Submitted by “Today at the JP Morgan Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in Boston, Tami Reller shared with the audience that the update previously referred to as ‘Windows Blue’ will be called Windows 8.1 and will be a free update to Windows 8 for consumers through the Windows Store.” They really didn’t have much of a choice, but good news anyway.
It is pretty much a service pack.
Thank god that they’re not charging for this update, because the ensuing OSNews article would’ve truly had fireworks.
Lets put aside Windows 8 hate for a second. The fact that Windows, Windows is finally moving to a yearly release schedule is an impressive logistical feat (for Microsoft, yes others have much more rapid cycles). Some people here hate Sinofsky, but you gotta give the man credit, he turned the WinDiv around after Vista. I didn’t envy his position in 2006.
It would be funny if they just asked for a £1 / $1 and see what some on here would say.
That beep beep beep sound trucks make when they back up.
Probably parking up behind a major retail outlet before unloading more PCs with Windows installed on them.
Edited 2013-05-14 18:21 UTC
I am picturing the retail manager running out of the store as the truck is backing up yelling “No more PCs!” “We didn’t sell the last batch of Windows 8 machines!”
It doesn’t matter what OS is installed when you buy the PC but what OS you install after buying it…
Usually it doesn’t change, we all know that.
Edited 2013-05-14 19:36 UTC
Well, you know, UEFI/SecureBoot doesn’t help much to that regard…
Kochise
It doesn’t hinder, either.
Edited 2013-05-14 20:12 UTC
It makes things a little more restrictive. You have to use a UEFI compatible bootloader, you cannot develop your own anymore (osdev haunting)
Frankly, I got more viral infection via web (xss) than got mbr corruption. So this whole “secure” boot stuff is basically just a lock-down.
Kochise
I would rather my OS be secure from the ground up, than having a strong partition around the defences.
Of course you can make your own boot loader. Any PC with the Windows 8 logo will allow you to disable secure boot or install your own keys. This is a requirement for the Windows 8 logo program.
This cannot be overstated: The Windows 8 logo program requires computers to be capable of both disabling secure boot and installing custom keys.
A couple of weeks ago I cleaned a friend’s computer of malware. Among the various types of malware it was infected with was a rootkit. This was on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine. “I don’t get those” is completely meaningless.
I don’t know if having a locked down computer is an any brighter security measure to enforce protection. The user’s knowledge should help more by performing less dangerous actions. See how Linux users breaks less easily their os. Sure there is indeed pretty decent file protection from the beginning, but the hardware access through pipes could breaks the machine perhaps even more easily than on Windows. Yet they experience less troubles.
I’m not wearing rose tainted glasses, if you were worried about.
Kochise
Edited 2013-05-14 21:34 UTC
Yeah because users always make good decisions </sarcasm>
So you take decisions for consumers ? That’s sounds dictatorship to me. The consumer can ONLY take the right decision if provided with the right information beforehand. Lockdown and secrety ain’t good fuel for making the right moves, otherwise spying and reverse engineering wouldn’t have been used in the first place.
Your comments are siding up Linuxian’s openess motos, if one cannot trust closed sourced software from a private company.
Kochise
It is called requirements engineering and historically consumers have been bad at actually specifying what they want.
Secure Boot protects both experienced and inexperienced users in a manner that doesn’t restrict their choices or force them to change their behavior. Why is this a bad thing?
Let me reiterate this: Secure Boot does not restrict user choices. It also provides protection from a whole class of common exploits. Not the most common, but still common.
Thank God Microsoft is not going to take advantage of the poor souls who have Windows 8. They could have advertized something like this in the Windows store…
Want your start button back? –> $5
Need better compatibility with older Windows software? –> $10
You use a PC with a mouse so want the touch-based Modern UI removed? –> $25
Edited 2013-05-14 18:30 UTC
obvious troll is obvious.
Sorry, my comment was obviously meant to be humorous…
Edited 2013-05-14 18:35 UTC
Poor humour.
Some people won’t get it anyway
They have that judgmental, black and white, 0/1 attitude: “troll or not-troll”.
Hey, I thought it was pretty funny actually…
Really. TBH I would have found it bloody hilarious if they charged another €30 euros again for the upgrade just to see everyone foaming at their mouths. When MacOSX has a similarly short release cycle these days and charges a similar amount but makes the expensive hardware obsolete that is still working perfectly fine and capable of running the OS.
Just saying.
Edited 2013-05-14 18:44 UTC
Just not the same hype and targeted audience. Btw Apple’s update have more of an upgrade, with added functionalities, not “just” a compilation of security fixes/patches/UImod to restore usable behaviors after badly anticipated users’ anger.
Keep in mind that if Windows 7 machines were still sold, they would surely outnumber Windows 8’s.
Kochise
Give me a shout when the oldest Windows 8.1 setup is not from 2003 and it probably runs alright.
???
Kochise
There is a load of features added to Windows Service packs … XP vs XP SP3 is actually massive in added new features … they just don’t advertise them like Apple and they work on the original machines that XP was ready for.
Ok, that’s fair, yet if you really wanted new features, you had to install PowerToys that weren’t shiped with SPs. You meant WGA, Security Essentials, pre-UAC, stuffs alike ?
Take a look at Vista and its SPs. Keep in mind Microsoft works in the OS field for quite a few years by now (something around 30) and they have enough background, experience, return to make the right choices.
I bet they have.
Kochise
I dunno what your point is.
Ha! I can see the headline now… “Microsoft Windows has decided to go to a Free2Play model”.
Anyone who plays mmorpg’s will see the humor…
…to buy Visual Studio v.Next.
Because Visual Studio 2013 update 3 was the last update with a tiny list of fixes
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2013/05/08/some-thoughts-on-…
Visual Studio 2010 support is kind of forgotten completely.
I am still Visual Studio (don’t laugh) 2003 on some projects and it just something tbh that is a bit rubbish. But I can do fine with .NET 4.0 / VS2010 at the moment and I haven’t wanted to take advantage of version 4.5 yet.
Edited 2013-05-14 18:39 UTC
Currently we are also using VS 2010 for our Windows projects, and for the look of it, most likely not buying VS2012 when it is already announced many of the fixes are planned for v.Next instead.
I don’t see any features that are compelling. Plus the silly UI which I will have to fiddle with. I can’t be arsed.
I’d love for them to move to a yearly release cycle with Visual Studio with an option to purchase a subscription to the steady stream of updates.
I really, really like the Office 365 business model, it works well for software that costs hundreds of dollars.
And there’s always Visual Studio Express if you can stand not having R#
R#?!
Edit: Ah you mean Reshaper. We don’t get it for our projects anyway.
It is hard to convince customers that they also need to pay extra for functionality that Java IDEs offer out of the box, when it is not project related.
Edited 2013-05-15 06:48 UTC
what the hell are you talking about? they had the nerve to ask for money for windows 7, so it’s not like this practice is in the distant past!
Windows 7 was worth it.
And XP even more : 10 years of support and rather stable/efficient OS. Bought two copies for my OSless computers. Worth every pennies.
Kochise
It won’t be free, but gratis. That’s a huge difference
The car that you borrow for free isn’t free, also. It’s gratis as in price. It’s not yours, you can’t do anything you want with it.
Yes, I hate car analogies, too.
It is free.
Stop making wanky distinctions to make you sound clever. If you have Windows 8 you will get this for nothing.
Clever people have no problem with understanding the difference between “free” and “gratis”. Thus, they will not oppose and object the obvious truth just because they feel miserable today.
Playing little semantics games in IRL would make you sound like a bit of a dick … it makes you look like one here as well.
Isn’t this basically just service pack 1? I mean all they’re doing is fixing the broken things…
There isn’t much broken. I would like you to list all the broken things … because I haven’t noticed them and I been running Windows 8 from launch.
Wow, Microsoft giving something away for free. Now, THAT’S what I call proof of Win 8’s failure.
Windows XP SP1, SP2 and SP3 were pretty free as well. Windows 8.1 is mostly SP1, so why would they charge for correction of mistakes they made ?
Kochise
Corrections of mistakes?
Do you understand how software is made? how software is tested? No software is bug free, no software is perfect … except maybe Hello World samples.
This really bloody irritates me because this is just a lack of basic understanding for software engineering principles that weren’t cutting edge in the 80s.
Show me the requirements that you think have a defect in. Show me the code that doesn’t reflect the use case.
Cheap comments are cheap comments. Nothing else.
Edited 2013-05-14 20:37 UTC
Windows is not made by a shareware releaser, but a massive corporation. Now they decided to go on a yearly release basis, good for them if they cope the pace. I bet that at their level of expertise, especially since they are following their own standart, they could ensure a minimum of code quality and functionnality. At least I hope them all the goods in that matter.
Kochise
What has this got to do with anything .. exactly nothing.
They can cope with the pace or they wouldn’t be doing it. Because they have a proper testing framework, proper test cases and proper tools to do them with.
You guys pretend Microsoft is a start-up that doesn’t know what it is doing. Windows releases these days are painless compared to the 2000/XP/Vista days … and you guys make snide remarks about their competence.
You was the one that insinuated that code can be full of bugs in the first place, dude. That’s something unwanted from such a large corporation that demand a high price for its ptoduct. Would you accrpt the same level of defects from a car, which are rather complex too nowadays (regarding to electronic equipments from various suppliers yet working all together rather flawlessly).
I can accept bugs in the code, but as you request a secure os from ground up in another post, thanks to secure boot, this whole “security” can fall like a card construct if the os is flawed from within. And so you told me that any code is inherently bug ridden. Let me cook some pop-corn before continuing this thread…
Kochise
Usual down-votes when it comes to basic software engineering.
Edited 2013-05-14 21:25 UTC
Since you keep repeating at will how clueless I am, could you please provide me with a link to your personal blog where you explain every step to build a commercial grade operating system and the various implications, best practices ? Since you sounds so much knowledgable on the subject, let’s share your insightful visions.
Kochise
I don’t really have or should do.
The fact is that you are making out like their should be zero defects, when we all know that it is impossible. In reality there is an acceptable number of defect that aren’t critical or show stoppers … they are minor bugs.
Making it out like Microsoft “have made mistakes” by the way you phrased that it makes it quite obvious you aren’t experience in the software development process despite your protests.
Also high price … are you kidding. It is f–king cheap.
Edited 2013-05-14 21:31 UTC
I wasn’t speaking about bugs, stop focusing, I was speaking about strategical mistakes : Modern UI enforced inplace instead of Desktop, breaking backward compatibility, stuffs like that. They mostly should have named this new product differently (while it shares some common DNA with previous incarnations) but continue to sell “legacy” Windows 7 as well.
Why such a urge to force down consumers’ throat a yearly release ? Will the new version solve starvation worldwide, provide peace in everyone’s hearth, make us to the moon by next year ? What is so revolutionary since IE7, Office 2003, IIS ? Does it really requires buying and buying software updates one after another with not much added fundamental functionnalities ?
Couldn’t have XP been upgraded with SP4 and SP5 ? Windows 7 with another SP ? Are we just cash cows that are to be milked with promise of a better future and more security ? Does it really needs to throw our ridiculously powerful yet 3 years aged computer and software suite to trash to renew everything just for hype’s sake ?
I’m still using a Windows 2000 SP4 box (offline) for ARM embedded crossdev, because 2000 is so fast and lightweight that’s ridiculous to beleive we needs so much more power hungry os. You know the KISS principle ?
Kochise
Make up the rules as you go along and strange usage scenarios to prove a point.
It gets comical.
Your sarcasms don’t support your pretentions.
Kochise
At some point I can’t be arsed … this is it.
Not basic software engineering, just a personal attack you edited. If that’s so obvious, why not taking some minutes to explain, document, link sources instead to just point how people are so stupid not to understand such basic knowledge. Without backing your claims with valid and solid arguments, but empty and bold statements, you’re the one bad looking here. Be a gentleman, keep your manners.
Kochise
It gets into russell’s teapot territory then.
Through the Windows Store? Does that mean that it requires a Microsoft Account?
Probably yes. I am sure you will shit your panties about it, when you don’t actually have to pay for it, or buy it.
Edited 2013-05-14 21:49 UTC
I think the Store will be the main UI people use to initiate the update, but I doubt the update itself will require a Microsoft Account.
It will probably just use Windows Update behind the scenes.
The “update” for the heavy DRM, break if you change the hard drive or mouse install will be “free”, but not “free” like Debian, Fedora, or even (shudder) Ubuntu.
Regardless of the Start menu, without the ability to disable the awfull Metro UI, this is a an inadequate update.
You can only put so much lipstick on a pig.
This isn’t so much putting lipstick on a pig as it is giving the pig a complete facial restructure. several key things have changed while still maintaining the metro interface
I really hope that Microsoft have done something to solve the conveyance issues.
See the youtube example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo
around 11:20 and forward
Control Panel can be found by bringing up charms, clicking/tapping Settings then Control Panel – not rocket science
Its more of an attitude than aptitude problem. People are resistant to change, every major UI overhaul I have ever seen has had people whinge and moan as if the end of the world had come. I rolled mice out across an entire bank in the nineties and you’d think we were killing puppies the response we got.
In the end people begrudgingly learn then reap the benefits.
It is not a question of being resistant to change, but finding the whole usability approach ugly and lacking any intelligible justification.
It like being forced to drive a rainbow colored Fiat Mulitpla. No matter how it drives, it is still an ugly car.
…or going to work in a Ronald Mcdonald suit. Sure, you are insulated and not naked, but you still look like a clown.
Microsoft seriously needs to get over its Playmobil design fetish. Unfortunately, I do not see this happening anytime soon.
Edited 2013-05-15 14:21 UTC
Even the name “charm” is completely not intuitive of the functionality it refers to.
Metro is an utter usability clusterf*ck on the desktop.