Can someone ... ANYONE! Explain to me why in the era when we have 4k (and with iMAC 5K) displays with almost unmeasurable performance, we have to make our GUIs all flat and ugly like some kind of Windows 3.0 desktop? iPad came out, and Microsoft misread the tea leaves and instead of realizing that the PC market was a replacement market, and the table market was a new expanding market, decided the world wanted everything to be tablets, ... So as Microsoft's market share starts to drop, everyone starts to copy them with dumbed down GUIs and THEIR market share drops too (Hello Gnome and Ubuntu). Then Microsoft who still can't read tea leaves, dumbs down their flying window to make it a flat ugly square and takes away all 3D effects... So now even Apple is copying this silly trend.

I like pretty windows with 3D icons. I don't like this new "flat" look at all. It's boring and ugly. What's next gray scale? Maybe ACSII graphics!

None of this matters to me. Windows is fundamentally broken on so many levels. They used the universal escape character for the path separator. You cannot assess an open file, even to read it, so you have to shut things down to do ANYTHING. The logs can only be accessed using an API, and unless you register all kinds of crazy garbage, the EventLog has a bunch of empty columns. Creating a Service is the most complicated process imaginable three layers deep.
Even the Help system has been rewritten so may times, it never works right. The shell is broken and stupid unless you use the PowerShell... and again. It's 10 pounds of technology for a 1 pound problem. PowerShell is a complete pain to deal with. The Registry is a mess. All kinds of system files are just dumped into system32.

Almost everything In Windows is a mess. I don't want anything to do with it.

My niece came to me crying because her Windows 7 PC was reinstalling its video driver every other day, the sound didn't work half the time. It wouldn't boot sometimes. One day it just died. Wouldn't boot. I did not have a Windows 7 license around, and she couldn't do her homework. To allow her to do her homework, I put Linux Mint on it. Installed Libre Office, Skype, and a handful of teen related things she might want. I figured after a few days we would have to sort her out. and find a Windows to install.

That was a year and a half ago. You would have to pry that machine out of her cold dead hands. No viruses, no crashes, battery lasts longer than it EVER did running Windows. Her Videos work, her music works, Libre Office works. She wants nothing at all to do with Windows. She says Mint is perfect. everything works, it's responsive and nothing she needs to do is missing. She can find a tool in Linux to do anything she needs, and most of it is as good as the Windows version. I asked her the other day if she misses windows... She said she misses Windows at least as much as cancer.

If Apple was in trouble (and they weren't) it has been saved by Microsoft. Thanks to Windows 8, my father bought a Mac when his XP system died. He went to Best-Buy, and the Apple store, and even though it cost more, he liked the Mac better; said Windows 8 looked like a phone to him. Indiana now issues Macs to the students. Of all my friends and family who bought computers recently, 5 of them bought Macs, and only one bought a Windows 8 system... and he HATES IT! ... says he wishes he would have switched to a Mac.

As a side note, my niece had a cheap Windows 7 Laptop that kept dying. She brought it to me, and I couldn't fix it. I even re-installed Windows 7, and it lasted 3 weeks before it started crashing again. she couldn't afford a new PC, and she was crying because she couldn't do her homework. I put Linux Mint on it to tide her over until she could get a new laptop. That was a year ago. She LOVES Mint, and says she never want's to use Windows ever again.

... and the security guards have a target logo right over their heart. .. how inviting.

Gee and just after Microsoft decided to adopt the silly flat tile User Interface paradigm too. You would think its popularity would surge.

Unintuitive interface... check.
Nothing works quite right... check.
Square confusing tiles in a grid... check.

It should be the Windows 8 standard!

It occurs to me that HP has seen Windows 8... Has seen consumer reaction to it. Has seen M$ trying to build their own hardware, and has seen the success of Android and iPad.

Basically M$ had the world by the balls because of the Windows infrastructure. Now they are:
o Building an OS that is fundamentally incompatible with that infrastructure.
o Screwing their business partners by building their own hardware.

HP (and everyone with a clue) knows M$ ALWAYS screws up everything they touch. (We have already seen this ... Apps already disappearing on the new surface. The OS taking most of the system resources.) .. and maybe .. just maybe has figured they better look for a better future. Maybe we just might see HP and maybe someone like Ubuntu partner to produce a reasonable alternative to Windows 8. I mean given the availability of Chrome, Skype, and Libre' Office. Ubuntu might be as compatible with Windows as Windows 8 is... If the users and businesses REALLY HATE the horribly ugly and dysfunctional Windows 8 systems... Maybe HP can say ... here buy this instead and it MIGHT just catch this time.

Of course... I don't much like the "new" (can something two years old still be called new?) Ubuntu desktop either, but I think it beats Windows 8.

I've just about had it. Slashdot used to be news for Nerds. Now it's almost entirely mindless bullshit, and the last straw is when spammers are permitted to confiscate the site, and Slashdot management allows it. As if it's my job to waste my mod points to mark this crap as Troll.

I am logging off, and deleting Slashdot from my home page. Have at it trolls. All yours now.

A 'Cloud-Based' world? WTF??? The real question should be simply .. will Windows 8 succeed. I think not. It is Microsoft's latest 'Vista' disaster.

After this fails and Microsoft can no longer give their versions names because of 'Vista', and cannot give them numbers because of Windows 8 ... Can we switch to Linux or Mac???

What??? 7-Eleven is few and far between? What part of the US do you live in? I spend a great deal of time both in southern California and southern Florida, and I have a 7-Eleven on every corner.

It is not that I am set in my ways. It is that I don't want my PC to be a tablet. I have a programs folder that is three columns long, and I don't want all that stuff as 7 pages of huge ugly square boxes. My Mac does not have a start button, but it does not fill my desktop with ugly garbage either. Windows 8 looks like a DOS machine running Lotus Notes, and works the same too. Actually it's uglier! Notes Icons were more colorful.

Tablets are for airports and living room couches. Computers are for serious stuff. I am not going to do my taxes on my iPad, and I am not going to carry my Desktop with me when I go to the airport. Microsoft is trying to turn the desktop into a Tablet because their revenue is slipping and they are desparate. Their revenue is slipping because everyone has a PC and they are in a stable, not an expanding market, and because Windows Vista and Window 7 are less capable than XP was. People are switching to Mac in droves, and the rest are just buying replacements.

I call B.S. on Windows being any useful comparison at all. That is a complete historical rewrite. When Windows won, there was no Windows and there was no Mac OS - in the same sense there is today. Windows won over Mac OS because Bill Gates is a marketing genius and Steve Jobs had not yet learned that skill. Steve Jobs was still a hippie, and Windows was DOS. At the time when the choice was being made, Neither Mac OS nor "Windows" (Which was little more than a vaporware App for DOS) was the best of breed. Best of breed at the time was the Commodore Amiga. 32 bit multi-tasking, 4096 colors, NTSC (PAL in Europe) video output, quadrophonic Sound (with stereo outputs), and real-time animation against DOS's 'beep' and 16 colors 'Ascii Art' and Mac OS's 64 shades of grey and monophonic MIDI 'sounds'. The best software of the day was being written for it. Electronic Arts was born and started selling games. Disney Animator begat "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", and "Max Headroom" (who was messed up on purpose to emphasize the fact that he was computer generated) and nobody had anything to compare with that. The business world did not really use these things yet. A few forward looking business gave them to secretaries, but there were Macintoshes and PC's both at this time. High end business (like law offices) tended to use Apple because it supported Postscript, and good looking printed output was possible, and low end businesses tended towards PC's running DOS because they were cheaper, and descent printed out was achieved with daisy wheel printers because laser printers needed Postscript, and DOS didn't support it (plus the laser printer cost more than the PC did). Bill Gates was able to manipulate the market to his advantage and nobody else saw it coming until it was too late. To his advantage was indeed an open hardware spec, but none of the companies involved at the time made anything to really compete with the Amiga. Adding peripherals to even try was very expensive, and nobody really tried very hard. Commodore lost by refusing to sell their machines through the toy stores for fear they would not be taken seriously where the Commodore 64 had a virtual lock on the market at the time (The Commodore 64 still holds the record for outselling any single model of computer ever), and insisting on SELLING their demo units to computer retailers, which were all independents at the time and refused to pay for them. So customers had a photograph of a better system in a corner of the store (Amiga), a better, but more expensive, piece of hardware with little software to take advantage of it (Apple), and cheaper hardware with little software to take advantage of it (DOS). "Windows" was useless at this point. There was also Atari, but they were somewhere between Apple and Commodore, and got squeezed out by being a bit too expensive with not quite enough hardware goodies to attract attention. If Commodore had had any marketing sense at all they could have killed everyone at this point, but they missed the boat. Then Apple kicked Steve Jobs out and replaced him with John Scully who made a complete mess of the company, and started losing market share faster than Nokia in the phone market. Steve finally woke up from his LSD infested dream and realized he screwed up. Steve Jobs created NeXT and wrote what is essentially the Mac OS of today, and got Apple back when it was almost completely bankrupt. By this time, Bill Gates had done some very underhanded, illegal, and anti-competitive things in the marketplace, mostly fixed Windows to look like a useful GUI OS, bought the components for Office (all of which were Mac based!), released Mac Office to generate interest in the business world that computers could actually be useful after all, and started porting Office to Windows. Steve Jobs came back to a marketplace John Scully had already lost. Microsoft owned the OS, and was able to write little bugs into Windows to break or slow down things like DR-DOS, Word Perfect, and Lotus 123... and add hooks to their advantage for Office. They finally finished Office, dropped Office on the Mac and checkmate!

Android has not really 'beaten' iOS. It is on more physical devices, but iPhone is still considered the Mercedes and the Android is considered a Ford in the marketplace. Android is on more devices because it is indeed open source, and companies who want a piece of this lucrative market MUST use Android because Apple owns iOS. I have an Android and my wife has an iPhone. The iPhone is more integrated and more consistent, but I wanted 4G and Google Navigator. Still today, it is iPhone, not Android that is eating Blackberry's lunch, because IT Departments are "officially"supporting the iPhone because the CEO bought one. Android is making inroads in the corporate world, but there is no victory to be claimed here.

... is not that Ford is updating software in cars; it is that USB sticks and US mail to million of owners is now cheaper than paying the mechanic to plug-in the car and flash the radio.

Eye Candy is fine. Unity turns my PC into a tablet. There is just a ton of stuff you can no longer do. It is about dumbing down the interface until morons can work it. Then intelligent people can't get their work done.

Tablets are fine, but they are not PCs. I don't want a 5 pound wrist watch that can watch movies, and I don't was a PC that can ONLY surf the web.

I am not sure that is quite true. Bill Gates is the one that was 'really good at PR'. Not to belittle Steve. He was good too (indeed he may have learned from Bill because he got better as he went along), but Steve actually had a better idea. M$ has never had ANYTHING that wasn't stolen. Windows only exists because they copied the Mac (or tried to), and yet Gates seemingly had the ability to sell eyeglasses to a blind man. As for Dennis. Indeed, he is the one who deserves the praise, but were it not for Steve, only the people on this blog would know what a computer was, because my father would never have an MS-DOS or a UNIX machine. The Commodore Amiga deserved the crown, but Commodore couldn't market eyesight to a blind man. M$ would not have built Windows without the Mac, because M$ has no vision at all. It is possible that without Steve, Commodore might have stumbled into the spotlight by accident, but I doubt they could have marketed their way to success because from a marketing point of view they did absolutely everything wrong. These guys tried to SELL their demo units to the reviewers!!

Anyway.. Happy Dennis Ritchie Day. He deserves the praise. Without him I might be a Cab driver.