A look ahead: 2012 is Microsoft's turning point

dreamer said:

Why you people no love for metro

I for one think metro is not a mere eye candy for desktops and laptops.I mean just imagine the possibilities of live tiles showing you the most relevant info without launching any app/software.If developers really create more apps,we could "see" our mails,fb feeds,twitter etc etc right there on the main screen.Also productive applications can be launched/viewed directly from metro.

For those people who hate metro they can revert to traditional desktop by just one click.

Thats just my opinion though.If MS handles it carefully metro might truly turn into game changer.

I agree!

DeaconFrost said:

M1GU31 said:

i felt 2011 was apples year imo hopefully they surpass apple and Microsoft brings out some good products

Apples year for what? To offer 6 month old technology at twice the cost? The logo is a status symbol, catering to the non-tech savvy who don't understnd the specs of the computer to being with....or else they'd never justify the cost. All Apple does well is market to create a false perception.

HAHAHAHAHAHA!! That's so true!

Noobs.....

jimbo45 said:

lehnerus2000 said:

whs said:

Absolutely. For my data the cloud is no solution and I don't think the cloud will get much use from desktops.

But for running some heavy hitter applications from a phone or a tablet, it may be ok.

Funnily enough I agree with both of you.

It's strange how phones are getting "smarter" and yet there seems to be a push to make PCs "dumber" (i.e. more like terminals).

Coke Robot said:

As for the cloud approach, I doubt Microsoft will really pull a google chrome os on us.

The "Cloud" is the "Holy Grail" for software makers:

• If you don't get access to the code, you can't pirate it.
• They get to "tax" you every time you use it.

What's cheaper, renting a device (long term) or owning it outright?

Hi there
Depends on what you mean by "Pirating".
Have you ever heard of the term "Reverse Engineering".

In the early days of PC's when MS was still a fledgling company they designed MSDOS to run on PC's in a similar manner to the original IBM PC. Now IBMDOS in those early days had patented its BIOS .

MSDOS to be compatable had to "reverse Engineer" the BIOS so its own OS could make the appropriate hardware calls and perform in a similar manner to the original IBM DOS.

This actually opened up the whole PC market to 3rd party suppliers -- until that time IBM had a monopoly since nobody else could "replicate" the BIOS.

Today both parties would probably be emplying 1000's of lawyers and clogging up 90% of the worlds court system with obscure "Patent Infringement" cases but at that time IBM and MS actually worked quite closely together.

So if software is being used via the Cloud somebody somewhere will reverse engineer it -- most of the available multi media codecs (both audio and video) that many "Free" players use were probably reverse engineered -- for example if you mount ANY regional encoded DVD as a Virtual DVD drive as an ISO stored on a HDD or USB drive -- just a straight ISO copy -- no decryption / CSS removal etc etc VLC will play it without a problem whatever the firmware setting of your physical DVD drive has.

So the Virtual Drive Mounter can obviously dynamically change the "regional encoding" parameter at will. As this is 3rd party software on W7 there might well be reverse enginerring of the "DVD Firmware regional settings" depending on the DVD being mounted.

However on W8 developer preview edition there is a BUILT in ISO mounter and similarly VLC will play ANY region DVD that is mounted as a Virtual drive -- and I doubt if MS is breaking other people's copyright deliberately too.

However there must have been some reverse engineering here as well to allow multi region playback.

Cheers
jimbo

I doubt highly that's not Microsoft's approach to software. Of course one could pirate, but there are drawbacks. Firstly, morality of such. If that doesn't stop you, then there's the fact that the pirated software can be detected. If that can be outdone (as it has with Windows 7), you will not be able to connect to an online multiplayer for games, or certain software will not be able to be updated automatically without having to do reinstall the new software with a newer crack.If you're caught uploading software (P2Ping), your internet provider will make you go through some steps to re-enable your internet. If you're caught uploading more times, your provider will terminate your contract with them. Or, if the US congress decides to go with big business and industry, they'll just pass SOPA related bills to make every copyright violation removed from the interweb highway.

Microsoft has taken a passive approach to piracy with Windows 7 though. They'll actually allow updates, to a certain extent with the 1033 update, because if a pirated Windows without the latest security updates fell into the hands of a remote hacker/attacker, there is potential that an array of Windows machines could be infected with some malware to do whatever and that could spread to non-pirated copies of Windows.

I don't foresee Microsoft putting all their software in a cloud environment, maybe somewhat limited versions, but if the cloud rules, a whole computing industry will die. NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, ASUS, Dell, and all their related manufacturers will loss a lot of consumer business. The only thing they could build are chromebooks. Bleh.

Metro UI is just that UI that will look nice to many and bad to much, but will look bad to all afterwards. :/