Windows 8 is based off the same basic architecture as Windows 7, with performance enhancements. Windows 7 drivers work in Windows 8.

The fact you're having crashing means you either have crappy hardware (or bad drivers), or you have something else going on. I game better in Windows 8 than I ever did in 7.

Really it's a changing demographic that Nokia hasn't kept up with. They sold lots of 'dumbphones' and 'feature phones' in an era now, where consumers want smartphones. They were late to the game, and as a result their behemoth status doesn't help them.

That said, I have a Lumia 920 and really, really like it. OS aside, it takes amazingly good pictures and I can beat a person to death with it and not have to worry about whether it works afterwards. Those also, were my requirements for buying a phone... good camera and durable. I have kids, kind of a necessity.

The XBox marketplace has had stuff like this for some time. I don't see how it's a big boon to Wii U when it's been done before.

I work in a large financial services firm, and here is the value of a college degree. It tells me you are willing to finish something. That's about it.

I don't particularly care if your degree is in horticulture or anything else, we have to use a baseline to employ for education. This is for multiple reasons, audits, external investors, etc. It's not as cut and dry as people think; while I like the idea of getting people with skills from outside of the college realm, my HR department still basically requires that I get college grads. It's kind of being part of the 'club' -- I went through, and I'm only hiring people who went through as well.

Granted, there's a great argument to be made about the value college provides, and the obscene cost of it all.... but right now it's just the way it is, and unless you are in an Ivy League school with a great business already in motion, going to college is a safe bet for your future. You won't rise anywhere in the ranks if you don't have a degree, but you can probably get lots of technical positions. But forget management or being an executive.

And the sad fact is, that as of today, Windows 8 under steam outnumbers *all* versions of Mac OS all together. You can bet that the desktop distribution to Mac is higher than Linux, so what is the point here?

Valve is caught with a problem, they are trying desperately to stay relevant in an era where XBox is actually really good, and while the integration into Windows 8 leaves much to be desired, you now give companies a huge benefit in added revenue via XBox points and Xbox Achievements (which points can unlock certain things). Simply stated, developers and publishers make more money through the Xbox channels than they do anywhere else.

I know the idea of Linux gaming is great on /. but let's face the bad news; only if the community takes on the challenge of porting games (ala Wine or something), will it ever be bothered to be played. And even then, every Linux "gamer" will keep a Windows partition because all games will come to Windows, and only some will come to Linux -- and that's in an ideal world. So if publishers/developers know this, what's the point in adding Linux support in? The games won't play as well, they will lose added revenue via Xbox points/achievements, and they will make a few nerds happy.

Sorry to say but getting a Humble Bundle developer to push the idea that Steam on Linux will be "moderately successful" to "wildly successful" is idiotic and naive. Next time show an interview from a big name publisher and let the entire interview be three minutes of laughing.

It's actually not... it responds to LDAP requests, but it's not a subset of LDAP.

You have to beat Microsoft Office.

And that is a game that has been tried, and failed many times. Enterprises aren't hooked to Windows as much as they are the tools they use on it. Excel being probably the biggest one. The amount of power that desktop app has is ridiculous, and while I can applaud all the open source flavors, nothing comes even close. You can't unseat Windows or make Linux more tractable in the enterprise without removing the dependence on Office.

You can make Linux awesome, make Samba a worthy AD competitor, but if you don't have the productivity suite that makes it amazing, the cost of a $90 Windows license is nothing compared to the productivity you'd give up to lose Excel. Here's a hint folks -- people don't look at the price of the OS, nor do they care. They look at the value of the suite of tools that allow an employee to work. If you could make a business case that a Calicovision would make you more productive than Windows, I think you'd see a swell of pilots testing it out.

Linux isn't being ignored because it's bad -- well... partly because it is, but that's more a Samba fix -- it's being ignored because it does not contain a worthwhile replacement to the jobs people are already doing, and the businesses already engrained in workflows that surround and use Office. And you will not break that mold easily, if ever. And it's why I still say Windows Phone is going to do well over time.... but I'll gladly eat my words if I'm wrong.

I mean not for nothing, this is all stemming from a *single* source -- the Verge. If they are slightly inaccurate about how they are wording this, or getting some bad information, everybody's running off on a tangent here.

Microsoft has been known to keep compatibility for versions from 100 years ago. That's why they keep offering a 32 bit version of Windows 8, because of legacy 16 bit code. The idea that they'd throw their enterprise customers for a loop like this without having seriously thought it through is well... ridiculous to me. They may have some bad ideas but their core cash cows being sacrificed is really not one of them.

There is truth to this.... I think Jobs knew what he liked, and his 'vision' of things is what people bought. Now that he's gone, how can you teach the skill of "know what people will like" to anybody else? Forstall might have been one of the few people to kind of get it; it's embued in the personality of a self righteous asshole. Tim Cook certainly doesn't have it, though he might be able to save a lot of cash on the assembly line and through suppliers, ultimately that doesn't help Apple innovate anything.

Microsoft is an interesting animal at this point, and given they just fired Sinofsky (which I view as a blessing for them), I think you'll see a real convergence of MS technologies by Windows 9 (which is what, two years away?). MS is doing hard innovation through R&D, Apple is doing revisionary work and using new hardware in an elegant way as it becomes available (usually first, to them). Ultimately I believe that the R&D efforts will prevail, and Apple will have to play catchup; but at that point it's going to be too late. Jobs was prescient about these things, where Cook is clueless. In time, we will see how it falls out but I feel the benefit is to us really, so I'm just going to kick back and watch the competition.

And shot.

There's really no security team in place at Adobe, is there?

It beats the pants off of vBulletin in many, many ways. First of all, the original developers are still working on the product. It has gone through many revisions and huge code changes. vBulletin at its core is a very dated piece of software.

The extensibility in IPB is better. They have a feature called IPConnect that allows you to integrate different authentication points. They have a shopping cart program called Nexus, Blogs, and a CMS that's pretty good though takes some effort to figure out (IP Content).

It runs fast, it's a clean setup, easy to administer and there are plenty of plugins and skins for it as well.

Take a look, many, many people switched from vBulletin to IPB.

It is Detroit. Highest rate of crime in the country.

But good luck with that. You destroy a local economy by outsourcing everything and then try to rebuild by insourcing, then you might have a hard time to get good engineers right off the bat.

Fair point... but if you're talking about having a server with Windows clients and trying to supplant AD, it's a futile exercise. It all works together really well because it's designed to. Once you lose control of being able to administer huge swaths of clients via GPO, you lose an organizational edge.

Unless you're a software firm intent on showing you can do without. But most people aren't software firms in that position.

Look at the use case.

I know too many Windows and Linux folks who try to shoehorn one way of doing things so it runs the way they want them to. This post reeks of that.

Find the best business reason to use one thing or another. I don't disqualify MS because it's not open source, or Linux because it's free. There are costs to doing everything, and usually made up outside of what infrastructure you decide on.

That said, Windows is best on the desktop because of Group Policy, its extension into things like System Center, IT Asset Management systems, reporting, workflow, automation, etc. I know it "can be done" with Linux but the process is usually smushed together and kludgy. Windows is simpler because of the software that supports it, many of them made by MS themselves.

I will stick with *nix for my backend requirements, and Windows for my front end. Until something changes drastically, I don't see much point in trying Linux on the desktop -- it's clearly not its strong suit.