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August Windows 8.1 Update Due Out August 12


NoelC

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Once the start menu reintroduction was no longer planned for this update, why expect earth shattering changes? Just another monthly update.

 

Regarding the "highlight" features, I wouldn't mind a good native touchpad driver. But this isn't it. And Miracast could be nice, but I'm more interested in sending than receiving. :)

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I dunno, with the new and improved "release whatever's building in the trunk at the moment" philosophy at Microsoft, I thought maybe we'd see substantive new features come out from time to time.  All we're getting are bugfixes.  Perhaps with all the focus on the pipeline itself, they didn't actually put anyone on projects that were set to finish this year.

 

Plainly, the accelerated release schedule initiative has failed.  There's a certain minimum time it takes to do some things, and all the executives in the world can't make that baby come out in less.

 

Not that I mind an OS that stays stable.  Someone somewhere said the 3 year release cycle was "bad".  I never thought so.  Releasing software that's taken a few years to engineer and another to test isn't a bad thing.  You get substantial work that way.  Not whatever someone could whip up in a few months.  Is anyone really scratching their head about why there's nothing truly fresh or new in Windows?  Or why the documentation has fallen into disrepair?  Short term thinking doesn't work with something this complex.

 

-Noel

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But you can add substantial features in shorter release cycles, since most of the "OS" is actually a bunch of unrelated pieces of software, utilities, subsystems that may have global effects but are still well-defined subparts with well-defined interfaces (say, font rendering), and so on. I wouldn't mind "rapid releases" as long as it doesn't break stuff, remove features, or radically change things without a good reason or a way to keep on using the old stuff.

 

Though I do hate the rapid release style of Firefox and Chrome. Or actually, their versioning. It's impossible to tell quickly when a release has major implications, so since they started with their inflated version numbers I update much less often.

Edited by shae
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Imagine the rejoicing if, during one of these milestone updates, Microsoft were to do nothing more than adjust the desktop theme element colors (e.g., darken scrollbar thumbs a little or - God forbid - add some style elements back) to make it slightly easier to use again.  People would hold parades for the new leadership.

 

-Noel

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Imagine the rejoicing if, during one of these milestone updates, Microsoft were to do nothing more than adjust the desktop theme element colors (e.g., darken scrollbar thumbs a little or - God forbid - add some style elements back) to make it slightly easier to use again.  People would hold parades for the new leadership.

 

-Noel

 

... and - actually - it wouldn't take 400 Mb of updates .....  more like 1 or 2 Mb of stuff ;)

 

jaclaz

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I once ran across a compiler where the author was getting complaints that the compiled executables were too small - people were discounting the products because, well, they just couldn't be substantial and functional if they were only hundreds of kB or maybe a few MB in size.  So they added a #BLOAT metastatement and users were happy.  True story.

 

-Noel

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I once ran across a compiler where the author was getting complaints that the compiled executables were too small - people were discounting the products because, well, they just couldn't be substantial and functional if they were only hundreds of kB or maybe a few MB in size.  So they added a #BLOAT metastatement and users were happy.  True story.

 

-Noel

Yeah, sure, nice one! :yes:.

 

Just to show you how I personally think it differently ;):

http://reboot.pro/topic/18792-if-anyone-is-up-for-a-challenge/

http://reboot.pro/topic/18792-if-anyone-is-up-for-a-challenge/#entry175985

 

For the record the minimum theoretical size of 97 bytes was reached by joakim :thumbup: (though with quite a few caveats):

http://reboot.pro/topic/18792-if-anyone-is-up-for-a-challenge/?p=176346

but I still stand by "my" 148 bytes version which is a tadbit more "universal":

http://reboot.pro/topic/18792-if-anyone-is-up-for-a-challenge/?p=176408

 

And how the good MS guys are not particularly attentive to size of what they provide :whistle:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/145209-the-smallest-possible-size-of-bootsdi/

and, to cite again myself :w00t: :

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/145209-the-smallest-possible-size-of-bootsdi/?p=933421

 

 

Good. smile.gif

Now it comes to mind a question:

if a single guy in a few days of his spare time can take a "random" item and reduce it's size tenfold what could do the full-time MS guys if they wanted to? unsure.gif

;)

As a dinosaur, in my simplicity I continue thinking that smaller things are faster, no matter how faster is your hardware, managing less bytes it will make it faster! :thumbup

 

 

jaclaz

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I have oft wondered if an entire OS could live inside the enormous caches inside todays CPUs.

Several megabytes depending on yer machine.

 

When I was pleasantly surprised the other day when I came across this tiny OS that fits on a floppy.

http://www.menuetos.net/

 

Yay for real tight programming. Well beyond my abilities. But just shows what can be done on Modern HW.

 

Remember the original Macs and Ataris had their entire OS inside 128-512k ROMs, Full GUI.

Limited technology sure, but that was the standard of the day.. But they were even Pretty, while functional!

Bitmapped graphics are almost limitless.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean.

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The OS could be all L2/L3 cached, but only if it doesn't do much else beyond loading the OS. The actual amount of memory used by the OS and applications will be much higher.

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I have oft wondered if an entire OS could live inside the enormous caches inside todays CPUs.

Several megabytes depending on yer machine.

 

 

Chances are that's where the most-used parts of it are running from right now.  That's what Cache is all about.

 

-Noel

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I have oft wondered if an entire OS could live inside the enormous caches inside todays CPUs.

Several megabytes depending on yer machine.

 

When I was pleasantly surprised the other day when I came across this tiny OS that fits on a floppy.

http://www.menuetos.net/

 

 

What I always loved of menuet OS :) is their simple, straight to the point, way to make a bootable CD:

http://www.menuetos.net/cdboot.htm

They simply append to an el-torito header the floppy image, without any CDFS filesystem :thumbup (which is actually the simplest and faster way to have  a floppy or superfloppy based bootable CD):

http://reboot.pro/topic/9916-grub4dos-isohybrided/?p=86679

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/152399-on-bootable-cds-floppy-emulation/?p=971170

 

jaclaz

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Well, I don't know about the August updates. I just installed the July ones. One of them won't install. I found a suggestions to use SFC. SFC didn't manage to do its thing after a restart and is now stuck in a "pending" state. The update that won't install just disappeared from Windows Update, along with all August updates but one. DISM doesn't seem to work either, I think for the same reason that SFC is "pending".

 

You gotta love the endless problems, tweaking, and research needed with Windows.

Edited by shae
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