Without experience on the job. And this is important. I remember my own university time as a nice source of theoretical knowledge, but things like good development practices were not a topic. Of course, any halfway smart developer will eventually figure it out. But it may take one embarassing failure as a wake-up call. Tough luck (but maybe well deserved) for a company who only hired newbies and no experienced developers as team leaders.
Sometimes. The majority drives below 90 mph (~145 km/h), and I have the impression that the average speed has actually decreased somewhat since the 90s, with the crazy fuel prices. A small but still significant proportion goes up to 125mph, and occasionally you see someone zooming past at positively crazy speeds. 155mph (250 km/h) maybe, most of the car industry voluntarily limits their cars to that. Of course, some high end sports cars don't have that limiter;-)
Agreed, with the caveat that the C64 and other TV-connectable computers of the era were, compared to mainstream computers of the time, extremely budget oriented and actually had fairly impressive capablities. Even without adjusting for inflation they were still far more expensive than the R-Pi, but they were the last machines to really target the budget consumer with something other than just a stripped-down, shoddily-built version of the mainstream offerings at a bit of a discount. (yes, I'm looking at you eMachines and company)
Compared to my current PCs, my C64 was rather shoddily built. Plastic case with only some aluminium-coated cardboard for EM shielding. A power supply that got pretty hot. A keyboard with rubber contacts that started going bad after three or four years (a yearly disassembling and rub-down with alcohol helped, but I was not impressed). And it cost about 400 Euros in today's prices, not counting inflation since the 80s. If you wanted a floppy drive too, another 400. And you still had no screen for those 800 Euros (I used a hand-me-down old black and white TV).
Give me today's prices anytime, for less than 800 Euros I can put together a decent PC including a monitor. It won't be the fastest gamer PC, but it will have reliable components.
For me, the reason for upgrading is usually some technical limitation, often connected to getting a new PC.
- I upgraded from 98 to 2000 because of stability problems. In hindsight, the main reason for the problems was a chipset bug, not 98 (fuck you, VIA!). But 2000 still was a nice improvement:)
- I upgraded from 2000 to XP when I got a new PC in 2007. I never got it to run stable in 2000, in XP it worked fine. In hindsight, I suspect that the hardware vendors did not bother to test their drivers under 2000 anymore.
- I upgraded from XP to 7(64bit) when I got a new PC in 2011. It has 4GB RAM, and under XP (32bit) a single process would be unable to use all of it. It is only a matter of time until some software actually needs that much.
Personally I thought the whole idea was retarded except for the mobile chips like Brazos, on the desktop the idea was completely stupid and on the server even more so. For those that don't know the original plan was to go "Full APU" and have the GPU take the place of the FP on chip, which would be a much simpler and weaker design than in years past thus freeing up more TDP for more cores. Why is this dumb? Well what if you want to use the GPU AND do some floating point heavy task? Or what if you don't want the integrated GPU because you can't OC worth a crap with the GPU built in?
All correct, but I could live with those aspects. I usually don't OC, and if I know I want the GPU AND do some floating point heavy task, I could get an additional discrete GPU. There is, however, a worse one:
Memory bandwidth congestion. A typical lower midrange graphics card with 128 bit data bus and GDDR3 is significantly slower than the same model with GDDR5. In an APU, the GPU part has to share the even lower bandwidth of the DDR3 main memory with the CPU part.
When the LLano was new, Anandtech published a preview: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4448/amd-llano-desktop-performance-preview It shows some comparisons to discrete graphics cards, including the HD 5570 which represents the lower midrange graphics card w/128bit mentioned above. In gaming frame rates, the HD 5570 beats the LLano even when it runs on DDR3-1866 RAM, which was not a JEDEC standard at the time. With standard DDR3, the difference gets bigger. Which shows clearly the LLano is limited by memory bandwidth and really could use four-channel memory as in Intel's socket 2011. With bigger and faster GPUs, the bandwidth demands will only grow, and for a Bulldozer APU with matching GPU part even four-channel memory may be insufficient..
Sooner or later, the old version will run into technical limitations that may have been irrelevant at its introduction, but become annoying with disk and memory capacity of the average computer getting bigger.
Lets use Windows 2000 as example: -To use partitions beyond 128 GByte, 48 bit LBA support must be activated -You have to activate that after installation in the registry. Now if you want a C:\ drive of, say, 200 GByte, you have a problem. Because during setup of Windows, 48 bit LBA support is not available yet. Presumably, setup will fail. You might not even be able to set up and format that 200 GByte partition from Windows.
Windows XP does not have that particular problem, but some applications already would like more than the 2 GByte RAM per process you get in vanilla XP.
I honestly don't know if that will help. After all by SP2 they had worked most of the bugs out of Vista but you still can't get most people to even think of taking Vista on a bet, once the public has made up its mind that is usually it.
To be fair to the public, no one has much reason to consider Vista anymore. Windows 7 is available, it is essentially Vista SP3 on the technical level plus a somewhat more user-friendly GUI. Why choose the lesser version?
If there was no Windows 7 but a Vista SP3, I guess it would get more attention and it might eventually sink in that it is not so bad anymore. But starting over with a new name was the easier way to fix the damaged reputation of Windows.
Sounds like the blacklist is for those license numbers that get shared on the internet. Those might reach activation numbers that are unrealistic for a single person, unless there is some limit.
Not that it helps much: these days you can get "pre-activated" versions from the usual suspects...
You mean, tax it to the point where there is not too much illegal production.
In Germany (where I live), cigarettes cost around 25 (Euro)cents apiece. That is enough to motivate some people to smuggle them. But not enough to make the black market as big and dangerous as in illegal drugs. So you get some tax evasion through smuggling of cigarettes from Eastern Europe, but cutting with dangerous stuff and gang wars are rare. Low-key drug crime like that is inevitable if you have serious taxes on the stuff, but it is at a tolerable level.
I still think it should be sufficient if the HOSTS file is only accessible with admin privileges. Because once you make the mistake of letting malware run with that level of access, your system is compromised anyway. Protecting a small corner of it at the expense of breaking well established functionality creates more problems than it solves.
IMHO the balance of damage is not in favor of what Microsoft is doing
Reminds me of Judge Jackson in United_States vs. Microsoft. He got so pissed at Microsoft's behavior in court that he said some rather unfriendly things about the company in interviews (see http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2001/02/42071).
Which was probably not so smart and might have contributed to his verdict (breaking up Microsoft) being overturned on appeal. I always wondered why he did not keep his mouth shut and sanction Microsoft's legal team instead. They did some things that might have counted as perjury, such as presenting a faked video as evidence.
I believe that would require a lot more standardization and designing for reusabilty than what is common today.
I'm one of those guys who like to tinker with old electronics, and what I get to see is a wild jumble of one-off designs that are made to fit one particular device, but have little chance of fitting into next year's model. There is one notable exception. The computer industry (in particular desktop parts) has mostly exchangable parts, and except for stuff getting obsolete, many parts could in fact be reused and resold. But guess what: Technically inclined consumers wordwide understand this, and tend to reuse stuff themselves. That even happens in some companies. At my current place of work, old computers go to the dumpster minus their RAM. So someone collects those things. Either one of the IT guys is running a business with used parts on the side, or the company must be sitting of many gigabytes of old DDR1 RAM;-)
Actually, some people do to get decent sound at all. Some integrated sound devices are just so bad that you need to replace them with something better. See my other post about my own experiences: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3041333&cid=40956281 Two out of three sucked hard enough that a replacement was necessary.
In my experience, the ability to drive headphones AND the overall quality varies wildly. The integrated sound on my last 3 mainboards performed as follows:
-Abit IC7 (Socket 478 board, bought in 2004): Could drive headphones in terms of volume, but had horribly bad filtering. Scrolling the screen would create audible noise in the headphones. Buying a cheap Soundblaster card was quite an improvement. The Soundblaster sounds much better, and it REALLY can drive the phones;-).
-ASUS M2N (Socket 939, bought in 2007): All-around OK sound with headphones. Cannot play as loud as the Soundblaster, but is good enough that I never bothered with a discrete sound card for this board
-Asus M4A78LT or similar (can't remember the exact model number, but it is a Socket AM3 board from 2011): OK but not really great sound with head phones at low volumes. Starts distorting the sound heavily if you turn up the volume. On this board, I added a discrete sound card again...
I think you mean Digital (DEC) which had an Alpha based workstation.
Actually I meant the Vobis Highscreen Alpha 5000 from 1997. Which was not an original DEC. It was a (presumably much cheaper, but still at the price of a high end 80486) machine designed by (for?) Vobis, a German retailer.
We had a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity during the Vista fiasco but gained almost no ground because the Linux desktop was virtually unusable during that period because of PulseAudio and other disasters. We get another chance handed to us gift wrapped and we are racing to implement the exact same tablet madness before Win8 ships. Almost like someone at Microsoft is paying people to work in our camp to make sure we don't threaten them or something.
Well, Ubuntu is doing something along those lines (cough... Unity). That hurts, because Ubuntu used to be the flagship for newbie-friendly distributions:-( Otherwise, there are really too many different distributions to make such a blanket statement. Debian for instance is switching to the XFCE desktop in Wheezy, that is very much not tablet madness.
On tablets as such, there is Android which is half Linux, half proprietary (but Google is usually open-sourcing the proprietary half after a few months, kudos for that). Android is doing very well. The biggest problem here are the hardware vendors with their tendency towards locked bootloaders. There seems to be very little activity in terms of non-Android Linux tablets. With a few minutes on Google, I could only find the Vivaldi (http://makeplaylive.com/), and it is still at the preorder stage.
I think beating back Linux on netbooks was mostly a matter of network effects, as defined by this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect The dirt-cheap Windows Starter Edition eliminated the price advantage of Linux, which had motivated many people to try it out. After that, it was a matter of sticking to the familiar system, which also had the familiar software. But then again, Microsoft acted fast in the netbook "affair". There was some short-lived interest in Linux, but Linux never got anywhere near 5% of the installed base, let alone 30%. With more market share, it might get more of the network effects as well and the change might be permanent.
Re: Apple: You are right, StatCounter GlobalStats shows them at 13% in North America for OS operating systems (7% worldwide), with a long term trend towards more. And I don't even have the impression that their main focus is on the desktop. Sounds like a competitor whom Microsoft doesn't want to open more doors;-)
Re: Commodore and Atari: As far as I can remember, falling behind on the hardware side in the 1990s had a lot to do with their demise. There was a quite rapid development on the PC side which Commodore and Atari could not quite follow. And a few MIPS more was still considered a big deal back then, one well-known retailer even tried to market an Alpha machine in a PC case to private end users. So it was not only about software, and MS-DOS by itself was certainly not something that could drive people to enthusiasm.
Maybe the network effects mentioned above made the difference, but I can't tell for sure because I did not have much interest in business computing back then.
I think with Linux in particular, they may come to regret "temporarily" and intentionally giving some market share away. IMHO Linux on the desktop already does a lot of things quite well and would be suitable for many organizations as a Windows replacement. I think many who switch "temporarily" won't come back.
I believe MS has chosen a risky but very very intelligent approach.
It is probably their best chance at getting a foot into the door with the growing tablet market. In other words, not a bad strategy if you believe that the future of computing is in tablets and mobile phones.
But the risks are significant too: If they alienate too many desktop users, Apple, Linux and Open Source in general may get enough of a boost to come out of the 5% marketshare corner (on the desktop) and seriously threaten Microsoft's traditional cash cows. Interesting times ahead:-)
Windows 8 I'm sure will build on the reliability but will also add an additional layer of complexity that will alienate the less technical users. OS X is similar in this respect - completely reliable..until the point that it fails in which case most people are pissing into the wind.
It might also alienate some technical, but not support-specialized users. People like me (software developer) who usually do their own administration, but not often enough to stay in practice with the finer points of tweaking the OS.
There are two classes of people whom I expect to have no big problem: 1) IT professionals who do babysit computers for a living. As in being sysadmins or higher level support guys. I think they'll get enough exposure to learn the new concepts reasonably fast and stay in practice. 2) The non-technical end users for whom Windows XP was already too complex. They have to call a support guy either way.
With Vista, the problems reported in the IT press were not so much about the paradigm shift, but mostly about sloppy programming and lack of drivers. Besides, there are credible reports that SP1 fixed most of the problems. So Vistas problem were solvable by improving the existing code, rather than redesigning everything. And yes, Windows 7 is very similar to Vista in architecture and GUI concept. So Windows 7 could be viewed as Vista SP3 with a new name to evade the bad reputation of Vista;-)
Now if Win9 will only refine the formerly-known-as-Metro interface but still refuse to backtrack, Microsoft may see a "Vista effect" that endures for the lifetime of Windows 9, with lots of users sticking to Windows 7. Even that won't kill Windows 9 outright, but it might give Apple and Linux a chance to grab more market share on the desktop,
I read a lot of David Weber, though I wish he'd get on with the Honorverse and with Dahak and Safehold.
He is still writing new novels in the Honorverse and the Dahak series.
The Honorverse is up to 19 novels (plus a few anthologies), 13 of those in the main storyline with Honor. The latest one was released in March 2012. Safehold has five novels released, number 6 is in the works (release planned for September 2012). Only Dahak is pretty much dead, judging by the release dates.
I liked most of that trilogy, but the ending was just weak.
First we get told in little more than an aside that humanity found some allies and managed to chase the Inhibitors off. Which should have been the grand finale or even a forth volume. Defintely a missed opportunity for a great space opera.
Then the same humanity runs from some out-of-control terraformers that should have been a much lesser threat than the Inhibitors due to their lack of cunning aggression. WTF???
Slashdot Mirror
Without experience on the job. And this is important. I remember my own university time as a nice source of theoretical knowledge, but things like good development practices were not a topic.
Of course, any halfway smart developer will eventually figure it out. But it may take one embarassing failure as a wake-up call. Tough luck (but maybe well deserved) for a company who only hired newbies and no experienced developers as team leaders.
Sometimes. The majority drives below 90 mph (~145 km/h), and I have the impression that the average speed has actually decreased somewhat since the 90s, with the crazy fuel prices. ;-)
A small but still significant proportion goes up to 125mph, and occasionally you see someone zooming past at positively crazy speeds. 155mph (250 km/h) maybe, most of the car industry voluntarily limits their cars to that. Of course, some high end sports cars don't have that limiter
And it cost about 400 Euros in today's prices, not counting inflation since the 80s.
Oops. That should mean "400 Euros in today's currency
Agreed, with the caveat that the C64 and other TV-connectable computers of the era were, compared to mainstream computers of the time, extremely budget oriented and actually had fairly impressive capablities. Even without adjusting for inflation they were still far more expensive than the R-Pi, but they were the last machines to really target the budget consumer with something other than just a stripped-down, shoddily-built version of the mainstream offerings at a bit of a discount. (yes, I'm looking at you eMachines and company)
Compared to my current PCs, my C64 was rather shoddily built. Plastic case with only some aluminium-coated cardboard for EM shielding. A power supply that got pretty hot. A keyboard with rubber contacts that started going bad after three or four years (a yearly disassembling and rub-down with alcohol helped, but I was not impressed).
And it cost about 400 Euros in today's prices, not counting inflation since the 80s. If you wanted a floppy drive too, another 400. And you still had no screen for those 800 Euros (I used a hand-me-down old black and white TV).
Give me today's prices anytime, for less than 800 Euros I can put together a decent PC including a monitor. It won't be the fastest gamer PC, but it will have reliable components.
For me, the reason for upgrading is usually some technical limitation, often connected to getting a new PC. :)
- I upgraded from 98 to 2000 because of stability problems. In hindsight, the main reason for the problems was a chipset bug, not 98 (fuck you, VIA!). But 2000 still was a nice improvement
- I upgraded from 2000 to XP when I got a new PC in 2007. I never got it to run stable in 2000, in XP it worked fine. In hindsight, I suspect that the hardware vendors did not bother to test their drivers under 2000 anymore.
- I upgraded from XP to 7(64bit) when I got a new PC in 2011. It has 4GB RAM, and under XP (32bit) a single process would be unable to use all of it. It is only a matter of time until some software actually needs that much.
Errors happen. At first glance I thought "what, Pokemon Institute?".
Personally I thought the whole idea was retarded except for the mobile chips like Brazos, on the desktop the idea was completely stupid and on the server even more so. For those that don't know the original plan was to go "Full APU" and have the GPU take the place of the FP on chip, which would be a much simpler and weaker design than in years past thus freeing up more TDP for more cores. Why is this dumb? Well what if you want to use the GPU AND do some floating point heavy task? Or what if you don't want the integrated GPU because you can't OC worth a crap with the GPU built in?
All correct, but I could live with those aspects. I usually don't OC, and if I know I want the GPU AND do some floating point heavy task, I could get an additional discrete GPU. There is, however, a worse one:
Memory bandwidth congestion. A typical lower midrange graphics card with 128 bit data bus and GDDR3 is significantly slower than the same model with GDDR5. In an APU, the GPU part has to share the even lower bandwidth of the DDR3 main memory with the CPU part.
When the LLano was new, Anandtech published a preview:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4448/amd-llano-desktop-performance-preview
It shows some comparisons to discrete graphics cards, including the HD 5570 which represents the lower midrange graphics card w/128bit mentioned above.
In gaming frame rates, the HD 5570 beats the LLano even when it runs on DDR3-1866 RAM, which was not a JEDEC standard at the time. With standard DDR3, the difference gets bigger. Which shows clearly the LLano is limited by memory bandwidth and really could use four-channel memory as in Intel's socket 2011.
With bigger and faster GPUs, the bandwidth demands will only grow, and for a Bulldozer APU with matching GPU part even four-channel memory may be insufficient..
Sooner or later, the old version will run into technical limitations that may have been irrelevant at its introduction, but become annoying with disk and memory capacity of the average computer getting bigger.
Lets use Windows 2000 as example:
-To use partitions beyond 128 GByte, 48 bit LBA support must be activated
-You have to activate that after installation in the registry.
Now if you want a C:\ drive of, say, 200 GByte, you have a problem. Because during setup of Windows, 48 bit LBA support is not available yet. Presumably, setup will fail. You might not even be able to set up and format that 200 GByte partition from Windows.
Windows XP does not have that particular problem, but some applications already would like more than the 2 GByte RAM per process you get in vanilla XP.
I honestly don't know if that will help. After all by SP2 they had worked most of the bugs out of Vista but you still can't get most people to even think of taking Vista on a bet, once the public has made up its mind that is usually it.
To be fair to the public, no one has much reason to consider Vista anymore. Windows 7 is available, it is essentially Vista SP3 on the technical level plus a somewhat more user-friendly GUI. Why choose the lesser version?
If there was no Windows 7 but a Vista SP3, I guess it would get more attention and it might eventually sink in that it is not so bad anymore. But starting over with a new name was the easier way to fix the damaged reputation of Windows.
Sounds like the blacklist is for those license numbers that get shared on the internet. Those might reach activation numbers that are unrealistic for a single person, unless there is some limit.
Not that it helps much:
these days you can get "pre-activated" versions from the usual suspects...
You mean, tax it to the point where there is not too much illegal production.
In Germany (where I live), cigarettes cost around 25 (Euro)cents apiece. That is enough to motivate some people to smuggle them. But not enough to make the black market as big and dangerous as in illegal drugs.
So you get some tax evasion through smuggling of cigarettes from Eastern Europe, but cutting with dangerous stuff and gang wars are rare. Low-key drug crime like that is inevitable if you have serious taxes on the stuff, but it is at a tolerable level.
I still think it should be sufficient if the HOSTS file is only accessible with admin privileges. Because once you make the mistake of letting malware run with that level of access, your system is compromised anyway.
Protecting a small corner of it at the expense of breaking well established functionality creates more problems than it solves.
IMHO the balance of damage is not in favor of what Microsoft is doing
Reminds me of Judge Jackson in United_States vs. Microsoft. He got so pissed at Microsoft's behavior in court that he said some rather unfriendly things about the company in interviews (see http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2001/02/42071).
Which was probably not so smart and might have contributed to his verdict (breaking up Microsoft) being overturned on appeal.
I always wondered why he did not keep his mouth shut and sanction Microsoft's legal team instead. They did some things that might have counted as perjury, such as presenting a faked video as evidence.
I believe that would require a lot more standardization and designing for reusabilty than what is common today.
I'm one of those guys who like to tinker with old electronics, and what I get to see is a wild jumble of one-off designs that are made to fit one particular device, but have little chance of fitting into next year's model. ;-)
There is one notable exception. The computer industry (in particular desktop parts) has mostly exchangable parts, and except for stuff getting obsolete, many parts could in fact be reused and resold. But guess what:
Technically inclined consumers wordwide understand this, and tend to reuse stuff themselves. That even happens in some companies. At my current place of work, old computers go to the dumpster minus their RAM. So someone collects those things. Either one of the IT guys is running a business with used parts on the side, or the company must be sitting of many gigabytes of old DDR1 RAM
Actually, some people do to get decent sound at all. Some integrated sound devices are just so bad that you need to replace them with something better. See my other post about my own experiences:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3041333&cid=40956281
Two out of three sucked hard enough that a replacement was necessary.
In my experience, the ability to drive headphones AND the overall quality varies wildly. The integrated sound on my last 3 mainboards performed as follows:
-Abit IC7 (Socket 478 board, bought in 2004): ;-).
Could drive headphones in terms of volume, but had horribly bad filtering. Scrolling the screen would create audible noise in the headphones. Buying a cheap Soundblaster card was quite an improvement. The Soundblaster sounds much better, and it REALLY can drive the phones
-ASUS M2N (Socket 939, bought in 2007):
All-around OK sound with headphones. Cannot play as loud as the Soundblaster, but is good enough that I never bothered with a discrete sound card for this board
-Asus M4A78LT or similar (can't remember the exact model number, but it is a Socket AM3 board from 2011):
OK but not really great sound with head phones at low volumes. Starts distorting the sound heavily if you turn up the volume. On this board, I added a discrete sound card again...
I think you mean Digital (DEC) which had an Alpha based workstation.
Actually I meant the Vobis Highscreen Alpha 5000 from 1997. Which was not an original DEC. It was a (presumably much cheaper, but still at the price of a high end 80486) machine designed by (for?) Vobis, a German retailer.
We had a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity during the Vista fiasco but gained almost no ground because the Linux desktop was virtually unusable during that period because of PulseAudio and other disasters. We get another chance handed to us gift wrapped and we are racing to implement the exact same tablet madness before Win8 ships. Almost like someone at Microsoft is paying people to work in our camp to make sure we don't threaten them or something.
Well, Ubuntu is doing something along those lines (cough... Unity). That hurts, because Ubuntu used to be the flagship for newbie-friendly distributions :-(
Otherwise, there are really too many different distributions to make such a blanket statement. Debian for instance is switching to the XFCE desktop in Wheezy, that is very much not tablet madness.
On tablets as such, there is Android which is half Linux, half proprietary (but Google is usually open-sourcing the proprietary half after a few months, kudos for that). Android is doing very well. The biggest problem here are the hardware vendors with their tendency towards locked bootloaders.
There seems to be very little activity in terms of non-Android Linux tablets. With a few minutes on Google, I could only find the Vivaldi (http://makeplaylive.com/), and it is still at the preorder stage.
I think beating back Linux on netbooks was mostly a matter of network effects, as defined by this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
The dirt-cheap Windows Starter Edition eliminated the price advantage of Linux, which had motivated many people to try it out. After that, it was a matter of sticking to the familiar system, which also had the familiar software.
But then again, Microsoft acted fast in the netbook "affair". There was some short-lived interest in Linux, but Linux never got anywhere near 5% of the installed base, let alone 30%. With more market share, it might get more of the network effects as well and the change might be permanent.
Re: Apple: ;-)
You are right, StatCounter GlobalStats shows them at 13% in North America for OS operating systems (7% worldwide), with a long term trend towards more. And I don't even have the impression that their main focus is on the desktop. Sounds like a competitor whom Microsoft doesn't want to open more doors
Re: Commodore and Atari:
As far as I can remember, falling behind on the hardware side in the 1990s had a lot to do with their demise. There was a quite rapid development on the PC side which Commodore and Atari could not quite follow. And a few MIPS more was still considered a big deal back then, one well-known retailer even tried to market an Alpha machine in a PC case to private end users. So it was not only about software, and MS-DOS by itself was certainly not something that could drive people to enthusiasm.
Maybe the network effects mentioned above made the difference, but I can't tell for sure because I did not have much interest in business computing back then.
I think with Linux in particular, they may come to regret "temporarily" and intentionally giving some market share away. IMHO Linux on the desktop already does a lot of things quite well and would be suitable for many organizations as a Windows replacement. I think many who switch "temporarily" won't come back.
I believe MS has chosen a risky but very very intelligent approach.
It is probably their best chance at getting a foot into the door with the growing tablet market. In other words, not a bad strategy if you believe that the future of computing is in tablets and mobile phones.
But the risks are significant too: :-)
If they alienate too many desktop users, Apple, Linux and Open Source in general may get enough of a boost to come out of the 5% marketshare corner (on the desktop) and seriously threaten Microsoft's traditional cash cows. Interesting times ahead
Windows 8 I'm sure will build on the reliability but will also add an additional layer of complexity that will alienate the less technical users. OS X is similar in this respect - completely reliable..until the point that it fails in which case most people are pissing into the wind.
It might also alienate some technical, but not support-specialized users. People like me (software developer) who usually do their own administration, but not often enough to stay in practice with the finer points of tweaking the OS.
There are two classes of people whom I expect to have no big problem:
1) IT professionals who do babysit computers for a living. As in being sysadmins or higher level support guys. I think they'll get enough exposure to learn the new concepts reasonably fast and stay in practice.
2) The non-technical end users for whom Windows XP was already too complex. They have to call a support guy either way.
With Vista, the problems reported in the IT press were not so much about the paradigm shift, but mostly about sloppy programming and lack of drivers. Besides, there are credible reports that SP1 fixed most of the problems. So Vistas problem were solvable by improving the existing code, rather than redesigning everything. ;-)
And yes, Windows 7 is very similar to Vista in architecture and GUI concept. So Windows 7 could be viewed as Vista SP3 with a new name to evade the bad reputation of Vista
Now if Win9 will only refine the formerly-known-as-Metro interface but still refuse to backtrack, Microsoft may see a "Vista effect" that endures for the lifetime of Windows 9, with lots of users sticking to Windows 7. Even that won't kill Windows 9 outright, but it might give Apple and Linux a chance to grab more market share on the desktop,
I read a lot of David Weber, though I wish he'd get on with the Honorverse and with Dahak and Safehold.
He is still writing new novels in the Honorverse and the Dahak series.
The Honorverse is up to 19 novels (plus a few anthologies), 13 of those in the main storyline with Honor. The latest one was released in March 2012.
Safehold has five novels released, number 6 is in the works (release planned for September 2012).
Only Dahak is pretty much dead, judging by the release dates.
You may check for yourself here: http://www.davidweber.net/books
I liked most of that trilogy, but the ending was just weak.
First we get told in little more than an aside that humanity found some allies and managed to chase the Inhibitors off. Which should have been the grand finale or even a forth volume. Defintely a missed opportunity for a great space opera.
Then the same humanity runs from some out-of-control terraformers that should have been a much lesser threat than the Inhibitors due to their lack of cunning aggression. WTF???