SourceMicrosoft confirms Windows 8's October launch date
Microsoft has revealed that Windows 8 will be released on 26 October.
And I'm still using XP...
SourceMicrosoft confirms Windows 8's October launch date
Microsoft has revealed that Windows 8 will be released on 26 October.
Hey, after watching the keynote, I think you're right... certainly makes sense considering some of the weird interface decisions they've made.StarBound wrote:Built for Kinect?
I hear Office 2013 is going to be web 2.0 and will run from within IE10rustypup wrote:wait until you see "office 2013"...
om my godjamin_za wrote:run from within IE10
Sojourn wrote:cant wait for it !!
+1. Eating my own hands would be less unpleasant....same goes for windows 8 and its catastrophically stupid interfacerustypup wrote:wait until you see "office 2013"...
*stab*stab*stab*stab*stab*stab*stab*
(Source here.)It's exceedingly rare for me to lay any sort of praise on a Microsoft product at all here on slashdot but it does happen once in a great while; maybe three or six times in the past decade out of over 6,000 posts. It's going to happen here for a moment so if you W/E folks want to save a screenshot of a post to throw back at me later, now is the time. If you're hovering over that overrated mod you might just want to hang back for a wee bit and maybe read all the way through and review my comment history before you decide I'm a Redmond astroturfer. If you're one of my /. fans, you may want to turn your head as it's going to get ugly. Let's pause for a deep breath before we dig in.
In my experience in my labs on diverse hardware the most recent W8 demo publicly released is considerably more performant than W7 in every case - and maybe even better than XP, and credible reports anticipate an even more performant and responsive retail product. Specifically the removal of Aero and related chrome speeds up user interaction. The removal of several background tasks and the streamlining of others add other enhancements. Memory footprint is smaller. I/O operations to boot and log on to the domain are consolidated and reduced. Boot time is thereby reduced to something approaching reasonable even on older hardware. There may be some improved things happening in the scheduler too. It should allow the Enterprise System Architect to, for example, budget about 2x as many VDI clients per CPU core, and 1/3 less RAM per VDI desktop, and reduce the storage IOPs budged by 1/3 as well - though storage IOPs are notoriously oversubscribed for VDI because storage IOPs are expensive as hell. For some installations that's millions of dollars in hardware savings.
But wait! There's more! For normal hardware based desktop and laptop users these improvements also apply, but there's more. There are also broad driver enhancements that impact a vast spectrum of historical hardware - offerring improved I/O, better graphics performance, more reliable and performant interaction even with hardware up to five years old. Driver support goes deeper into history I believe than any Windows version has ever gone before, and broader across more brands. Yes, there will still be legacy devices, including some ancient printers and webcams that came in a white box, that don't have drivers - and if you have legacy devices that aren't supported you're out of luck. But generally not only are modern devices supported - they're supported better than any new version of Windows has ever supported them. If all your hardware is supported the $39 upgrade to W8 from even XP or Vista is a performance improvement that might get you out of buying new gear, giving you the performance boost of a 2-year upgrade - and get you the "Pro" version when you've been plodding along with a "home version" or worse and Media Center as a download too! If that's spare money an SSD and a couple Nexus 7 tablets or a Transformer Infinity or SGS III are all great places to put that money you would otherwise give to HP, Dell, Acer or Lenovo, and then you can have both a performant PC and the Pretty Amazing New Stuff!
For once Microsoft remembered to put some bait on their hook. In short, some Microsoft code geeks got retro and started doing stuff everybody else was doing 5-15 years ago. There's some other stuff in the box too and I'll talk about it in other posts. But for once I'm going to give the Microsoft software engineers some praise and not take it immediately away. They found out how to operate a performance analyzer, how to trim some fat, how many legacy devices to support in an OS revision. They figured out what a waste that UI chrome was. They read up on what a framebuffer is. They figured out that 5,000,000 128-byte I/Os at boot time could and probably should be consolidated somehow. They figured out how to get the fixes for that past their management.
I'm not a fan of the company and I'm not ever going to be. I'm not a fan of this product either for reasons I'll go into in another post. This is not an endorsement for the product. I wouldn't recommend it either as a new buy or an upgrade because of those other reasons which may or may not (probably not, to be honest) matter to most people. But on a purely technical basis there is good solid work going on here both in designs and internals and it should be recognized. There are some gnomes in Redmond still able to and struggling to produce good product and this one time some of their efforts finally saw the light of day despite the maneuvering of their "strategic thinkers". It's "better." Nicely done whoever you are.
I will now return to my regularly scheduled Microsoft bashing. Don't expect this to happen ever again.
The forum doesn't relate to the forum in any way any more...Ron2K wrote:...I no longer relate to this forum community in any way...
Some of us don't upgrade just for the sake of upgrading Lemmetjie. I'm still 'stuck' with XP on my work PC and laptop because that's what they shipped with and the software I use run on them.Bladerunner wrote:It's the same amount of nonsensical babbling we see with every upgrade users have to perform.
-----snip
Citation needed.THE_STIG wrote:@Ron.
Now yes there are some good things about win 8. But I am sorry, that interface just completely ruins all of it as you have to use it to get to what you want. Everyday you will be greeted by its ghastliness and stupidity so who cares how good it is underneath when it is covered in a veneer of turd
What he said.Ron2K wrote:
- Spoiler (show)
This is exactly where Blade's earlier comment fits in.THE_STIG wrote:@Ron.
Now yes there are some good things about win 8. But I am sorry, that interface just completely ruins all of it as you have to use it to get to what you want. Everyday you will be greeted by its ghastliness and stupidity so who cares how good it is underneath when it is covered in a veneer of turd
The only time you'll really be greeted by it's ghastliness is when you open the start menu. And from what I've seen in that lifehacker vid it already looks a lot better than the developer preview (that was bad). I recall myself downgrading the Metro interface to "Homo", but as soon as you use it on a phone or tablet, it all makes sense.THE_STIG wrote:@Ron.
Now yes there are some good things about win 8. But I am sorry, that interface just completely ruins all of it as you have to use it to get to what you want. Everyday you will be greeted by its ghastliness and stupidity so who cares how good it is underneath when it is covered in a veneer of turd