Introducing Windows 8

Windows 8: how to install Consumer Preview

We show you how to install Windows 8 using the setup wizard, with a DVD ISO image and via USB.

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The full consumer release of Windows 8 is coming in late October - but if you want to get ahead of the pack and see what Windows 8 looks like now, the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is now available to download If you previously installed the Windows 8 Developer Preview you will need to carry out a clean install.

The Developer Preview was a pre-beta version of Windows 8 for developers and cannot be uninstalled, it is also missing a lot of the functionality now available in the Consumer Preview. As Microsoft revealed at their Windows 8 Consumer Event in Barcelona, there have been over 100,000 significant product changes since Windows Developer Preview.

 

System Requirements

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview works great on the same hardware that powers Windows Vista and Windows 7:

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
• Taking advantage of touch input requires a screen that supports multi-touch
• To run Metro style Apps, you need a screen resolution of 1024 X 768 or greater

The Preview is available in English, French, German, Japanese and simplified Chinese languages.

How to download Windows 8

There are two methods to download the Consumer Preview:

 

Windows 8 Consumer Preview Setup (Simple)

This is the easiest of methods (and fully automated). Windows 8 Consumer Preview Setup will check to see if your PC can run Windows 8 and select the right download. This setup process also checks to see which of your apps (programs) are compatible and offers upgrade assistance should you need it.

Install from an ISO image (Advanced)

Windows 8 Consumer Preview ISO files (.iso) are provided as an alternative to using Windows 8 Consumer Preview Setup (it is not recommended for computer novices).

An ISO image must be converted into installation media stored on a DVD or a USB flash drive.

The easiest way to convert an ISO file to a DVD in Windows 7 is to use Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool. You can get it here.

 

Once downloaded, run the tool and browse to your ISO file. Click 'Next' and choose from either 'USB device' or 'DVD' installation options. Insert your USB/DVD and select 'Begin copying'.

A note on installing the Consumer Preview

Windows 8 Consumer Preview is prerelease software that may be substantially modified before it's commercially released. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, with respect to the information provided here.

Some product features and functionality may require additional hardware or software. If you decide to go back to your previous operating system, you'll need to reinstall it from the recovery or installation media that came with your PC.

Download Windows 8 Consumer Preview

VIA: www.msn.com

Facebook: One Billion and Counting

Mark Zuckerberg has just six billion more people to go.

 

Facebook said it has topped one billion monthly active users, a milestone that raises growth questions anew for the social network and whether it can profit off its giant user base. Geoffrey Fowler reports on digits. Photo: Getty Images.

Mr. Zuckerberg said Thursday thatFacebook Inc., FB +0.54% the social network he started in his Harvard dorm eight years ago, reached the milestone of one billion monthly active members on Sept. 14.

The Menlo Park, Calif., company had reached 500 million active users in July 2010, making Facebook one of the fastest-growing sites in history.

Facebook didn't specify whether the one-billion count includes fake accounts, but it has been on a campaign to remove them. In August, Facebook said fakes constituted 8.7% of its users.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in San Francisco on Sept. 11.

The announcement couldn't come soon enough for Facebook. Investors today value the business at a fraction of the $100 billion opportunity they saw in the company when it held its initial public offering in May.

Other social media businesses are also running into difficulties. On Thursday, social-games maker Zynga Inc. lowered its earnings outlook for the year, in part because consumers appear to be losing interest in some of its games.

The question for Facebook is just how much value Mr. Zuckerberg can extract from all those people that Facebook signed up for free. Last year, the company produced nearly $4 billion in revenue, mostly from advertising—far less than the nearly $38 billion that Google squeezed out of an equally large set of users in the last fiscal year.

Facebook still trails behind other Web companies in capturing revenue from users. In the U.S., search engines such as Google and Yahoo make about $88 per person who uses its search engine, while Facebook makes about $15 per user, according to eMarketer Inc.

This week, Facebook executives attended New York's Advertising Week, trying to convince advertisers that its mix of direct access to people and their network of friends provide a potent marketing tool equivalent to five Super Bowls each day.

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said earlier this week Facebook is looking at "premium services for businesses" as a way of adding to its revenue stream.

Meanwhile, Facebook has grown increasingly bold in its efforts to find alternative lines of revenue.

           

On Wednesday, it began testing a service in the U.S. that charges members $7 to ensure that their friends see posts on the social network, angering some users who said Facebook was turning its back on a long-standing promise to remain free.

Facebook's next billion members may be tough to come by. There are some 2.5 billion people on the Internet today—and many of the ones not on Facebook are in countries like China that haven't welcomed Facebook's particular brand of online communication.

Mr. Zuckerberg has visited China, home to more than 500 million Internet users, but the site remains blocked there except to people who use tools to bypass government censors.

On Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg met with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of Russia, another market where Facebook has had difficulty growing.

Mr. Zuckerberg, 28 years old, showed just the extent of his aspirations in a celebratory post on his Facebook profile in which he compared his social network to other inventions that have "connected" humans.

"We belong to a rich tradition of people making things that bring us together," he wrote. "We honor the humanity of the people we serve. We honor the everyday things people have always made to bring us together: Chairs, doorbells, airplanes, bridges, games."

Lately, Mr. Zuckerberg has also touted Facebook's efforts on mobile phones, which will prove crucial to the company's ability to attract more members from the developing world, and more ad dollars from consumers around the world amid changing Internet habits.

On Thursday, Facebook said it had 600 million mobile users, meaning more than half of the social network's members access the service on phones or other on-the-go devices. There are five billion mobile device users in the world.

Facebook has struggled to keep up with this trend, only this year beginning to show mobile users ads. Investors have been concerned that Facebook won't be able to generate ad sales at the same rate as desktop ad dollars.

Last month in an onstage interview at a technology conference, Mr. Zuckerberg admitted the company's previous mobile strategy was wrong. But he said Facebook could eventually make more money per user on mobile phones than on desktops.

More

Digits: Facebook's Milestone

In a "Today" show interview that aired Thursday on NBC, Mr. Zuckerberg sought to reassure investors that he is the right person to lead Facebook, as some on Wall Street have questioned whether he has the ability to helm a large public company. "I take this responsibility very seriously," he said.

A Facebook spokesman said Mr. Zuckerberg wasn't available for an interview.

To date, people have made 140 billion friend connections on Facebook, the company said. As it matures, Facebook users are getting younger: The median age of a user joining today is about 22, down from 23 for a user who joined at the time the site hit 500 million users.

The Web industry has various ways of measuring user reach so it's difficult to full compare companies. Facebook defines active users as a logged-in member who visits the site at least once a month, or accessed it in some way through a third-party site connected to Facebook.

Looking at reach by another measure, Google is the only Web company with more than a billion unique users visiting its stable of websites monthly, according to data from comScore Inc. It took Google from 1998 to 2011 to reach the one billion mark.

Steve Jobs -- The untold tales Friends and colleagues shed a light on Jobs by revealing some of their most indelible moments with the late Apple leader via Forbes magazine.

Steve Jobs left strong impressions among the people he knew, and some of them have shared those impressions in the latest issue of Forbes. 

Stories about meetings and encounters with Jobs are always intriguing due to the multi-faceted personality of the man.

This Friday marks the one-year anniversary of death of the Apple leader, prompting the magazine to publish some of the "untold" tales about Jobs as related by friends and colleagues.

Web browser guru and now venture capitalist Marc Andreessen related a story in which Jobs showed him a prototype of the first iPhone in 2006. After playing with the phone, Andreessen asked Jobs if he thought users might have a problem typing on the screen without a physical keyboard. With a piercing look, Jobs merely said: "They'll get used to it."

Jobs and NeXT software engineer Randy Adams both owned Porsches at a time that NeXT was looking for venture capital. One day, Jobs told Adams that they had to hide the Porsches. When Adams asked why, Jobs said that Ross Perot, who was thinking of investing in the company, was stopping by for visit. But Jobs didn't want Perot to think NeXT had a lot of money. Hiding thecars must have worked, according to Forbes, since Perot invested $20 million in the company in 1987.

Though often typecast as unfeeling, Jobs had a softer side and seemed to instinctively know how to help people in need.

Venture capitalist Heidi Roizen related one tale in which she was on a business trip when told that her father had passed away. As Jobs called her to discuss a deal, she informed him of her father's death. Immediately, Jobs told her to come home and said he would be right over.

According to Roizen, Jobs spent a couple of hours getting her to talk about her father and share her grief. Jobs' mother had died a few months before, so she believes he was especially "attuned to how I felt and what I needed to talk about. I will always remember and appreciate what an incredible thing he did for me in helping me grieve."

Other memories of Jobs can be found in Forbes' online edition and in the magazine's October 22 print issue.

VIA : news.cnet.com

Who is the next Steve Jobs (and is there one)?

 It's a loaded question, one with no clear answer. But in the year since Apple's co-founder and visionary CEO died, it's been asked in tech circles over and over:

Who is the next Steve Jobs?

There's one easy response. It's safe to say that no figure in the tech industry will perfectly duplicate the unique blend of vision, salesmanship, mystique and eye for detail possessed by Jobs, whodied one year ago Friday.

And it's complicated further, some say, by the fact that for much of his own life, many wouldn't have predicted Jobs himself would earn tech-icon status.

"Steve Jobs had a strange career. He really wasn't celebrated as a genius until really late," said Leander Kahney, editor of the Cult of Mac blog and author of books on Apple, including "Inside Steve's Brain."

 Not until Jobs returned to Apple and introduced the iPod and iPhone did people begin to praise him as a modern-day Thomas Edison, Kahney said. "He was dismissed before then as a marketing guy, a fast talker who didn't know much about technology. He only really was lionized in the last four or five years."
#WhatSteveJobsTaughtMe: Share your thoughts on his life and career
But industry observers abhor a vacuum. Futile though it might be, it's perhaps human nature to speculate about who could emerge to fill the void left by the passing of tech's biggest personality and most recognizable face.
One can make cases for or against a handful of nominees. And no list is long enough to include an as-yet unknown creator who may be birthing the industry's next game-changer in a garage or dorm room somewhere.
Did Apple's fanboy fever peak with Steve Jobs?
But here are some names worth considering, with thoughts both for and against their candidacies:
Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon
Pros: Bezos actually has a host of traits that mirror Jobs. Like Jobs was with Apple, he's the founder of Amazon as well as its CEO. Being a part of a company's life story helps. As much as anyone, Bezos also captures a bit of Jobs' panache at live events. At last year's rollout of the Kindle Fire, he got high marks for introducing a game-changing product in a stylized fashion, then getting off the stage. (Tech giants Google and Microsoft have been accused of being rambling and unfocused at similar unveilings.) Reports say Bezos shares Jobs' penchant for attention to detail (some would say micromanaging) and, like Jobs, he's been willing to take the company into new and unexpected directions.
"I've met Bezos personally, and he is mesmeric. Brilliant smile, quick mind, very engaging and decisive," Kahney told CNN. "He has the same obsession with the ordinary consumer; to make and sell things from the consumer's point of view. ... Bezos has Jobs' focus and drive. He's a little bit maniacal in his drive and ambition."
Cons: Despite the Kindle line, Amazon is, at its core, a content company. The mobile devices are a means of delivering books, music, movies and other data to customers as directly as possible. Will the public ever be as excited about the CEO of the company that peddles e-books and data-storage space as it was about the one that sold it its personal computers, laptops, phones and music players?
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook
Pros: The Steves -- Jobs and Wozniak -- had their garage. Zuckerberg had his Harvard dorm room. And in those two rooms, perhaps the two best-known origin stories in tech were born. As head of the social network that has changed the way people use the Internet, Zuckerberg is maybe the only tech boss who, like Jobs, has become a household name. ("The Social Network" didn't hurt.) He created a product that millions of people now use. And he's even cultivated his own trademark, casual-wear style, as the Zuckerberg hoodie is now almost as iconic as Jobs' mock turtleneck.
"Zuckerberg has some of the characteristics (of Jobs), and perhaps the most important one -- the pursuit of a vision," Kahney said. "That sets him apart."
Cons: He's gotten better at speaking in public. But as a pitchman, Zuckerberg still falls miles short of the charismatic Jobs. It's seems Zuck would rather be the idea man behind the scenes than front-and-center when it comes time to sell the final product. Also, the fact that Facebook's stock price is not already racing toward Google/Apple heights doesn't help.

Apple's Tim Cook has inherited Steve Jobs' role as chief Apple pitchman.
Tim Cook, CEO, Apple
Pros: Well, there's the obvious one. Job's was Apple's CEO. Now Cook is. At the helm of the company, Cook gets to be the face of every new innovation rolled out by Apple. He's got the biggest stage and brightest spotlight in which to put himself forward.
Cons: Cook comes from more of a business background than one of innovation and design. He may masterfully steer Apple's course for years to come, but, rightly or not, few observers at this juncture are inclined to give him credit for vision, or influence over products' design, the way they did Jobs. Plus, being Apple CEO after Jobs is like being the football coach who follows a retiring Bear Bryant or Vince Lombardi. What were those guys' names? Exactly.

Apple design chief Jonathan Ive chats with Kate Middleton at an event in London on July 30.
Jonathan Ive, senior vice president, Apple

Pros: When Jobs stepped down, there were many who expected Ive, not Cook, to step up. Ive is senior vice president of industrial design and is believed to be the creative mind behind products from the Macbook Pro to the iPod to the iPad. The London native already has a knighthood, as well as a healthy dose of Jobs' true-believer passion for the product.

Cons: Well, he's not the CEO. (Nor is marketing mastermind Phil Schiller, another name bandied about to replace Jobs). To truly ascend to Jobsian levels, Ive would need to set out on his own -- which, at 45, is doable. It's hard to envision Ive bolting from Apple, where he's worked since 1992. But, boy, it would be fun to watch.
Marissa Mayer, CEO, Yahoo
Pros: If you need proof of how well Google alum Mayer is liked in Silicon Valley, just look at the number of folks she's been able to lure to join her at a Yahoo that was floundering when she took the reins in July. At Google, where the former engineer was the 20th employee, she's credited with everything from the clean design of the search page to becoming one of the leading public faces of the tech giant.
Cons: It looks like a turnaround has begun at Yahoo. But the job's still a long way from done. If Mayer becomes the face of a dramatic rebirth, she will have accomplished something few predicted. If she doesn't (the four CEOs before her all fell short), it likely won't hurt her reputation all that much -- but neither will it bump her up to the next level.

Elon Musk hopes to revolutionize several industries.
Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur
Pros: How's this for an origin story? Musk grew up in South Africa before leaving home at 17, without his parents' consent, rather than serve a compulsory stint in an army which, at the time, was enforcing the race-based apartheid system. He'd end up in the United States four years later -- although he'd already sold his first software, a video game called Blastar, when he was 12. Since then, all he's done is create publishing software Zip2 (sold to AltaVista for $300 million), co-found PayPal (he owned 11% of its stock when eBay bought it for $1.5 billion) and help create Tesla Motors, makers of the first commercial electric car. Oh, wait ... he also runs SpaceX, a company working on space exploration. Director Jon Favreau says Musk was his inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark character in the "Iron Man" movies.
"His ambitions are so huge," Kahney said. "He's definitely a ballsy character. And he's a good leader, like Jobs. He's surrounded himself with good people."
Cons: With the exception of Tesla, none of Musk's projects, so far, have directly involved consumer products. Tens of millions of people had something Jobs made in their pockets, on their desks or piping music into their ears. Among the public, Musk may be less well-known than all of the names above -- at least for now. But, at 41, he's got time to change that and it would be foolish to bet against him.
Seth Priebatsch, CEO, SCVNGR, LevelUp

Pros: Who? Priebatsch is the wild card on this list. But consider him the representative of a new generation of young, creative tech "makers" who could ascend to loftier heights in the years, or decades, to come. At 22, Priebatsch's SCVNGR raised more than $20 million in funding. He founded his first Web company at 12 and has moved on to start LevelUp, a mobile-payments system that's also raked in millions from investors. He got rock-star treatment for a speech he gave last year at South by Southwest Interactive. Plus, he's already cultivated a Jobs-like signature fashion statement -- his trademark orange sunglasses and shirts.
Cons: In the startup world, for every success story, there are countless washouts. Not every young turk even wants to be another Jobs, and not every killer app has the potential to make millions, or billions, of dollars -- even when they're well-liked and widely used.
Good or bad, what lessons did you learn from Jobs? Share your responses in the comments below, or join the conversation on Twitter using #stevejobstaughtme.