Windows 8 And Windows 9?

[srochford]

Apple should do large educational discounts to get schools using mac for everything... they're more "creative" as they say than Windows... and that's what kids need isnt it? Them Mac v PC videos on YouTube are right I guess.

The other main thing is the amount of people who can't use vista yet as it looks entirely different, the start button has gone... so all them tutorials we made are now wrong as there is no effin START button!

If they can't use Vista after XP as the button (which is in exactly the same place and has much the same function) doesn't say "start" on it, do you really think they'll cope with the change to a Mac???

I think many people move quite smoothly between OS versions and machines. Of course there are niggles - I still want to press <Windows> R to run an app instead of just pressing Windows, typing the name and letting search find it. The new method is better (the Windows R only works for programs on the path; search works for any program, document, folder, email etc) but I still find myself getting it wrong :-)

Part of the difficulty is how much help the OS should give the user. Many people will remember the *&^!"ing paperclip in Word saying "I think you're writing a letter; do you need any help" and don't want that sort of thing. Do we need "I think you're trying to find a spreadsheet - let me show you how"??

[CyberNerd]

The change from 8 to 16 etc wasn't just about memory. Remember, there are two important sets of "numbers" in a CPU - the width of the address bus (controls the maximum RAM you can address) and the width of the data bus (controls the size of numbers you can process).

On 8 bit CPUs you were stuck with numbers no bigger than 2^8 (256 decimal). This meant that to do maths with "real" numbers meant lots of complex fiddling around (eg the Z80 CPU allowed you to use pairs of registers so you could deal with numbers up to 2^16 but that still doesn't allow you to handle decimal numbers with any precision)

Anything involving real maths needs more bits (eg true colour graphics need 24 bit numbers for each pixel). If you want to be able to process graphics reasonably quickly, you want to be able to do more than 1 pixel at a time.

The data bus must be what they are talking about. The data bus and the address bus need not be the same.
Similar to the Z80 example, the 386SX was 32bit processor but to get 32bit from memory required 2 fetches because it has a 16bit data bus but the 386DX has a 32bit data bus.
but what hardware is a 128bit os going to run on? Usually intel/AMD produce the chips first then MS play a catchup game. It took ages for windows to get onto AMD64 where other os's were going it well before - infact didn;t MS drop 64bit support in NT4?