Is there a civil war going on within MS? On the one hand they are releasing stuff like this --- on the other hand there is the SUPPOSED vision for Windows 8 (like an iPhone, only easier to use). Seriously, WTF???
In THEORY these two poles can be balanced. Apple does this by having the Mac GUI, plus the UNIX world you can access from the command line. But what we're seeing here is of a piece with what we saw earlier with the ribbonned Explorer, in the mainline GUI, and makes one wonder just what Win8 is going to be. It certainly looks on track to both horrify power users (with the simple start screen and basic apps) AND terrify novice users (as soon as they need to do anything that goes beyond the start screen).
I think with them improvements it will be better than the current windows Start menu. Atleast scientifically as MS point out above it IS better, you just have to get used to it and know it's features (for instance many people dont know you can just start typing to search, you dont have to bring up a search box anymore). But there we have the biggest problem of all for most users... change.
I really only use the start menu to search for programs and system features and to shut down the system.
The search in metro is better but shutting down is worse. I generally like what they're doing with metro. My one concern is the lack of heavy multitasking.
Seems like an odd fit i'd agree. Whilst i quite like this improved task manager, since I so rarely need to power up my self-built rig these days, preferring to just do everything home based on iPad, I think I'll stick with Windows 7 for a few more years.
Being as Win 8 will run on tablets it can completely replace your iToy or anything else. You'll have a full blown OS on a tablet that can do anything a desktop PC can. I'd expect Win 8 tablets to all have HDMI too, so just plug it in to a monitor to use it like a desktop computer for work, then unplug it when taking it around.
The difference is that the transition between the 2 win8 interfaces is as seamless as ALT TAB, and Lion is a mess of a GUI that has angered even the most loyal Gizmodo editor, that wrote an entire article on the uselessness of Lion's GUI changes.
Windows is the one moving forward, and Lion is stagnant. After all it's only 30$, you get what you pay for.
I must admit I finally got round to borrowing a new Mac mini a few weeks ago to really try out Lian and see what all the fuss was about.
I must say the most used phrase was "WTF???"
I was expecting something amazing compared to the dreadful Win7 I'd been using for the past 2 years.
Well that's what all the Apple fanboys led me to believe. Quite frankly the user experience was a real disappointment. It didn't feel advanced or slick at all. It really did feel quite old fashioned.
Not very intuitive either. Really other than web browsing, looking at photos and using iTunes it didn't seem all that great for anything else. Maybe that's why folks like them?
I didn't regret handing it back or feel like I had to buy one.
It certainly is inferior to Win 7. I'd say even Vista.
Things like the "File / Edit" menu at the top of the OS is something Windows got rid of from Win 95 onwards. But even without that in so many ways OSX feels like Windows 3.1 to me. No amount of shiny icons can change this.
If you even make an app fullscreen, using the new Lion fullscreen option (Windows has fullscreen option for how many years???) then you cant even use any other connected monitors, they display grey and cannot be used at all. Apple has even copied Windows with the new OS buttons, they used to have round corners (looked like they were from 1999).
I'd literally be here all day if i were to list everything so i'll just stop now.
OS X might be great for some, but it's not for me.
I'm one of those strange people who often has 30 or more windows opened. As long as I have enough memory, I don't see the point of closing windows that I might need to use 5-10 minutes later, assuming the OS/GUI actually helps me manage those 30+ windows.
With Windows 2K/XP/7 I can have the 30+ windows each having their own task button in a double height taskbar. So if I need to switch to a particular window, I just need one click.
With OSX, as far as I know you can't do that in one click. In fact the OS gets in the way, making me take more time to switch to a particular window.
I personally don't think it's impressive if an operating system has a slick interface that's good for managing a handful of windows. If I only have a handful of windows/tasks I don't need much that much help, right?
It's impressive if an OS has a slick interface that can somehow augment me and let me manage say 100 or even 1000 tasks with ease. You might ask who can manage that many tasks? And I'd say, that's the point. Currently the conventional desktop UIs aren't helping us as much.
But look at some of the RTS game UIs, they allow expert players to do very many actions per second and control hundreds of items or more. That proves that significant numbers of people can actually benefit from a UI that's not just designed to help noobs. Many modern game UIs allow noobs to get started and do stuff, while still helping the expert users do advanced stuff.
Modern desktop UIs should be like that too. Look at experienced cashiers or data entry workers, they too are able to do many actions per second, they're normal humans.
It's a bit jarring going back and forth between Metro UI and Desktop, though. Plus, Microsoft is going to be encouraging developers to go with Metro UI to the detriment of the Desktop. Features like alt-tab to flip back and forth between applications don't exist in Metro UI. It's great for phones and tablets, but I'm not sure about it as a primary interface for Windows. Desktop looks like a transitional solution in Microsoft's vision (much like Classic was for Mac or XP Mode is in Windows 7 Professional).
Also, is there something weird about this screenshot that I don't understand. Look at the numbers. This Device is claimed to have 160 logical processors??? 5MB of L1 cache, 20MB of L2, and 250MB of L3??? I expect MS has access to experimental new Intel processors, but this is rather more than we were expecting from Ivy Bridge!
Look at the image again. This is the processor it's using. And it's using 8 of them as you can see under the "Physical Processors: 8" category. Beneath that it shows how many logical processors there are at 160.
Ahh. So Windows gives aggregate numbers for things like the L1. To me that makes a lot less sense that reporting something like: 8 processors each of which has: 10 cores each of which has: 2 threads 32KB of L1 etc I've no idea who, for example, cares about the TOTAL amount of L1 in a box, as opposed to the amount per core.
But at least I see what is going on. Thanks for the explanation.
Great, only took several years to do that, but great news nevertheless. Now with Sandy Bridge Xeons having up to 8 cores per socket in 2P configurations it means you can have up to 32 logical cores. Today's task manager with "only" 24 logical cores was ludicrous.
This machine has 160 logical cpus, a terabyte of memory - but only 3 disks and two network interfaces.
That display would become rather cluttered for a database machine with a few hundred disk drives and a dozen network interfaces. Perhaps they need to apply the same trick that they used for cpus and just show a shaded grid for those too?
Those disks are probably, 1 local array for host os, and a couple SAN connectectd arrays, so it could be thousands of actual disks. Those two nicks are probably 10GbE, or better yet, LACP teams of 10x10GbE each. with 8x$5000 processors and a TB of ram, doubt they skimped on disks and nic's.
I think they do have the disks separated to an extent. If you look at the image it shows multiple drive letters next to each HDD and all those labels on the left side look like buttons. I bet if you click them it brings up advanced info.
Is process affinity being touted as something new? We've had it at least since Vista, where you can set what logical processor(s) should be used for a particular process
What I would like to know is if the OS remembers a program's affinity settings now. When dual cores where new, there where some games that didn't like getting bounced around between CPU cores. Every time one of the games launched, I had to rush to get the affinity set in task manager before the game crashed. That was back with XP though.
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It reminds me of that horrid theme in the 20th century that "form should follow function" - which gave us boring buildings, boring cars, and boring phones.
Now we are finally breaking free of that age. Manufacturing capabilities are adding fun design elements to cars, buildings, and phones.
But... our computers are going boring? Why do I want solid color boxes as my menu? why can't I fly through a 3D environment and shoot down viruses as I find the App I'm looking for? My PC will do SO much. Why just have it paint solid boxes in flat 2D?
You're unhappy with the chrome? Aqua effects are probably just turned off for development. (And maybe will stay turned off on ARM systems?) Hopefully there will be plenty of translucent lighting effects to go around (on a capable PC).
Reading that developer blog is something else. I really appreciate that Microsoft is paying that close attention to user comments (from people that actually use the preview) and is coming up with all these different types of ways to explain their methodology in designing Win8.
Do any of you people actually read anymore? METRO IS OPTIONAL, it is not meant for desktops, you can simply use Windows 8 almost the same as you do Windows 7.... METRO is mostly meant for tablets and phones, it's an operating system where one build runs on many platforms. Imagine your phone, tablet, xbox, desktop and laptop all running the same OS but the OS is smart enough to change the UI a little based on screen size and device it's running on.
Obviously MS can't force business users, CAD, 3D, programmers, designers, etc into some crazy touch screen interface - there would be a revolution and mass exodus to the Macintosh or something crazy like that. Common sense alone should tell you that MS is not THAT dumb.
Well, I like the graph MUCH better, it's easy to see the chart history as it rolls by. Where's the usage history here? How can a human read and get a good feel for 100 little boxes with numbers in them? When my CPU is under pressure I'll pull up task manager and watch it while I'm working, I like to see the graph and the history of the last few minutes. This just looks dumb to me. Normally I like what MS does, but not here - at least please offer a couple "display" options.
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36 Comments
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name99 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
Is there a civil war going on within MS?On the one hand they are releasing stuff like this --- on the other hand there is the SUPPOSED vision for Windows 8 (like an iPhone, only easier to use).
Seriously, WTF???
In THEORY these two poles can be balanced. Apple does this by having the Mac GUI, plus the UNIX world you can access from the command line. But what we're seeing here is of a piece with what we saw earlier with the ribbonned Explorer, in the mainline GUI, and makes one wonder just what Win8 is going to be.
It certainly looks on track to both horrify power users (with the simple start screen and basic apps) AND terrify novice users (as soon as they need to do anything that goes beyond the start screen).
yelped - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
Um... If you would check the source, then you would see that this is the advanced view.piroroadkill - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
I couldn't agree more. New task manager is awesome, yet metro is awful for desktop use.Windows 8 has so much love/hate stuff going on.
B3an - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
MS have already made improvements to the new Start Screen (Metro) since the dev preview...http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/11/refl...
I think with them improvements it will be better than the current windows Start menu.
Atleast scientifically as MS point out above it IS better, you just have to get used to it and know it's features (for instance many people dont know you can just start typing to search, you dont have to bring up a search box anymore). But there we have the biggest problem of all for most users... change.
Nihility - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
I really only use the start menu to search for programs and system features and to shut down the system.The search in metro is better but shutting down is worse. I generally like what they're doing with metro. My one concern is the lack of heavy multitasking.
robinthakur - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
Seems like an odd fit i'd agree. Whilst i quite like this improved task manager, since I so rarely need to power up my self-built rig these days, preferring to just do everything home based on iPad, I think I'll stick with Windows 7 for a few more years.B3an - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
Being as Win 8 will run on tablets it can completely replace your iToy or anything else. You'll have a full blown OS on a tablet that can do anything a desktop PC can. I'd expect Win 8 tablets to all have HDMI too, so just plug it in to a monitor to use it like a desktop computer for work, then unplug it when taking it around.ananduser - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
The difference is that the transition between the 2 win8 interfaces is as seamless as ALT TAB, and Lion is a mess of a GUI that has angered even the most loyal Gizmodo editor, that wrote an entire article on the uselessness of Lion's GUI changes.Windows is the one moving forward, and Lion is stagnant. After all it's only 30$, you get what you pay for.
jabber - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
I must admit I finally got round to borrowing a new Mac mini a few weeks ago to really try out Lian and see what all the fuss was about.I must say the most used phrase was "WTF???"
I was expecting something amazing compared to the dreadful Win7 I'd been using for the past 2 years.
Well that's what all the Apple fanboys led me to believe. Quite frankly the user experience was a real disappointment. It didn't feel advanced or slick at all. It really did feel quite old fashioned.
Not very intuitive either. Really other than web browsing, looking at photos and using iTunes it didn't seem all that great for anything else. Maybe that's why folks like them?
I didn't regret handing it back or feel like I had to buy one.
B3an - Saturday, October 29, 2011 - link
It certainly is inferior to Win 7. I'd say even Vista.Things like the "File / Edit" menu at the top of the OS is something Windows got rid of from Win 95 onwards. But even without that in so many ways OSX feels like Windows 3.1 to me. No amount of shiny icons can change this.
If you even make an app fullscreen, using the new Lion fullscreen option (Windows has fullscreen option for how many years???) then you cant even use any other connected monitors, they display grey and cannot be used at all. Apple has even copied Windows with the new OS buttons, they used to have round corners (looked like they were from 1999).
I'd literally be here all day if i were to list everything so i'll just stop now.
lyeoh - Sunday, October 30, 2011 - link
OS X might be great for some, but it's not for me.I'm one of those strange people who often has 30 or more windows opened. As long as I have enough memory, I don't see the point of closing windows that I might need to use 5-10 minutes later, assuming the OS/GUI actually helps me manage those 30+ windows.
With Windows 2K/XP/7 I can have the 30+ windows each having their own task button in a double height taskbar. So if I need to switch to a particular window, I just need one click.
With OSX, as far as I know you can't do that in one click. In fact the OS gets in the way, making me take more time to switch to a particular window.
I personally don't think it's impressive if an operating system has a slick interface that's good for managing a handful of windows. If I only have a handful of windows/tasks I don't need much that much help, right?
It's impressive if an OS has a slick interface that can somehow augment me and let me manage say 100 or even 1000 tasks with ease. You might ask who can manage that many tasks? And I'd say, that's the point. Currently the conventional desktop UIs aren't helping us as much.
But look at some of the RTS game UIs, they allow expert players to do very many actions per second and control hundreds of items or more. That proves that significant numbers of people can actually benefit from a UI that's not just designed to help noobs. Many modern game UIs allow noobs to get started and do stuff, while still helping the expert users do advanced stuff.
Modern desktop UIs should be like that too. Look at experienced cashiers or data entry workers, they too are able to do many actions per second, they're normal humans.
KPOM - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
It's a bit jarring going back and forth between Metro UI and Desktop, though. Plus, Microsoft is going to be encouraging developers to go with Metro UI to the detriment of the Desktop. Features like alt-tab to flip back and forth between applications don't exist in Metro UI. It's great for phones and tablets, but I'm not sure about it as a primary interface for Windows. Desktop looks like a transitional solution in Microsoft's vision (much like Classic was for Mac or XP Mode is in Windows 7 Professional).name99 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
Also, is there something weird about this screenshot that I don't understand.Look at the numbers.
This Device is claimed to have 160 logical processors???
5MB of L1 cache, 20MB of L2, and 250MB of L3??? I expect MS has access to experimental new Intel processors, but this is rather more than we were expecting from Ivy Bridge!
Solidstate89 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
http://ark.intel.com/products/53578/Intel-Xeon-Pro...Look at the image again. This is the processor it's using. And it's using 8 of them as you can see under the "Physical Processors: 8" category. Beneath that it shows how many logical processors there are at 160.
This is obviously running on a server.
sanguy - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
This is an E7-2870 box, and these are available already.http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/Intel-Xeon%20E7...
8 sockets in the machine = 8 physical cpu's
10 cores per socket = 80 physical cores
2 threads per core = 160 logical cores
30MB of L3 cache per socket * 8 sockets = 240MB.
Nothing magical here.
name99 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
Ahh. So Windows gives aggregate numbers for things like the L1.To me that makes a lot less sense that reporting something like:
8 processors each of which has:
10 cores each of which has:
2 threads
32KB of L1
etc
I've no idea who, for example, cares about the TOTAL amount of L1 in a box, as opposed to the amount per core.
But at least I see what is going on. Thanks for the explanation.
piroroadkill - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
It's a neat bit of information. If you actually cared about the CPU details you'd be using CPU-Z anyway..Nihility - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
Agreed, seems like a useless way to display the data.sanguy - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
I agree, the presentation of the info is a bit off but the #'s do add up.Filiprino - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
Great, only took several years to do that, but great news nevertheless. Now with Sandy Bridge Xeons having up to 8 cores per socket in 2P configurations it means you can have up to 32 logical cores. Today's task manager with "only" 24 logical cores was ludicrous.darunium - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
too bad it looks like it doesn't nicely relay thermocouple info.tony95112 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
This machine has 160 logical cpus, a terabyte of memory - but only 3 disks and two network interfaces.That display would become rather cluttered for a database machine with a few hundred disk drives and a dozen network interfaces. Perhaps they need to apply the same trick that they used for cpus and just show a shaded grid for those too?
bertomatic - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
Those disks are probably, 1 local array for host os, and a couple SAN connectectd arrays, so it could be thousands of actual disks. Those two nicks are probably 10GbE, or better yet, LACP teams of 10x10GbE each. with 8x$5000 processors and a TB of ram, doubt they skimped on disks and nic's.tayb - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
I think they do have the disks separated to an extent. If you look at the image it shows multiple drive letters next to each HDD and all those labels on the left side look like buttons. I bet if you click them it brings up advanced info.bertomatic - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
i thought the 28xx procs were 2p max, and the 88xx procs were the 8p chips. Is this a cluster of 4x2p systems?sanguy - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
I think the wrong model # is being displayed, and these are E7-8xxxx series.Wardrop - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
Is process affinity being touted as something new? We've had it at least since Vista, where you can set what logical processor(s) should be used for a particular processsilverblue - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
It's in XP. :)Mr Perfect - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
What I would like to know is if the OS remembers a program's affinity settings now. When dual cores where new, there where some games that didn't like getting bounced around between CPU cores. Every time one of the games launched, I had to rush to get the affinity set in task manager before the game crashed. That was back with XP though.rddtretff - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
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__________$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$s.
__________$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$(o)$$$$s
_________s$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$s$$$$$$s
________s$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$3$$$$$$$$
_______s$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
_______$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ Nike Air Max 2010 achat en ligne hommes achat tn
______s$$$$$$$$$$$ nike tn 2010
_____s$$$$$$$$ Nike tn femmes
_____$$$$$$ Nike TN Pas Cher Femme
_____$$$$$Polo Ralph Lauren Homme taille
_____$$$$` Nike air Max 2009
_____$$$`Nike TN Pas Cher Femme
http://www.okeytn.com/
_____$$$$
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http://www.okeytn.com/
Shinobisan - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
Everything is so sparse now days.It reminds me of that horrid theme in the 20th century that "form should follow function" - which gave us boring buildings, boring cars, and boring phones.
Now we are finally breaking free of that age. Manufacturing capabilities are adding fun design elements to cars, buildings, and phones.
But... our computers are going boring? Why do I want solid color boxes as my menu? why can't I fly through a 3D environment and shoot down viruses as I find the App I'm looking for? My PC will do SO much. Why just have it paint solid boxes in flat 2D?
I hates it I do.
stanwood - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
You're unhappy with the chrome? Aqua effects are probably just turned off for development. (And maybe will stay turned off on ARM systems?) Hopefully there will be plenty of translucent lighting effects to go around (on a capable PC).Ninhalem - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
Reading that developer blog is something else. I really appreciate that Microsoft is paying that close attention to user comments (from people that actually use the preview) and is coming up with all these different types of ways to explain their methodology in designing Win8.Exodite - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
SPARC called, they want their TWM window styling back.p05esto - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Do any of you people actually read anymore? METRO IS OPTIONAL, it is not meant for desktops, you can simply use Windows 8 almost the same as you do Windows 7.... METRO is mostly meant for tablets and phones, it's an operating system where one build runs on many platforms. Imagine your phone, tablet, xbox, desktop and laptop all running the same OS but the OS is smart enough to change the UI a little based on screen size and device it's running on.Obviously MS can't force business users, CAD, 3D, programmers, designers, etc into some crazy touch screen interface - there would be a revolution and mass exodus to the Macintosh or something crazy like that. Common sense alone should tell you that MS is not THAT dumb.
p05esto - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Well, I like the graph MUCH better, it's easy to see the chart history as it rolls by. Where's the usage history here? How can a human read and get a good feel for 100 little boxes with numbers in them? When my CPU is under pressure I'll pull up task manager and watch it while I'm working, I like to see the graph and the history of the last few minutes. This just looks dumb to me. Normally I like what MS does, but not here - at least please offer a couple "display" options.