64K???
Posted on 04/29/2012 6:50:37 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Microsoft says that so far the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is twice as popular at this point than its predecessor Windows 7 was based on the number of downloads. The company didn't say how many downloads that is, but claimed it is used by millions of people per day.
Meanwhile, the next prerelease version of Windows 8 will be available in about six weeks, inching closer to a final product that is still expected to launch this fall.
Microsoft's Windows Chief Steven Sinofsky announced that the Windows 8 Release Preview version will be ready for download the first week of June, with no date specified, according to a tweet on the Building Windows 8 @BuildWindows8 Twitter account.
Sinofsky gave no details about what the difference will be between the Consumer Preview and the Release Preview. He also made no mention of when or if there will be a preview of Windows RT, the version of Windows 8 that will be sold only in combination with hardware that is based on ARM processors.
Is it a toaster? Is it a refrigerator?
Apple CEO Tim Cook came up with a zinger that will have staying power among critics of attempts to put Windows 8 on both laptops and tablets. "Anything can be forced to converge," Cook says, "but the problem is that products are about tradeoffs, and you begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left doesn't please anyone. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going be pleasing to the user."
He was responding to a question about whether Apple would converge its laptops and tablets, but added a little hip check that seemed aimed at Microsoft: "We are not going to that party, but others might from a defensive point of view."
BYOD less expensive with Windows 8
Windows 8 licensing will charge for non-Windows devices to access Windows devices on corporate networks. If workers use their own Windows laptops and tablets, no extra charge. The arrangement seems like it would penalize BYOD users of, say, iPads, but that's not what Microsoft has in mind, the company's Vice President of Worldwide Partner Sales and Marketing Jon Roskill tells Customer Relationship News.
Running Microsoft applications on non-Windows devices is a problem for businesses, he is quoted as saying: "This is a direct way to help actually solve that business problem." And that kind of help doesn't come free. "We want to be paid and monetized for our value-add."
Send your apps
Microsoft plans to set up sites in 38 countries for submitting Metro-style apps to Windows Store, the online market for applications that cater to the Windows 8 platform. Along with the 33 new sites comes a further segmenting of categories of applications, from five to 26. The Microsoft blog announcing the changes doesn't specify the locations or the new categories.
Factoid
No saying whether this is statistically significant, but advertising site Chitika posts an article that says 0.13% of computers that access its ad network are Windows 8 machines and 99.63% of all the hits the network got were from Windows machines of one type or another. The company doesn't break out the number for Apple's OS X Mountain Lion, but says it's about half what Windows 8 tallied. The study was based on hundreds of millions of ad impressions, Chitika says.
Self-selecting poll
PC Advisor asked its readers whether the will upgrade their current PCs to Windows 8 and 44% say no, 30% say yes. The rest will only upgrade when they buy a new PC. Some 18% say when they buy a new PC, it won't be Windows.
Anyone who comes can fill out the publications poll questionnaire.
Rumor
Windows 8 Beta posts a rumor that Huawei, the Chinese maker of networking and telecom gear, is working on a Windows 8 tablet. That's it for details. The company already makes some tablets, and a lot of other vendors are rumored to be prepping Windows 8 tablets as well, based on the standard Windows 8 desktop version or on Windows RT, the version for ARM processors.
The one thing that Microsoft has never done is to poll its “power” users and technically knowledgeable users. Instead it asks other corporations what they want, like DRM.
It would be very interesting indeed to just compile a listing of say 100+ things that Windows has and does, with just four possible responses.
Like it, don’t want it, needs improvement (specify), and other (specify).
Then after an area to explain any answers, have an essay area of wanted features.
The poll would be clear that all poll results and actions taken from ideas and derivatives are property of Microsoft.
Since it would be limited to power users and technically knowledgeable users, it would eliminate a lot of stupid answers. Importantly, it would help Microsoft to both improve on and streamline Windows to eliminate a bunch of its archaic and unwanted baggage.
What exactly do you like about it? I just find annoying changes from XP including that a few of my programs now longer run on it. In fact I just had to resurrect an old XP laptop so I could run some TI DSP development programs which are not supported on Win 7. My Encyclopedia Britannica stuff no longer works, nor my Wilson Poker. I also find the non-standard facecards so annoying that I cannot play FreeCell anymore.
ML/NJ
RE: Microsoft says
I stopped reading right there.
_______________
Just curious, would you stop reading if you read the phrase “Apple says”.
I can't speak to whether or not Vista was a "disaster" in the marketplace.
But I've been running it on the machine I'm on for the last four years without a glitch of any kind. Very stable and reliable.
Because MSFT won. America has a cultural fondness for underdogs.
Simple:
XP crashed a less than Win95, but it still crashed on a regular basis. At least once per week. Especially when I ran memory intensive programs (like MatLab).
Windows 7 has been remarkably stable. Maybe one crash every 3-4 months or so. Really, not frequent enough for me to even be sure. I like the look and feel of it better too.
I’m not a regular Mac or LINUX at all... but I wonder if anyone knows how often these other operating systems crash compared to Windows 7...
I have Vista at work. The longer I leave it running the slower it gets. After 3 days, it needs a reboot or the performance is untenable.
Don’t have that problem with either XP or Windows 7. As I noted earlier, XP crashed more often, but at least its performance didn’t degrade over time. Windows 7 is fine.
64K???
Don’t bother with switching to Win 8 until Service Pack 1 gets released. Why? Because Microsoft uses its customers a guinea pigs to debug their new and improved OS software.
Apple technology: you may find better, but you will never pay more.
The other is using the free virtual xp mode in 7 pro, ultimate and enterprise. This gives you a virtual space in which to run xp programs and works great.
It will probably run your Encyclopedia Britannica stuff and your poker and the version of Free-cell that you are used to.
Windows 7 is the most secure, stable, visually appealing and powerful version of Windows yet.
I had a UNIX data server running > 3 years a couple months ago.
Honestly, I'd like to meet the consumer who owns a Zune, a Windows Phone, and uses Bing as their favored search engine. All of those are just awful. It's pretty obvious by now that the modern consumer has adopted either an Android phone or an iPhone, uses an iPod/iPad, and doesn't even remember that Bing even exists.
In IT, corporations are getting along just fine with their rickety and aging deployments of WinXP, Win2003/2008 Servers, Office 2003/2007, ancient Visual Basic homebrewed apps running on SQL2000/2003, and assorted Blackberry devices while allowing the integration of worker's personal communication devices. The lousy economy has had a profound effect on deferring infrastructure upgrades that MSFT and PC makers relied upon for their revenue stream back in the '90s-'2000s. I know of so many corporations who are in 'if it's still holding together, DON'T touch it'. Many of them have even turned Windows Update off by policy.
Gotta really wonder how much longer the cubicle farms will have a 'grandpa box' cubic rectangle PC with it's 750w power supply and constant IT tech support for each cubicle worker with a per-employee cost of $1,200 to $2,000 -- and that's if, and only if, the modern American IT worker hasn't already had their flippin' job offshored to some coconut-head train top riding Vindaloo in India or Bengaledesh.
The Metro interface makes it work on touch screens, but makes it LABORIOUS with a mouse.
Sounds more than a bit like Gnome 3. Version 3 looks like it's made for a tablet, and it's quite annoying to use on a real computer.
I’m running 7-64 on my desktop of my everyday machine in the office and XP (tablet) on my laptop/tablet. I like both just fine. I still run Office 97 on my 7-64 machine, it does great for me. I also had some old printers and scanners that FINALLY came out with 7 drivers, they work better than ever now.
I have an I-Pad. I like the I-Pad but don’t like the way you have to access everything through I-tunes. I look forward to Win-8 on a tablet so that I can easily talk to my other machines.
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