[Cialug] Windows 8

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 12:30 PM, Todd Walton <tdwalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm watching the Microsoft Build Conference keynote right now.
> They're poring over the upcoming Windows 8.  All in all, it really is
> an improvement over Windows 7.  (Well, I really haven't used Windows 7
> very much.  But, the point being, there's lots of improvements.)
>
>
The part that concerned me was showing off the UFFI boot. It will refuse to
boot unsigned boot partitions. That might make it a bit hard to replace
Windows on new PCs.

The main speaker said something that made me very angry.  He said,
> (roughly), "in the new world of computing apps must not be siloes and
> must communicate with other apps through more than just a narrow
> channel."  I know he's supposed to be 'oh wow' and 'gee whiz', but you
> know... the only reason Windows apps have been so siloed and greedy is
> because Microsoft has legislated and incentivized it for so long.  I
> learned Linux administration long before Windows, and when I came to
> Windows administration 5 years ago or so, this was one of the things
> that infuriated me so much.  Every little thing I'd want to do used
> it's own app, hidden away in its own place, using its own interface.
> And you could never take the output of one app and give it to another.
>  Agh!
>

I don't know that this is a Windows fault, per se. The problem isn't exactly
that Windows locks up data. As a matter of fact, many of the canonical
Windows programs have been examples of how to expose the apps data and
functionality as a service. You could write a shell script (VBScript for
example) that could completely control MS Word or Adobe Photoshop. In some
cases there were APIs available to scripts that were very hard to get to in
the UI (like Photoshop's batch conversion stuff).

It's different from UNIX's pipes or course, but it does let you do some
pretty cool stuff. As a matter of fact, Windows took a sheet from the UNIX
play book with Power Shell. I've not used this capability, but as I
understand it, you can pipe "objects" so that instead of having to parse
plain text you get an actual object, with it's data and methods. That sounds
pretty cool.

Now it just so happens that few application developers go through the
trouble of exposing their API in such a way. These then become silos.

The demo was quite impressive. I'm glad to see MS innovating again. From
mobile and from Apple they're getting some serious competition and they're
having to really push the limits. I've said it before and I'll say it again,
competition is great.

(oh, and yes, I saw several things that have been around for a while on
Linux - for example, application developers can sync their services' data
using Windows Live. Sounds a bit like Ubuntu One...)

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin and twitter

♫ You're never fully dressed without a smile! ♫
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