Well, Microsoft has announced that they are (unsurprisingly) working on the operating system follow up to Win 7, which they have decided to call *drum roll* Windows 8!.

But a lousy and obvious name is not why I consider this new worthy. No, it's the features that are, especially if, by chance you own an Xbox 360. According to Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb, Microsoft's mouthpiece for all things Xbox Live, Win 8 will be packing Xbox Live support for PC's, and that MS will be hoping developers will be making PC games that harness the power of Xbox Live, which, I hope, will bring about more cross platform multiplayer games between PC's and 360's, which will be interesting in regards to the control pad/keyboard and mouse debate.

Beyond this, information is a little more sketchy, but this could spell the end of Microsoft's Games for windows brand, as well as giving gamers the ability to use songs and films downloaded on one platform (through, for instance, a song downloaded via zube on a 360) on both platforms.

Time will tell how Windows 8 will shape up, but these is an interesting start, I would say.

Frankly, good riddance to GFWL.

Well, good riddance for GfW, but a whole lot of Win8 is just going where the market's going, which is to say catering to more "simple", fancy, overpriced, underpowered, unreliable "gadgets". I'm reading the dev blog and saw a couple of pretty awesome features that they're implementing, but also a pile of design and... direction choices that are utterly intolerable, and you know that saying: A glass of sewage in a barrel of fine wine results in a barrel of sewage; a glass of fine wine in a barrel of sewage results in a barrel of sewage. But it's still some way off, so let's see how it'll eventually develop...

PS: But there'll be an "app store" so good riddance to GfW but in comes something way worse, almost certainly.

Touch screen and integration with Xbox Live? Well that is exactly what us PC gamers were asking for! Not!

Seriously, while I appreciate the fact that MS finally drops the facade and openly admits that what they wanted all along was to turn PCs into Xboxes, I couldn't care less about any of those stupid features. They already showed they don't understand PC gaming in even the most basic sense, and their big announcement is that they're making the entire OS like a console? Motherfuck this fucking garbage.

I just wish Valve got around to make their own OS so I can drop these jackasses for good. That would be the day.

Since Windows 7 is a good Windows version, it's scientific fact that the next one will be horrible.

I love the fact that they gave a smiley face to the new blue screen of death. Wonder what marketing dipshit thought that was a "cool" idea. I hear Windows 9 will display "LoLoLoLoL!!!" and Rickroll you while it startups.

Anyways, the Live+Windows thing can only mean one thing: The next Xbox will run W8 and be basically a locked-down PC.

That looks noticeably less informative than a BSOD too.

The default since either Vista or Seven was to reboot directly, without displaying any notice at all, so this is actually more informative. Vista/7 have a setting to reactivate bluescreens though, I guess 8 will too.

I never let it reboot directly. And defaults are often just those things I change right away :)

You first have to figure out though that this instant reboot you just experienced would have been a bluescreen. I have been a regular user of most versions of Windows since 3.x, and I had to be told by someone else that Vista/7 actually still had bluescreens and that I could prevent the automatic reboots. Lo and behold, my sudden reboots suddenly weren't sudden reboots anymore.

To be fair though, Windows 7 is so darn stable that you really don't get them anymore, and if you do they're probably due to hardware failure (I experienced them on two occasions since switching to 7: once when I built in a PSU that couldn't maintain the voltage, and once when my mainboard died), in which case they're useless anyway.

To be fair, the Mac is notorious for shutting down because "an unexpected error has occurred".

WHAT ERROR IS EXPECTED?!?!

To understand this, one needs intelligence. And experience with the law of causality.

It will go well with Acer's new notebook, the one with two screens and no keyboard.

I...what? I certainly hope Microsoft knows what they're doing, because this sounds like it'll bite their ass hard. Who's going to use a pc with a tablet like os for servers or business? That and games are the only real reasons I can think of why Windows is still around. My next pc will be running Linux, but I still find it amazing how dumb Microsoft can be.

Not really. In fact, more like all the contrary: MS is catering to the lowest common denominator with this; the kind of mom and even grandma who is still afraid of doing any wandering away from their facebook and maybe their email client. The people that find Windows Explorer too obscure and frightening, but who can more or less comfortably use their computer-ish cellphones. MS is giving these people a computer OS that works exactly like their phone's OS. Win-Win.

And then there's the Xbox integration. That's the other customer base MS is concerned about (have you ever used GFWL? We herd you liek Xbox so we put an Xbox in your Windows!! lolololol), and you wanna take bets on how many console gamers will be happy about that? Just look at OP up there.

I'm guessing that with the money they'll have coming from facebook grandmas and Xbox users, MS will have more than enough to just drown the whining screeching of us old-time PC gamers/tweaking enthusiasts (I mean an awful lot of us is still on XP, for Dawg's sake) (and how many of us even legally buy our OSes anyway?).

Again, Valve, start working on that SteamOS already. My money is just getting more and more wadded up into a little ball with each day that passes.

Everybody who is using tablets, slates, etc. professionally, i.e. mostly engineers, architects, graphic designers, game designers, artists, flight instructors, medical personnel, military personnel, logistics personnel, and so on and so forth. I have never seen a commercially noticeable Linux presence on such computers, mostly because of shitty support. Besides, Windows 8 is just optimized for touch screen technology, you can still use other input devices. Plus UI/systems architecture familiarity over different platforms (x86/ARM) is a great benefit and saves money, etc.


Umm... why, yes. Running applications, for business and/or entertainment. Like every other OS...

Also: Windows will be tweakable, as always. You just need skills/time/will. No amount of third-rate meme babble or cluelessness will change this.

I still wonder what they mean by that, because all the functionality is already present in Windows 7. Multi-touch support, handwriting recognition, and all that. Windows 7 is perfectly Tablet/Pad ready, and I'm quite sure a number of such devices are being sold. There was even a Windows XP Tablet Edition. So what exactly is new about Windows 8 and tablets except marketing? Maybe further performance optimisations for weak portable hardware, or new applications targetted at touch-based use, but probably not a whole lot on the HID support side.

Um, the entire Metro interface, along with its own version of IE and such, which are all perfectly and completely useless for a desktop?

Aside from the metro interface, the important thing is that it supports the ARM processor architecture. This is a type of processor which is not as powerful as you have in your PC (x86), but uses up much less electricity allowing for longer battery life, from what I understood. So it's an interesting development for laptops and netbooks, because they can now use less power-consuming hardware and still run windows.

And that's a good thing, but I still say it should have been kept separate, with installer options about whether you want it or not. Even installing those things on the desktop is just bloat, and what I hear is that this is the new standard interface, the desktop being "just like another app" that can be started, not even loading unless you tell it to - so here's where the optimization for touch and tablets comes in. If anyone is actually running the developer preview, you'd know better.

At work we have it running on both a tablet and a PC. On the tablet it works quite o.k., using the Windows interface on the tablet is quite annoying since all the buttons are so tiny and you can't use keyboard shortcuts. I thought some of the UI of Metro could use a couple dozen more iterations, but I guess that's what it's a beta-ish thing for. You're right about the PC, there it's just bloat.

Well, I for one *hope* for improvements in performance scaleabilty, hand-writing recognition, advanced stroke capturing and editing, plus additional widgetry that benefits the slate form factor and UMPC-sized displays. Especially the latter one is of interest to me; a couple of promising UMPC concepts like the 2nd gen. Sony Vaio P models or the Viliv N5 were set back by shitty battery life, awful driver support (Intel GMA) or lack of useful hardware features (Vaio P f.e. had no touchscreen... but an accelerometer nobody needed; otherwise, with better battery life, it would have been the perfect UMPC as far as I'm concerned). I don't care about tablets; I need a keyboard too, therefore only slates and suitable UMPCs. 10+ Inch slates are served well enough through Win 7 with Wacom drivers for their active digitizers, but it can always made better. Especially UMPCs could profit well from the Win 8/ARM combo. Too bad everyone is shitting out cheapo tablets ATM, but there's hope Apple's army of patent chasers takes care of some.

Entirely unrelated, but just a pointer to whoever wants to write a news piece about it: Sony prepares to ban gamers from PSN unless they waive their rights to file class action lawsuits in the event of future problems.

Gotta love those lawyers, they will throw anything and everything in the hopes that something sticks like the good little monkeys they are. Regardless, there's no way that EULA would stand to any court action.