Linked by Adam S on Tue 14th Oct 2008 12:30 UTC
According to the official Windows Vista Blog, Microsoft has decided that, in order to keep things simple, the OS code-named "Windows 7" will officially be called "Windows 7." Sayeth the poster: "since we began development of the next version of the Windows client operating system we have been referring to it by a codename, "Windows 7." But now is a good time to announce that we've decided to officially call the next version of Windows, "Windows 7."" Of course, this introduces a major issue - if the version number of Windows 7 is, in fact, 6.1 or 6.2, as many expect, how can you call it Windows 7? And if the kernel version is updated to version 7, how many apps and drivers might fail due to poor version checking? I'm sure the upcoming PDC and WinHEC events will shed some light on this.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
No, you're not alone. Waaaaay back ...I once downloaded a beta of what would become Windows98 - Memphis....over a dialup connection! It took 5 days with the connection being dropped deliberately by my ISP every 2 hours. Oh, the thrill of loading that up on my 486 laptop with 8mb of RAM. Sure, it ran like a pig with chronic arthritis...but it was 'state-of-the-art' baby! 
I've been using various flavours of Linux as my primary OS for going on 6 years now and rarely give Windows a second glance. That's not to say they don't do some good stuff...I'm just not a member of their target market anymore.
Member since:2005-08-07
jack_perry joked...
Yes, you are. The rest of us lost nearly all enthusiasm back when they touted Windows 3.0 and MS-DOS 6 as cutting edge. :-P
LOL. I don't think I was even playing with Windows seriously at that point. Maybe I was only using WordPerfect Dos at that time? I forget, it was a while ago, but I think at that time I was much more of an end-user.
wakeupneo reminisced...
No, you're not alone. Waaaaay back ...I once downloaded a beta of what would become Windows98 - Memphis....over a dialup connection! It took 5 days with the connection being dropped deliberately by my ISP every 2 hours. Oh, the thrill of loading that up on my 486 laptop with 8mb of RAM. Sure, it ran like a pig with chronic arthritis...but it was 'state-of-the-art' baby!
I think I may have seen that one floating around at one of the other forums I've been a member of. I never ran it on my desktop, but I do remember being enamored by the IE4 desktop update when it first came out. I eventually moved into the 98Lite camp though and became all about deintergrating IE from the desktop, even though I still liked IE when used in one of the many shells for it allowing tabs and ad-blocking.
wakeupneo commented...
I've been using various flavours of Linux as my primary OS for going on 6 years now and rarely give Windows a second glance. That's not to say they don't do some good stuff...I'm just not a member of their target market anymore.
Ditto here. I may still run Windows XP on my entertainment box but its been Linux all the way on my laptops for awhile now. Especially on my Eee901, now that I've licked the battery life issues with eee-control-tray!
--bornagainpenguin
Member since:2005-11-13
Yep big time my friend.
I find that I can't get excited anymore. Their software has reached the point where its over complicated and each upgrade is a performance hog.
The magic is gone, if it was ever really there to begin with.
I still do windows for a living, but I don't get excited over it anymore.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.More News »
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Member since:
2005-08-07
Am I the only one whose lost nearly all enthusiasm for new Microsoft releases these days?
I used to at least follow stuff when XP was still known as Whistler and actually liked the Watercolours theme back in the earlier betas.
I even followed Vista quite a bit back when it was still known as Longhorn and found myself entranced by the various screenshots and videos of the Operating System, despite my decision to start moving to Linux at the earliest possibility.
Having used Vista quite a bit at the store and while working on people's computers and having verified for myself just how broken the OS is I simply can't seem to get excited about Windows 7 the way I used to about earlier Microsoft releases.
Is anyone else feeling this way? Did you used to be all geeked out about the newest and latest features in Windows (stuff like .Net, WinFS, Monad) and now just can't force the same kind of enthusiam you once had?
--bornagainpenguin