Windows 8

I set up that Windows 8 VM today and am typing this from it right now. There are lots of really good things going on here with the Metro UI. I would love to try it on a tablet. I really think it might work well with 3 monitors. I'll have to try and set it up at home and see how that works. I don't know if the VM is going to give me grief trying to do that.

I installed it on it's own hard drive and it works much slicker than vbox. It really does seem like it's tailored to get people using metro as it's not particularly mouse friendly.

One thing I'm wondering about is whether there's restrictions in place to deter people from using it day-to-day. I installed it as I do all other OSes, just the one hard drive connected so that it doesn't spread it's boot loader onto a different hard drive (and I multiboot using the BIOS to select boot device), and once the install is done I reconnect up the other hard drives and boot it up again. The fun bit is it doesn't detect additional hard drives, there's no new devices in device manager.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

I set up that Windows 8 VM today and am typing this from it right now. There are lots of really good things going on here with the Metro UI. I would love to try it on a tablet. I really think it might work well with 3 monitors. I'll have to try and set it up at home and see how that works. I don't know if the VM is going to give me grief trying to do that.

Can you run the metro UI on one monitor and the regular UI on other? That would be sick.

Also, does text render differently at all? I find myself browsing the internet 90% of the time on my 13" Macbook Pro instead of using my 24" monitor on my PC because I find the way OSX renders text to be easier on the eyes.

BNice wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:

I set up that Windows 8 VM today and am typing this from it right now. There are lots of really good things going on here with the Metro UI. I would love to try it on a tablet. I really think it might work well with 3 monitors. I'll have to try and set it up at home and see how that works. I don't know if the VM is going to give me grief trying to do that.

Can you run the metro UI on one monitor and the regular UI on other? That would be sick.

Also, does text render differently at all? I find myself browsing the internet 90% of the time on my 13" Macbook Pro instead of using my 24" monitor on my PC because I find the way OSX renders text to be easier on the eyes.

That would be sweet to have the metro UI on just one of the monitors. There is lots of information conveyed to you at a glance from that screen, so it could be very useful. I probably won't go through the hastle of trying to setup a virtual box with 3 monitors. I don't think I would be able to set them up separately, but I may be able to set it up as a big 6040x1080 monitor and see what the UI looks like spanning 3 monitors.

I'm wondering how the metro/desktop hybrid will end up at release. I can see the metro apps perhaps working quite well if you 'break them out' of the full metro tablet interface, perhaps to something like rainlendar, supercharged widgets, and I can see a lot of them working perfectly well in a window. 'Active desktop' is something that gets kicked around, but it could quite well work and make the desktop somewhere besides just icon storage, and thinking about it, once you add a few widgets/tiles, you're not that far away from 'full metro'. Perhaps the new desktop is metro, minus a little bit.

They demo'd multimonitor support in the key note toward the end. They did have metro on one side, and old Windows on the other, and all kinds of things in between. They now span the task bar on both monitors, too, as well as doing cross monitor wallpaper. So they seem to have made some nice multi-monitor upgrades.

MannishBoy wrote:

They demo'd multimonitor support in the key note toward the end. They did have metro on one side, and old Windows on the other, and all kinds of things in between. They now span the task bar on both monitors, too, as well as doing cross monitor wallpaper. So they seem to have made some nice multi-monitor upgrades.

SWEET! SOLD!

Something else I warmed up to was the metro version of IE, specifically other uses for right-click than just the usual right-click menu, in all sorts of apps. It's got me thinking now whether I can make Firefox show and hide the navigation and tab bar on right click, giving me the maximum browsing area. I did some experiments with Ff4 before it came out, and managed to get nav/url/tab/search bars all in the title bar but it wasn't really usable, but an quick to access (hand is always on mouse) toggle might be if I want that extra few pixels of vertical space.

Sounds like hype, but it's a good thing when things are shaken up a bit.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:

They demo'd multimonitor support in the key note toward the end. They did have metro on one side, and old Windows on the other, and all kinds of things in between. They now span the task bar on both monitors, too, as well as doing cross monitor wallpaper. So they seem to have made some nice multi-monitor upgrades.

SWEET! SOLD!

Starts at 1:33:00 or so here on the machine he's demoing. Gets to dual monitor @ 1:45:00.

MannishBoy wrote:

I suspect due to the interface changes in Win 8, a lot of enterprises might not upgrade for the sake of user training costs. They may skip it like they did Vista.

Really? I don't know what "training" even means anymore. Who in this day and age trains people to use Windows? The basic knowledge of it is taken as a given. Even beyond that. If I am looking to hire someone, a person who is not familiar with MS Office, much less Windows, will be automatically disqualified.

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:
MannishBoy wrote:

I suspect due to the interface changes in Win 8, a lot of enterprises might not upgrade for the sake of user training costs. They may skip it like they did Vista.

Really? I don't know what "training" even means anymore. Who in this day and age trains people to use Windows? The basic knowledge of it is taken as a given. Even beyond that. If I am looking to hire someone, a person who is not familiar with MS Office, much less Windows, will be automatically disqualified.

I work at a bank in operations/technical project management work. We have some number of tellers that struggle with XP at times, and many who've gotten used to XP will have issues moving to something this different.

Not all, but there are enough to make it a relevant concern for some portion of our staff.

I think our branch images still use the W2K GUI to this day in XP, so no green start button, etc, which was a decision made to make the transitional training easier.

Depends on what type of work force you're migrating. Going back farther, we had a lot of OS2 machines (big in banking), but they were used by lenders and back room staff who are a bit more flexible and willing to learn new things. So moving them to W95/W2K wasn't that bad, but there was a lot of basic level OS training.

I don't necessarily think it's that big a deal for the vast majority of people, but it's different enough that I know at a minimum we'd have web based training, and maybe instructor led Live Meeting training. Not sure it would go as far as in person training.

The reason is if you roll out to a location and suddenly tellers can't figure out how to hop between their various teller, account maintenance applications, email, and intranet sites when clients are in their faces, we look bad and are giving a bad impression and bad service. While most people would do alright, there are enough that wouldn't that I can see our management waiting awhile for people to get familiar more on their own before they see it at work.

We're just now finally looking at going to Win 7 images after skipping Vista.

Comparison between Win 8 and iPad interfaces.

The only thing mentioned on WMC that I've seen was the post back in the first week of September on the Build Windows 8 blog in which they acknowledge it isn't in the current build, it will be in Windows 8 but there are suspicions it will be part/like the Windows Live/Wave stuff in that you download it separately for free or it's one of the apps you can get from the App Store.
The demographics of us hardcore WMC users isn't as profound as you would think.

Eezy_Bordone wrote:

The only thing mentioned on WMC that I've seen was the post back in the first week of September on the Build Windows 8 blog in which they acknowledge it isn't in the current build, it will be in Windows 8 but there are suspicions it will be part/like the Windows Live/Wave stuff in that you download it separately for free or it's one of the apps you can get from the App Store.
The demographics of us hardcore WMC users isn't as profound as you would think.

I was just happy to see it mentioned.

I can envision it in the new Metro style, though, and I think it could be cool. Especially if they make it easier to make add ons for by supporting something other than MCML.

The fact that they'd been talking about it in a lot of the Windows 7 commercials lately had me pretty sure it would make the transition to Win 8 in some form, so I didn't quite believe all the doom and gloom WMC people that thought they'd not even include it.

What ever happened to those embedded devices that were shown at CES? I really think if it's going to get any kind of adoption rate, that's where it needs to be positioned.

Didn't they show media player/centre when they first showed metro?

It seems silly to look at the Win8 preview and think "this is how Win8 will be", as it's been jiggled around to highlight metro and aimed at developers, but I can see how someone would be able to just take it at face value and go "Aarrgghhh! Metro everything!". No doubt if it was just presented as another version of windows, with a few advancements, without metro, people would be whining too.

Scratched wrote:

Didn't they show media player/centre when they first showed metro?

It seems silly to look at the Win8 preview and think "this is how Win8 will be", as it's been jiggled around to highlight metro and aimed at developers, but I can see how someone would be able to just take it at face value and go "Aarrgghhh! Metro everything!". No doubt if it was just presented as another version of windows, with a few advancements, without metro, people would be whining too.

Not Media Center, more of a Metro WMP functionality.

I'm talking about TV/DVR/10 foot interface stuff. That allows you to use Xboxes as extenders around the house that give you full live TV and DVR functionality.

Actually, that links into something else. One of the things they're constantly mentioning about Xbox live is the media side to it, obviously we concentrate on the gaming side but I wonder if they're going to do anything major with the media side of XBL.

Kind of makes me want them to go crazy with the integration and do it properly, but split the gaming and media sides. It would seem a bit odd having an isolated XBL app with a large range of different functionality, than a gaming part to windows and a media part to windows, and all the different components talking to each other through and sharing functionality through that shiny new contract API. For example whatever media app/interface you use can just pull XBL as a source of media.

I know it'll never happen though.

I think MS is heading in the right direction. It won't be perfect for sure. But if you are already owning an xbox etc, I can see some nice things that can be tied together.
Still, I am very close to getting an iPad and this isn't going to make me wait to see how it works out.

Scratched wrote:

Actually, that links into something else. One of the things they're constantly mentioning about Xbox live is the media side to it, obviously we concentrate on the gaming side but I wonder if they're going to do anything major with the media side of XBL.

Kind of makes me want them to go crazy with the integration and do it properly, but split the gaming and media sides. It would seem a bit odd having an isolated XBL app with a large range of different functionality, than a gaming part to windows and a media part to windows, and all the different components talking to each other through and sharing functionality through that shiny new contract API. For example whatever media app/interface you use can just pull XBL as a source of media.

I know it'll never happen though.

On Xbox, they're saying their rolling out live TV/on demand stuff later this year. I think they wanted to announce at E3 who the partners were, but the deals aren't done.

Also, they're confirmed they're working on Media Room stuff for Windows Media Center. Media Room is their set top box/IPTV solution, which is actually already available on Xbox. In the US, if you have Uverse, you can actually already use your Xbox as an additional cable box in the house.

There are some other partners rumored by years end, too.

I'm running the Developer Preview as my primary OS.

The boot time is noticeably faster than Windows 7. Unfortunately, there's a noticeable wait for the OS to complete the first login after a cold boot. The only program I've added to start-up is Dropbox, so I hope they fix this problem. Speaking of login, there's a pretty fullscreen image covering the login screen. You have to flip it up, which I'm sure feels natural with a touchscreen, but it's awkward with a mouse.

The first thing you see after login is the Metro UI live tiles. Everything up to this point is very pretty and very smooth. It's a huge improvement over the tired Aero interface. Unfortunately, the Metro apps are all touchscreen tech-demos and pretty much unusable with a mouse. I don't know how wise it is to dump every user here by default. There's a Metro tile for the desktop, and for all the talk of it being a different app, the switch is very fast.

I really wish Microsoft would have done away with Aero altogether, because it's pretty jarring (visually) to go between these two interfaces. A lot of people will still need to use the desktop UI, but restyling it with Metro would have made it feel clean and new.

My first instinct is to see what's installed, so I press the Windows key to bring up the Start Menu, which whisked me back to the Metro screen. This is really frustrating. This functions as the Start Menu, so the flow is the same. It's just visually jarring. I'm jumping back and forth between these two disparate UI experiences.

On the bright side, I've had no compatibility problems to speak of.

More to come...

Is anyone tracking this issue w/ Windows 8 and OEM firmware?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterpri...

It looks like OEM versions of Windows 8 will have locked firmware that won't allow the system to boot into an unsigned OS. this would mean that using an OEM-built PC as a Linux box, Hackintosh, or using Frenas will require rooting, a la mobile phones.

The article also points out it will make backup software that boots to an image, like Acronis, very difficult to use.

Oso wrote:

Is anyone tracking this issue w/ Windows 8 and OEM firmware?

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterpri...

It looks like OEM versions of Windows 8 will have locked firmware that won't allow the system to boot into an unsigned OS. this would mean that using an OEM-built PC as a Linux box, Hackintosh, or using Frenas will require rooting, a la mobile phones.

The article also points out it will make backup software that boots to an image, like Acronis, very difficult to use.

I think the issue is being blown out of proportion by blogs to get internet hits. Ars Technica seemed to have a more reasonable (less sensationalist) article, as evidenced by their article title: "Windows 8 secure boot could complicate Linux installs."

I'm not concerned, personally. There will probably be plenty of workarounds.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

I think the issue is being blown out of proportion by blogs to get internet hits. Ars Technica seemed to have a more reasonable (less sensationalist) article, as evidenced by their article title: "Windows 8 secure boot could complicate Linux installs."

I'm not concerned, personally. There will probably be plenty of workarounds.

The Ars article seemed to read along the same lines as the RWW article. At least they both use the same quotes from MS and both conclude that MS isn't intentionally targetting the FLOSS community or third-party drive image software market. The unintended consequences, however, will add annoyances into our lives. I'm not really a tech guy, but I'm comfortable rooting my phone to run a custom os and rooting my router to run a custom os, so I'm sure I'll be comfortable rooting a laptop. I'd just prefer not to.

Presumably you could do the secure boot thing with linux though, at least on self-builds. I could see this as on-by-default for mass market home or corporate PCs, but I think a motherboard manufacturer would be shooting themselves in the foot to mandate their UEFI board only work with windows, and even then it would seem like you would need to do some work to tie the secure boot protection together between the install on disc and the mobo.

I can see it has it's uses ("security"), and I can see it has the potential for misuse (lock-in, or even lock-out of certain functionality?), but just because it's there doesn't mean it will be used that way. I hope it doesn't get misused, and I'd like to think companies involved are smarter than that, but there's plenty of examples to the contrary.

Typically, with boot protection setups, you are not given the ability to sign code yourself. As implemented, Trusted Computing is so that CONTENT COMPANIES can trust your computer, not that YOU can. It's a weapon AGAINST you, not a tool working in your favor.

That would change completely if you were allowed to set up your own key signing environment for a board. But they won't give you that. Only Microsoft and other "approved" OS manufacturers can sign boot code.

tagging nothing to see here...

Noticed this article today: http://www.osnews.com/story/25450/Mi...

Essentially, MS are having challenges adapting software like Office to metro, because of the lack of UI elements ("chrome") that serve a purpose, that an interface like metro almost mandates you get rid of. The article also mentions things like window management lacking in metro.

What I'm wondering is how rough Win8 will be on the desktop (I'm sure it's going to the best thing since sliced bread on portable computers for at least the first two weeks) if the interface doesn't provide any major positive movement from Win7. Based on what I've read so far, it does seem like Win7 could become established as 'the next WinXP' and Win8 as Vista, although for different reasons. Besides the usual under the hood advancements and improvements that you get from release to release, what's the big draw for Win8 (and metro as it's new headline feature) on desktops if it's a poor UI for desktop tasks?

The way to adapt the ribbon, etc. for Word is to move it along the sides of the screen. There's plenty of unused real estate there.

Win8 will the the Vista, though, as Scratched says. Let's just hope it's not the Win ME.

Corporate for the most part aren't the target customer for Win 8 anyway...MS is still struggling with getting them to upgrade from XP to 7 Pro/Enterprise. But from what I've heard its finally starting to ramp up in a significant way and according to one of my friends at MS they have on tap a record number of OS migrations from Fortune 5000 for '12. VDI is helping this transition in a big way.. the licensing for 7 Enterprise has helped this tremendously.

8 seems squarely a transition OS for mobile/laptop brick and mortar consumers..

Anybody read up on the Storage Spaces tech? In practice, it gives a lot of the same flexibility and ease of creating data storage pools that WHS v1 did. And while I'm not sure, that article kind of implies this might now be a part of NTFS going forward. So if they release a WHS v3, maybe we'll get this added in. But I'm afraid WHS v2 might have killed the product off completely when the enthusiasts left, and the OEMs also walked away.