I expect the tiles based desktop in Windows 8 will make if much less likely people will try to use other browsers compared with past OS's. Everything about Windows 8 seems to be aimed at dumbing down the user experience.
Windows 8 Dev build
- Thread starter deeFive
- Start date
Blazkowicz
Legend
being Windows, there will be a crapload of freewares to give you back a start menu and whatnot, also geeks can develop their own tiles.
you maybe can make a shutdown/power tile, a command prompt tile, a tile that shows a X11 remote app running on linux?
if settings are again buried in a different way, just call the applets from the command line or from a run box if it's still there. so windows 7 made it hard to find the network settings but launching ncpa.cpl still works, likewise devmgmt.msc, compmgmt.msc etc.
I'll have to try it though.
you maybe can make a shutdown/power tile, a command prompt tile, a tile that shows a X11 remote app running on linux?
if settings are again buried in a different way, just call the applets from the command line or from a run box if it's still there. so windows 7 made it hard to find the network settings but launching ncpa.cpl still works, likewise devmgmt.msc, compmgmt.msc etc.
I'll have to try it though.
Blazkowicz
Legend
it will be interesting to read about new AMD FX benchmarks , there ought to be a Bulldozer-aware scheduler.
, there ought to be a Bulldozer-aware scheduler.have any powerful-ish (as good as the current consoles) ARM desktop devices been announced yet? as after spending some time with the developer preview, the only way i see win 8 being a success is if it works on ALL ms platforms in the same way (pc, phone, embedded and xbox). Also can you write directx home/Live tiles?
hoom
Veteran
Well we managed to get this on one of our testbench PCs.
All I can say is I'm really not looking forward to trying to help our 1st level guys with talking customers through doing anything with it
Basically all the phone support people in the world need to get together & blockade all the MS offices worldwide until they agree to rationalise this UI so that it actually makes some logical sense.
eg from the Metro interface you can get to full Control Panel which opens in Windows Desktop.
But from the Windows Desktop you can't actually get to it by mouse clicks other than by going to the Metro interface.
The Settings section that you can get to from the Windows Desktop actually has pretty much no settings.
When I installed Flash on the Metro IE I couldn't work out whether it was actually installing or what.
Gave up & started doing something else -> Oh look UAC wants my permission to let the Flash player install just sitting there on the Windows Desktop.
Metro IE isn't linked to Windows Desktop IE so had to reinstall Flash on that one too.
I managed to crash the Metro IE. It went whitescreen & completely unresponsive. I was able to switch away & other programs including Windows Desktop IE ran OK. Metro IE only started working again on reboot.
All I can say is I'm really not looking forward to trying to help our 1st level guys with talking customers through doing anything with it
Basically all the phone support people in the world need to get together & blockade all the MS offices worldwide until they agree to rationalise this UI so that it actually makes some logical sense.
eg from the Metro interface you can get to full Control Panel which opens in Windows Desktop.
But from the Windows Desktop you can't actually get to it by mouse clicks other than by going to the Metro interface.
The Settings section that you can get to from the Windows Desktop actually has pretty much no settings.
When I installed Flash on the Metro IE I couldn't work out whether it was actually installing or what.
Gave up & started doing something else -> Oh look UAC wants my permission to let the Flash player install just sitting there on the Windows Desktop.
Metro IE isn't linked to Windows Desktop IE so had to reinstall Flash on that one too.
I managed to crash the Metro IE. It went whitescreen & completely unresponsive. I was able to switch away & other programs including Windows Desktop IE ran OK. Metro IE only started working again on reboot.
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I don't think you can directly compile SSE intrinsics (or x86 SSE asm) to ARM. ARM's NEON vector instruction set is not identical to SSE. NEON itself isn't that bad, it's not as advanced as AVX, but is pretty much comparable to SSE. Of course it's up to the hardware manufacturer to decide how much transistors they use for vector execution units. There are (also) many x86 CPUs that split wide vector instructions to two half wide parts (P4, Bobcat, Bulldozer) and thus have half theoretical throughput. Half rate vector units are still much better than having none at all. According to ARM documents you can get over 7x perf improvements by NEON optimizations (and 2x-3x perf boost is pretty common).
Window-key+pause/break - does this still work? In Win7 you can do this and click "Control panel home" in the upper left corner.Well we managed to get this on one of our testbench PCs.
All I can say is I'm really not looking forward to trying to help our 1st level guys with talking customers through doing anything with it
Basically all the phone support people in the world need to get together & blockade all the MS offices worldwide until they agree to rationalise this UI so that it actually makes some logical sense.
eg from the Metro interface you can get to full Control Panel which opens in Windows Desktop.
But from the Windows Desktop you can't actually get to it by mouse clicks other than by going to the Metro interface.
The Settings section that you can get to from the Windows Desktop actually has pretty much no settings.
When I installed Flash on the Metro IE I couldn't work out whether it was actually installing or what.
Gave up & started doing something else -> Oh look UAC wants my permission to let the Flash player install just sitting there on the Windows Desktop.
Metro IE isn't linked to Windows Desktop IE so had to reinstall Flash on that one too.
I managed to crash the Metro IE. It went whitescreen & completely unresponsive. I was able to switch away & other programs including Windows Desktop IE ran OK. Metro IE only started working again on reboot.
Hmh, how did you do that?
Installing pluging like Silverlight or Flash to Metro IE shouldn't be possible.
hoom
Veteran
Interesting.
Will check up on the status of that when I get to work tomorrow.
Pretty sure I just browsed to the Flash download page & ran the installer.
Possible that I was confusing downloading the plugin from Metro IE -> Running it but only installing on the Windows IE?
I find myself very confused about quite what is going on with Win 8
Will check up on the status of that when I get to work tomorrow.
Pretty sure I just browsed to the Flash download page & ran the installer.
Possible that I was confusing downloading the plugin from Metro IE -> Running it but only installing on the Windows IE?
I find myself very confused about quite what is going on with Win 8
For most products, but Microsoft products in particular, don't expect a product to be half-decent before SP1. No guarantee that Sp1 will be a good product version, mind you, but before that version you're taking unnecessary risks.
Now this here, is the very very first public test version. So that's WAY worse. I'm sure they'll get it more or less right eventually ... And these early versions (should) help them get the necessary feedback for that.
Now this here, is the very very first public test version. So that's WAY worse.
I'm sure they'll get it more or less right eventually ... And these early versions (should) help them get the necessary feedback for that.IMHO, Win7 RTM was much better than Vista RTM. SP1 for Win7 was not a must waiting for.For most products, but Microsoft products in particular, don't expect a product to be half-decent before SP1. No guarantee that Sp1 will be a good product version, mind you, but before that version you're taking unnecessary risks.
Now this here, is the very very first public test version. So that's WAY worse.
What a cop-out.
Windows 7 is Windows 5.1 internally, versus Vista's 5.0. It wasn't that different from Windows 2000 vs XP - for the most part optimisations and (admittedly significant) user interface improvements.
But if it makes you feel better, yes, Windows 7 was actually quite good. I switched from Vista to Windows 7 very quickly (got a free upgrade as I bought a machine a few months before 7 was released). I like Windows 7 a lot.
It doesn't change my statement though, that if you can and you are a business user that depends on everything working as expected, you should wait until SP1.
I really like the Windows 8 Dev build's Metro UI but I'm not liking how the desktop side is currently handled. The gap between those two is IMHO too large and some of the strange restrictions doesn't help. For example it's nearly impossible to create a Metro UI app which talks to an app running in the desktop. This is because the web requests from Metro UI can't target localhost.
Building for example an IRC client with the Metro UI isn't possible at the moment. Metro supports only the web sockets which can't be used to open a socket connection to the IRC server. The desktop side can use normal sockets but because we can't communicate between the two sides, it's not possible to create the IRC client by combining a desktop side back-end and a Metro side UI.
Building for example an IRC client with the Metro UI isn't possible at the moment. Metro supports only the web sockets which can't be used to open a socket connection to the IRC server. The desktop side can use normal sockets but because we can't communicate between the two sides, it's not possible to create the IRC client by combining a desktop side back-end and a Metro side UI.
So even if you program your Metro app in C++ and WinRT, you can't do normal sockets? That's the first time I have heard anything like that. Or are you talking only HTML5+JS Metro apps?
All the WinRT programming languages share the same framework, so it shouldn't matter if the app is written with JS, C# or C++. The situation is identical to the .NET Framework where the same "platform" can be used from many different programming languages like C# and VB.NET.
All the Metro applications are run in sandbox and they can access only the features which WinRT provide. So for example with file operations, even if you're using C++, you can't directly access the files inside the user's hard disk but you have to use the APIs "projected" from WinRT for your language. Because WinRT doesn't have the Socket-api but only WebSockets, our sandboxed app is limited to WebSockets.
But please let me know if I've got this wrong. I haven't had that much time yet to play with the WinRT and I've mainly just read through the available APIs.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
So it sounds like apps for the MetroUI in Win8 are limited by stricter security standards which are enforced through the WinRT framework? I'm assuming that's why accessible sockets are so limited?
Regards,
SB
Regards,
SB
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