As for businesses, they like things the way they are; many of them would still be running Windows 2000 if they were able to. Microsoft doesn't see that the fact that they would benefit by people spending more money is irrelevant; what matters is if the buyers see the benefit in spending more money. And when it does come time to spend, they have to demonstrate why their product is better than the competitor's. It's not enough any more just for them to show up.
But they would have saved everyone, including themselves, a huge amount of time and money by using something more UNIX-like as the design basis of Windows NT in the early 1990s.
The Windows NT security model is basically the UNIX security model (with a few additions and refinements). The problem isn't that NT-based operating systems are inherently insecure. The problem is that (as you allude to in your post) NT had to be backwards compatible with existing applications, especially when it was rolled out to home users in the form of Windows XP. Since existing applications were not security-aware, this usually meant running as administrator. Unfortunately, this led to a vicious circle: since everyone was assumed to be running as admin, there was no reason ever to change things, so people kept running that way, and even the security-minded individuals who wanted to do otherwise would have a hard time since most software expected to be able to write to anything it wanted. Microsoft did tell people how things were supposed to work during the XP era (only write to restricted folders/regkeys during install, after that do everything in userland) but developers didn't listen since there was no consequence to not doing so. UAC in Vista was Microsoft's attempt to break that circle, by basically shaming the applications that wouldn't follow the rules, letting the user continue to use them but making it more annoying. And as much of a pain in the ass as it was at first, it worked. By now, most major vendors do produce software that only requires admin access during the install, not during regular usage.
That said, the UNIX security model has plenty of problems of its own. Its fundamental flaw is the assumption that the program IS the user and will do what the user wants it to. This may have been a sensible assumption back in the 1970s on shared-time systems where all the users were coders, but it makes no sense now, when most code is being downloaded from the Internet by non-techs. When you run a program from an unknown source as non-admin, it can still do all kinds of nasty things: steal your personal information, delete your files, send spam, and so forth. What is needed is a security model that is manifest-based. A program should have to say in a manifest exactly what it needs to do, and should be restricted to the OS to only doing those things and no others. And the user should be able to veto specific manifest settings (e.g. if a solitaire game says it needs Internet access, the user should be able to refuse that while still letting the game run). It should be possible to force apps to only read/write user files through an OS-controlled dialog box, not on its own initiative. Android is actually closer to a sensible security model on this front than conventional UNIX is.
I had year in which I paid six figues in taxes.
Pull the other one.
Rather than try to cram modern features into the creaky old pile of bloat that is X11, that ancient technology needs to be relegated to server-only usage, and replaced with something modern that can talk more closely to the hardware without going through half a dozen abstraction layers.
Yes, network transparency, I know. 99% of users don't give a shit, and just want things to display and animate smoothly – which X11 fails miserably at. Keep that on servers, where it matters, and drop it on desktops, where it doesn't. There is a reason why, when Google borrowed parts of Linux to make Android, they dropped the X11 layer without a second thought.
Judges generally don't like it at all when people try to skirt around their rulings by barely acknowledging the letter while flagrantly disregarding the spirit.
Apple is just begging for a contempt citation here.
Fanboys are a plague to any platform. If you want your product not to suck, you can't drink your own Kool-Aid. You need to look at the product with a very skeptical eye and work hard on picking out the flaws. And you need to take criticism from your users seriously.
Most computer users don't want a Wild West computer experience. They want a safe, functional one where the computer interface is as inobtrusive as possible. They want as little burden on their consciousness as possible, so they can focus on what they want to use the computer to do in the first place.
That's true of the average home user, which is why the walled-garden experience has been accepted on the iPhone and iPad. It is not true of power users, and is also not true of most businesses. These users expect to be able to install whatever they want. (In the case of businesses, the control over what gets installed generally rests in the hands of the IT department, not end-users – but they want to have this control internally, not beg Microsoft for permission to run the programs they need.)
Microsoft is going to have Windows 8 embedded into businesses all around the world
No, they won't. Businesses tend to be very conservative about OS upgrades. A lot of them are still on Windows XP. Relatively few businesses ever used Vista – they correctly figured that they were better off sticking with XP until Microsoft came up with something better. Now, Windows 7 is looking to be the new XP – many businesses have upgraded recently, and don't plan to upgrade again (at substantial time and expense) any time in the future. And Windows 7 will be supported with security patches through mid-2020.