Windows 8 Early Build Hints At Apple, WebOS Competitor - EWeek 375
Microsoft's next Windows could be a cross-platform OS in the style of Apple's iOS or Hewlett-Packard's webOS, if supposed early builds are to be believed... "Bloggers Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott, in a series of April postings on Rivera’s Within Windows blog, have described the various features of what they claim is an early build of Windows 8: an Office-style ribbon integrated into Windows Explorer, complete with tools for viewing libraries, manipulating images and managing drive assets; an unlock screen that harkens to the 'Metro' design style already present in Windows Phone 7; an 'immersive' user interface and a built-in PDF reader they call 'Modern Reader.'"
Different from mine (Score:5, Informative)
It is even more annoying than WinXP in so far as something small as the file manager in Win7. You can select the files, it tells you how many you selected, but it no longer says how many MB / GB of files you selected.
Odd - mine shows the size of the selected files at the bottom. I'm running Win 7-64bit Ultimate.
Re:Change for change sake (Score:5, Informative)
If you select more than 20 items, size does no longer appear.
Its apperantly for performance reasons. The same reason why it does no longer show the size of the curren directly in the status bar.
That is for me the only thing i hate on W7. And its so useless a restriction, too.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sure I can find a lot of other stuff that's wrong with windows when thinking about it...
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
efficient usage of system resources = How does 7/R2 fail to use systems resources in a efficient way?
stability - I can't seam to get my systems to have stability issues, how do I reproduce this?
file system - What is wrong with NTFS as implemented by 7/R2?
decouple GUI from core - Has already been done. Server Core
decouple apps from core - Which apps?
simple remote access - RDP and other methods are already built in.
get rid of the sick registry - In what way is it sick?
customization - In what ways?
documentation - What needs to be improved?
adhere to common open standards - Which standards?
lower hardware requirements - It can run on very expensive systems. Exactly how low are you talking about?
better modularization - Explain this please.
remove unneeded services/bloatware - Which ones are you talking about?
provide a powerful shell - Powershell
enhance security/permission features - Example?
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
Server Core. Haha aha ha ha. Yeah, great. Now get a unix OS and see what a real headless/GUI-less system can do. It needs SSH, for secure remote login, remote file copying and remote command execution. Of course, somebody at Microsoft is right now programming a really shit set of updates for powershell to try and copy SSH, but they'll get it wrong, naturally.
Powershell is crap. The outrageously long commands they've created are a really bad joke, especially compared to the nice simple single-purpose commands of the Unix world.
The same hardware running OS X (hackintosh or Apple) tends to outlast Windows 7 in battery drain tests. I.e, Mac OS X does some basic stuff so much more efficiently that it translates in to lower power draw for the same tasks. Windows 7 needs to be more efficient.
The registry is crap, but it works. The WOW32 registry is a bad joke dreamed up by fools.
Search is crap. It often uses >1GB memory on a 4GB system and causes huge amounts of paging. This is probably the main reason that OS X is more energy efficient. I'm a programmer, and I've spent a lot of time researching where the memory goes on my systems, and I've come to the conclusion that Windows search is the culprit. It's just shit. Apart from that, it can NEVER seem to find stuff inside files in the filesystem -- at least not as well as spotlight.
I'll throw in a few others -- IIS, shit. MMC, shit. EventViewer, fucking hell, when did that get so slow? IE, shit, get it out of my default install, Run As user/administrator holy crap, that's bad - Windows /really/ needs a sudo clone now that the (sensible) default is to not run everything as admin. UAC is NOT sudo.
Final thing off the top of my head -- those stupid Windows 7 screen-edge 'gestures', the Aero Alt-Tab thing and the absolutely retarded shake-to-minimize-everything-else 'gesture'. If I could turn them off, it'd not be so bad, but I can't find out where to get rid of this intrusive 'feature creep/trying to add as many things to a checklist as possible' crap.
Re:Change for change sake (Score:3, Informative)
If you select more than 20 items, size does no longer appear.
Technically correct, except you forgot to mention that a link then appears, which you can click to "Show Details". The total size then appears.
Its apperantly for performance reasons.
Lemme guess...if MS had allowed you select 20+ objects, requiring a few seconds each time to calculate the total size each time you did that, you would be the one screaming how slow and laggy W7 is. Some people you just can't please...especially the ones who have decided to hate you no matter what you do.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Security: read this [wikipedia.org] and check out what Exec Shield and PaX do
Windows has full NX bit support. It also has ASLR, and a far better implementation of it than either Linux or OS X (as evidenced by pwn2own results).
What desktop linux distros ship with PaX?
Interoperability: more effort into native POSIX support. Mingw32, Cygwin, SFU, [...] shouldn't have to exist; this is a consequence of too much difference, most of it deliberately engineered for vendor lock-in purposes.
The reason why Win32 is not POSIX-compatible is not due to anything "deliberately engineered" - it's a consequence of backwards compatibility applied to the extreme.
That said, SUA (the new name for SFU) is native POSIX support. It does that by completely ditching Win32 subsystem, and using a POSIX subsystem implemented directly on top of NT kernel (unlike Cygwin, which tries to implement POSIX on top of Win32 - which is very hard due to many mismatches).
Mingw has nothing to do with POSIX at all, it is simply a port of gcc to Win32.
"Real" command shell: if you think PowerShell is not a joke, then perhaps you're acquainted with its super-compact syntax [stevex.net]?
Do you realize that all common commands have short aliases out of the box, most of them in fact taken from Unix shell? Sure, you can write "get-childitem", but you can also write "ls" - and all sane people do. Long names exist because PowerShell has a strict naming guide for all commands to improve discoverability (you can often guess the name of command you need by looking at the names of other commands that you know), and this is applied to common commands such as "cp" for the sake of consistency.
Oh yes, "write-output" is aliased as "echo", and "write-host" is aliased to "write". And "write-host" is a very different thing - it writes directly to the host (PowerShell can be used as a scripting language; host is the program that does so). Normal shell scripts should use "write-output" (i.e. "echo"), which writes to stdout as God intended.
A much bigger WTF is the decision to use a back-tick as a line continuation indicator. e.g., if you want to insert a linebreak into an echo statement (oh wait, it's fucking called write-host . So elegant!) you do so like this ... No \n.
What does "\n" have to do with it? In Unix shell, line continuation would be \ followed by end-of-line. "\n" is when you want to insert a newline in the output. In PowerShell, you write "`n" for the same.
The obvious reason why PowerShell does not use "\" as escape character is because it is used as the path separator by OS. They had to use something else simply because otherwise writing out paths would be very painful (and they can't just use "/" for that because that would be inconsistent with other applications - you couldn't copy/paste a path from, say, Explorer into PS then). Even so, other than the different escape character, all escape sequences are the same as in Unix shell.
Some more absurdities are move-item instead of cmd's move, copy-item instead of cmd's copy, and rename-item instead of cmd's rename. A command-line scripting language should be file-oriented from top to bottom, yet these -item suffixes are in some of the most commonly-used commands!
See above regarding consistent naming. As well, PowerShell is not file-oriented - it's object-oriented and object-tree oriented. Files are objects, directories are lists of objects, and filesystems are trees of objects. This lets it deal with any hierarchical data structure in the same way.
As well, "copy-item" is aliased to "cp", "rename-item" is aliased to "ren", and "move-item" is aliased to "mv"
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
By that argument, all version of Linux are just the previous version of Linux with a new skin.
There was actually a lot of under the covers changes in Windows 7, and the kernel changed substantially. Those aren't things you can see though, so you look at it and say "It's just windows with a new skin" because the skin is all you can see.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
This is a complete and utter lie. In 2008 the only system left standing was Ubuntu
The quality of ASLR implementation is not the sole factor that decides who wins the contest, so looking at winners is not giving you any information. But if you read the interviews with participants, they did explain some aspects of making attacks easier, and ASLR was specifically covered. For example, here [tomshardware.com] is one from 2009, and I quote:
"ASLR is also very tough to defeat. This is the way the process randomizes the location of code in a process. Between these two hurdles, no one knows how to execute arbitrary code in Firefox or IE 8 in Vista right now. For the record, Leopard has neither of these features, at least implemented effectively. In the exploit I won Pwn2Own with, I knew right where my shellcode was located and I knew it would execute on the heap for me. ...
And just so that our readers know, ASLR is implemented in Windows Vista (but not XP) and Vista SP1 is required for the full ASLR. Leopard had some binaries placed randomly, but Snow Leopard is rumored to introduce full ASLR. On Linux, kernel 2.6.12 has a weak form of ASLR like Leopard does, but PaX and ExecShield will implement Windows Vista-like ASLR."
and since then no GNU/Linux has been in the contest.
Which basically means that we don't know how it really stacks up against Windows and OS X. By the way, do you know why they don't do Linux? Quote: [internetnews.com]
"Linux is not an operating system that has widespread use with any one particular distribution, flavor or configuration. In general Linux is still a server-based operating system, people do use it on the desktop, but you can't go to BestBuy and buy Linux with a specific distro on it that everyone uses that has widespread market share. If we were to include Linux, we'd have even more controversy and we just don't want to deal it."
So it's not because it's somehow magically invulnerable.
As for your other points, I wouldn't trust a liar like you about anything.
Fanboi much? You don't need to "trust" me on anything - you've got Google to check facts, and (hopefully) brain to check conclusions. Use them.
Of course, if you want to stick fingers in your ears and go "Lalala I can't hear you, Linux is the best OS in all respects because how could it possibly be otherwise?", then you're welcome to do so - you can join the company of creationists and other similar religious fundies over there.