Windows 8 Discussion

[long2]

Personally I think it looks great.

[Sackman]

I'm going to put this bluntly: gamers aren't important. It's even more of a niche than tablets are (see tablets' adoption amongst everything from airlines to boardroom executives). Mobile computing is obviously the way of the future, regardless of whether or not the particular form factor is going to a laptop, smartphone, tablet, or something else. Both Windows and Apple, with Win8 and Lion respectively, have made a large bet on the future of mobile computing by implementing smartphone and tablet-inspired UI elements into their operating system. You may not like the way computing is going, but complaining about its efficiency and calling it a niche market (when you're a gamer... really?) is just wasted breath.

I'm not a gamer, neither am I advocating gaming. Tablets are a niché market, regardless of the size of that market. Gaming is also a niché market. Please understand the meaning of the word - perhaps a dictionary will help you there. Niché does not mean "small".

I was responding to tablets being used for gaming.

I was also making certain people were aware of the speed and efficiency of a keyboard and mouse vs a tablet.

I would love to see how fast you could word process with a tablet vs me at 160wpm+ on a keyboard. I would love to see how fast you could provide a complicated spreadsheet solution using a tablet vs a keyboard and mouse.

Tablet is a gimmick, because it is not a tactile peripheral. It is great for generating media, for viewing media, for phones, for document reading, for browsing... but to suggest that it has more productivity than a keyboard and mouse? That it will eventually surpass them? That is asinine.

If you want to know why I call it a gimmick, get the dictionary again. It is a gimmick because it doesn't do anything a keyboard and mouse cannot, and it doesn't do it faster. Aside from built in accelerometers it's selling point is the fun and "coolness" or "hipness" of being able to touch a screen.

If you are disputing what I have said, you are welcome to do so by yourself.


(p.s. I like tablets, and I like the operating system, and I like being hip. But If I have work to do, it's a keyboard and a mouse - and considering my job is 45+ hours a week of typing and reporting, that my previous job involved network practitioning and IT consultancy in an upcoming business where adoption of a computer based infrastructure was paramount to their growth, and that previously I studied general IT that included IT in the workplace and Systems Analysis and Design, I like to consider myself experienced enough to use myself as a source in discussions around peripheral use, peripheral and device market niché and the comparitive efficiency of peripherals and devices.)

[Sackman]

Grats, cherry picking computing tasks that are irrelevant to 95% of consumers. If you want to run a virtual machine, yeah, you should probably stick with a desktop for now. If you're like every other consumer, though, you're much more interested in running Quickbooks, Excel, Word, or an IDE than you are in running a virtual machine.

P.S. There are smartphones - smartphone, not tablet - with 1GB RAM. It's not so far off.



Again, I don't think games are important (if that's what you're referring to). People who play Crysis are not representative of typical consumers.

Reading through lots more of your responses and I shouldn't really have responded, you're either trolling or far too inexperienced to coherently grasp the computing market.

Not that your being inexperienced is bad nor am I trying to be insulting, but you should probably read up some more and go to workplaces and go to peoples homes and see what people use.

Tablets are great, no doubt about it. But I think you seem to have dropped into a marketing trap whereby you think they will soon make the world turn.

You are partly right by saying smartphones will be very important - partly right because they already are - but there is not much growth available there. Not saying that the market is entirely satured or stagnating, but it's incredibly presumptuous to consider any other market penetration from these devices. Soon they will act as credit cards, perhaps even ID cards, which will make them grow... slightly, but they already own casual gaming, phone/diary/calculator, portable media players - and social cameras, they will keep improving at those, but there are not many other markets they can get hold of and certainly not many markets with the size or influence of the aforementioned.

---------- Post added 2011-09-19 at 04:52 PM ----------

as someone who has a tablet, i don't think they are ever going to replace a desktop, at least not for a very long time (decades), they make great replacements for books, manuals, etc and you can get away with only using a tablet if all you do is browse the web and get email, but they have serious limitations, VM hosting is a good example of what you cant do on a tablet, however, they do make fairly good VDI recievers

personally i use my ipad to supliment my desktop when im away from it, it's much better then my laptop at being portable and granting easy access to the web or whatever else i have on it, but there is a reason i still have a laptop, because for all the cool things that a tablet can do, they cant do any of the cool things a laptop or computer can do

however, what really pisses me off about my ipad is that its made by apple, while the ipad is the best tablet out there, it's held back by the crap coding of it's OS and the fact that apple keeps a tight leash on what you can and cant do with it, and of the 14 computers in my home network, my ipad is the only one that doesn't interface with the others, even my android tablet can at least see my NAS and Printer

this is why im looking forward to W8, if i can run everything with it, then i can have full compatibility among my devices and not have to worry about whether something is stuck on my ipad or my computer and how to transfer between without using itunes

And this is the niche (or rather, USP) of windows 8 as I described earlier - Windows again heading for market domination by allowing all of everyones devices to synchronize and communicate. Windows 8 will be the platform people want to use, because they will be able to communicate their laptops, desktops, windows (and probably android) phones, tablets across networks and the internet and feel very much at home on all of them.

And it will be interesting to see Apple's response to it. As I completely empathise with your frustration and I don't even have an iPad, I can already imagine the annoyance of its inability to communicate with your other devices - or your need to buy apple based peripherals instead of peripherals that can be used on almost every other machine and device out there.

---------- Post added 2011-09-19 at 04:57 PM ----------

I don't really get why people really care about that... Modern computers have 4+ gigs of RAM. I want that memory to be used optimally and to full extent, that is the reason I bought it in the first place! For example, it is common for Unix (e.g. OS X) to preallocate RAM for future tasks, so that programs can be launched very fast. I have almost no free RAM on my Mac, but I have 15+ applications open at all times, with 30+ Chrome browser tabs and I can switches between the different programs almost instantly. If windows 8 can perform on a similar level, people should be happy about it, no matter how much RAM is reported as being taken by the system.

So far, the preview of the Windows 8 has horrible usability for desktops and is an UI mess. If MS will force this form of UI onto desktop users, I predict significant increase of Mac and Linux users who would want a "real" desktop OS.

Because - 404MB of 4GB is 10%, and 281MB is 7% of your total RAM (obvious approx'es). Because Windows 8 is not just a desktop operating system. Consider having the same OS on a tablet with 1GB or less RAM. Imagine a tablet with 1GB of RAM, this is an extra 124MB of RAM it is able to utilise.

[glo]

Anyone know what the current driver support is like? Are Windows 7 drivers (mostly) adequate?

Debating whether or not to test this now or when beta hits.

[chaud]

As long as it is a desktop and not a laptop you should be fine.

[mafao]

Because - 404MB of 4GB is 10%, and 281MB is 7% of your total RAM (obvious approx'es). Because Windows 8 is not just a desktop operating system. Consider having the same OS on a tablet with 1GB or less RAM. Imagine a tablet with 1GB of RAM, this is an extra 124MB of RAM it is able to utilise.

You are missing the point. I was simply stating that it is not really possible to tell if the figures given by the RAM monitor are accurate. The OS can claim additional RAM if its unused by applications (e.g. to cache IO, file search database, preload often-used libraries etc.) but give it free the moment you start a resource-hungry application. To be honest, this is what I expect a good OS to do. Thus, it is not a good comparison method to say: this OS uses less RAM at idle therefore its more resource-efficient. Ressource-efficiency for me is optimal usage of the present resources. So if no the application uses the RAM, I encourage the OS to use more RAM to improve my computing experience.

A better test of OS resource-efficiency is, as I already stated, launching many resource-hungry programs and observe the computer's performance. And here is where you really start to see the difference between Unix and Windows. The Windows kernel wasn't really developed with heavy multitasking in mind. Try launching Visual Studio, Word, Excel, some DB development software, Matlab, open a dozen or two browsers windows and add some PDF files to the mix, all that while playing music and you will notice delays and heavy swapping when switching between the stuff. My point is: a better investment of time for MS would be to reduce the process/thread overhead and efficiency of resource usage in heavy multitasking environment. This is what makes the end user happy, not 100Mb less reported idle RAM usage.

[haxartus]

The OS can claim additional RAM if its unused by applications (e.g. to cache IO, file search database, preload often-used libraries etc.) but give it free the moment you start a resource-hungry application.

That is correct. The OS also adapts to the amount of RAM available in th machine. If you install it on a PC with 768MB RAM it will take about 300MB in idle, while if you install it on 8GB RAM, you might see +1GB RAM in idle.
In operating systems that don't do that, you get a heavy use of the swap file even with +8GB RAM, which reduces the performance significantly.

[lymanli43D]

That doesn't make me feel any better