Cody Taylor

snydeq writes “Microsoft requested on Tuesday some billion in bailout funds from the federal government, claiming that as the company controls an overwhelming share of the OS market, it is too big to fail. Low adoption rates for Vista, the ensuing ad campaign trying to convince people that they really do like Vista, and the increased need for development resources to rush Windows 7 to market to make people forget about Vista have necessitated the bailout, the company said. “We want to make it absolutely clear that this is not a crisis of mismanagement,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a prepared statement. “This is simply a crisis of dollars — a crisis of not having enough dollars coming our way.””

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ahziem writes “Ubuntu’s Intrepid Ibex and Redmond’s Windows XP go head-to-head in an OpenOffice.org 3.0 performance smackdown measuring vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org 3.0. Each platform and edition does well in different tests. Go-oo is known for its proud slogan “Better, Faster, Freer,” but last time with OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Fedora, Go-oo came in fourth place out of four. Slashdot has previously reported Ubuntu beating Vista and Windows 7 in benchmarks, so either XP is faster or this benchmark carries a different weight.”

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Vista’s driver support was a mess when the OS first launched. Will Windows 7 have the same compatibility issues?

The other day I realized that it had been a long time since I’d talked about Linux as a whole as opposed to looking at specific distros. Also, over the past few weeks I’ve spent quite a lot of time discussing Windows, in particular Windows 7, and Apple’s Mac OS X.

Free support for Windows XP ends on April 14th, and the Windows 7 release candidate arrives in May, coincidence? I don’t think so.

Details on the Windows 7 Release Candidate public download have leaked, straight from Microsoft.

nandemoari writes “Microsoft has revealed more about Windows 7 and its support for touch screen technology. The system sounds impressive, however, reports suggest it appears to have a high error rate. In an early version of the system, Microsoft found some problems. For example, both the zoom and rotate functions worked less than 75% of the time, often because the computer confused the two. To rectify this, engineers redesigned the system so that it only looks out for gestures specifically relevant to the program being used. This made a significant improvement: the zoom gesture was now recognized 90% of the time. The problem is that even a 90% success rate may be too low. If you can imagine how frustrating it would be if one in ten keystrokes or mouse movements didn’t do what you intended, you can see why touch screen technology will need to be even more reliable if it’s to truly improve the user experience. PC Authority has a related story about statements from HP, who don’t expect such technology to replace keyboards and mice any time soon.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes “Someone over at Redmond flipped the wrong switch, it would seem. Ars Technica spotted that the Windows 7 download page on TechNet had switched to say Release Candidate instead of Beta. It’s now back to Beta, but not before Ars got all the details off the page: ‘The public RC will apparently be coming in May 2009, and not in April as previously rumored. The RC testing program will be available at least through June 2009, and the actual build will expire June 1, 2010. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions will be available in English, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish.’ A screenshot and all the text on the RC download page, which was set to be published ‘May 2009’ is saved over at Ars.”

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TRNick writes “TechRadar talks to Windows 7’s Senior User Experience Designer and discovers the interface ideas the Windows 7 team almost, but didn’t put into Windows 7, and the stages various UI features went through to their final form. Quoting: ‘… The next prototype, in February 2007, was called the Bat Signal; when you moved your mouse over an icon in the taskbar, the full window would pop up on screen, highlighted by beams of light (a little like the Batman signal projected over Gotham City). Bat Signal made it easy to find the right window but it caused other problems: ‘sometimes people toss the mouse down to the bottom of the screen when they’re typing because they don’t care where the mouse is and the Bat Signal pops up and that’s really intrusive in their flow.’ Bat Signal evolved into Aero Peek in Windows 7; you can hover over an icon to get thumbnails and hover over a thumbnail to get a preview of the window.”

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Mike Chapman points out this InfoWorld article, according to which you shouldn’t immediately expect much in the way of performance gains from Windows 7 (or Linux) from eight-core chips that come out from Intel this year. “For systems going beyond quad-core chips, the performance may actually drop beyond quad-core chips. Why? Windows and Linux aren’t designed for PCs beyond quad-core chips, and programmers are to blame for that. Developers still write programs for single-core chips and need the tools necessary to break up tasks over multiple cores. Problem? The development tools aren’t available and research is only starting.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.