Windows 8

Microsoft is dead serious about killing the classic Start button and Start menu in Windows 8, and is reportedly disabling hacks that bring them back.

Paul Thurrott, a well-connected Microsoft blogger, reports that the company is “furiously ripping out legacy code” that can make Windows 8 look like its predecessor. Hacks that bring back the Start button and Start menu, such as the third-party software ViStart, will reportedly be broken in the Windows 8 Release Preview, which is expected to launch today.

Apple CEO Tim Cook took another swipe at Windows 8 yesterday, saying that forcing tablets to use an operating system written for desktop PCs means Windows 8 tablets will be "very similar to what tablets were 10 years ago." And PCs will be worse off as well, he added.

Cook's comments came at the AllThingD's D10 conference, and he had plenty of other bad things to say about Windows 8.

Microsoft will ship Windows 8 Release Preview today, several days earlier than expected, according to a blog briefly posted by the company.

The blog post, written by Chuck Chan, an executive with the Windows development team, went live for a few minutes late Wednesday, long enough for several users to take notice. Neowin first reported the leak of Chan's post and its Thursday date.

Windows 8 and ultrabook laptops are expected to take center stage at the Computex trade show in Taipei next week, as industry giants Microsoft and Intel try to develop products that can compete better against Apple's iPad.

Microsoft, Intel and local PC vendors such as Acer and Asus all are expected to show off tablets with the upcoming Windows 8 OS, as well as thinner and lighter ultrabooks running Intel's latest processor, code-named Ivy Bridge, said Thomas Huang, the manager in charge of organizing Computex.

Microsoft's Windows 8 Release Preview may be available as early as Friday, but if you can't wait to get your hands on the next Windows 8 beta, a purported leaked 64-bit version has surfaced online. The only catch is the leaked Windows 8 image is in Chinese; however, some users have been able to get parts of the system to display English. Copies of the supposed Windows 8 leak were available on a number of Chinese-language sites, and the Pirate Bay also has links to a 3.29 gigabyte torrent you can download. You can also find an active forum thread on Winunleaked.tk discussing where to get copies of the purported leak and how to try to get the operating system up and running.

Image courtesy of Winunleaked

Microsoft will not reduce the price of Windows 8 upgrades, as it did three years ago before the roll-out of Windows 7, a retail sales analyst said last week.

"I would expect upgrade pricing to consumers to be on par with Windows 7," said Stephen Baker of the NPD Group. "They had a compelling reason to get consumers off of Vista and priced [it] to make that happen [in 2009]. But the reason to get consumers onto a more modern platform with a software upgrade is a lot less now than in 2009."

Microsoft has already ruffled more than a few feathers with the exclusionary potential of its forthcoming Windows 8 operating system, and this past week the open source community has been up in arms again.

The cause this time has been its Visual Studio 11 product line, new details about which the company published earlier this month.

Some details are beginning to emerge of what we can expect from the first generation of Intel-based Windows 8 tablets. If the leaked specs of the Dell Windows 8 tablet are any indication, though, the devices may be severely underwhelming.

According to information shared by Neowin, the upcoming Dell tablet will sport a dual-core Intel Cloverleaf processor, 2GB of RAM, and 128GB of SSD storage. The RAM and storage capacity are larger than most of the tablets currently available, but this is an Intel x86 device, not an ARM-based tablet, so it’s not as impressive as it sounds.

If you thought Samsung's 11.6-inch Windows 8 preview tablet was on the large side, it's nothing compared to the touch screen Steve Ballmer has in his office.

The CEO of Microsoft uses an 80-inch touchscreen with Windows 8 for communications and productivity, Wired UK reports. “He's got rid of his phone, he's got rid of his note paper,” spokesman Frank Shaw said. “It's touch-enabled and it's hung on his wall.”

500,000. That’s the number of takedown requests Microsoft has submitted to Google just over the past month related to copyright infringement and software piracy.

Extrapolating that for a whole year—assuming half a million takedown requests a month—that would be six million websites attempting to illegally distribute Microsoft operating systems or applications. And, those are just the ones that are identified. Who knows how many slip through the cracks or fly under the radar?