Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the Internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of Windows 8.1, Nintendo’s method of monetising fan videos, and the $325,000 burger that you probably wouldn’t want to eat.

Microsoft’s very proud touting of their 100 million licenses sold figure for Windows 8 has had some industry analysts wondering whether or not the corporate giant is being entirely truthful about what this figure means.

Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy points out that there’s a distinct difference between “licenses sold” and “computers actually being used”. As far as Microsoft is concerned, a license is “sold” the instant the Windows 8-powered device rolls off the factory line, meaning that there are literally shelves and warehouses full of Windows 8 licenses that have been “sold”, but are not being used by consumers.

Figures gathered by California analytics company Net Applications show that of the Windows PCs connected to the internet in April, only 4.2% of them were running Windows 8. With Microsoft claiming that there are 1.4 billion Windows PCs in the world, that puts active Windows 8 PCs at only 58.6 million, far less than the 100 million licenses sold that Microsoft are claiming.

Net Applications’ figures aren’t entirely reliable, but even as a broad indicator, the numbers don’t quite add up. Interesting stuff.

Source: PC World (thanks, PalZer0)

Microsoft have revealed that Windows 8, although still unpopular largely with gamers, appears to be making huge overall gains. The OS has just passed the 100 million licenses mark — up from the 60 million mark in January — and shows no signs of slowing down.

The company is keen to stress that a huge amount of this growth is on the PC, saying that the PC is “very much alive and increasingly mobile”.

“The PC is also part of a much broader device market of tablets and PCs. Windows 8 was built to fully participate in this broader and increasingly mobile device market. The PC part of the market is rapidly evolving to include new convertible devices and amazing new touch laptops, and all-in-ones,” said Tami Reller.

Reller also revealed that Windows Blue — the codename for an update coming later this year — will deliver “the latest new innovations across an increasingly broad array of form factors of all sizes, display, battery life and performance, while creating new opportunities for our ecosystem”. What that means for you, the PC gamer, is yet to be determined.

Source: Windows Blog via VG247

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of the possibility of Windows 8.1 allowing users to boot straight to the desktop, Apple’s warranty assessment guidelines, and the Google Glass technical specifications.

Windows 8 has had its detractors, but the sales figures show that many people are quickly moving to embrace it: Microsoft have announced at this year’s CES that the OS has now passed the 60 million sales mark only ten weeks since release.

At the show, Microsoft also announced that their new Windows store, which has been the subject of loud complaint from some in the gaming industry, has already passed the 100 million downloads mark. But are gamers really embracing it? The latest figures from December show that less than half-a-percent of Steam users have upgraded to Windows 8.

We recently completed a month of gaming with Windows 8 to see how it held up — check out our thoughts.

Source: Eurogamer

Before Windows 8 was released to the public, there was a very real concern that it would change the face of gaming as we know it. Now that it has been released, has anything changed?

Well, the short answer to that is, ‘no, not really at all’. Analyst for the NPD Group, Stephen Baker has told Digital Trends that while Windows 8 hasn’t provided any stimulation to the market, neither has it been the gaming doomsday everyone worried about.

According to a recent Steam survey, nearly 240,000 users are running Windows 8, a figure that equates to just under half a percent of their 54 million registered users. Microsoft has also announced that it sold 40 million licenses in November, but later a research firm found that only 15 million of those were actually using the OS.

So those are some pretty general figures. What about you guys? Any of you running Windows 8? Has it started any fires or killed any kittens? Or better yet, is anyone willing to stand up and say ‘Windows 8 has changed my life – for the better!’? Let us know what your experience with Windows 8 has been so far — or read about ours over here.

Source: VG247

Windows 8 has been copping a lot of flak lately from games developers everywhere, most notably the movers and shakers at Valve. But how does it fare for gamers like you and I, who just want to play games on their machine? Jason Imms has spent the last month gaming exclusively on Windows 8, and he brings us his story.

Paul Thurrott on the Windows Supersite is reporting that an insider source claims Microsoft is “disappointed” by Windows 8 sales that are are “below expectations”.

“Sales of Windows 8 PCs are well below Microsoft’s internal projections,” claims Thurrott of his insider source, “and have been described inside the company as disappointing. But here’s the catch: The software giant blames the slow start on lackluster PC maker designs and availability, further justifying its new Surface strategy.”

The source went on to claim that PC manufacturers “inability to deliver” was what was causing Windows 8 to be slow in taking off.

Source: Gamespot

Want some DirectX 11.1 in your Windows 7? Looking forward to the native stereoscopic 3D support it brings? Well, you’re out of luck: Microsoft have confirmed over the weekend that the next version of DirectX — and presumably, all future versions — will be exclusive to Windows 8.

In a post on the Microsoft Answers Forum, an Microsoft employee by the name of Daniel Moth inadvertently revealed the information when confirming a separate DirectX issue.

“DirectX 11.1 is part of Windows 8, just like DirectX 11 was part of Windows 7,” Moth stated. “DirectX 11 was made available for Vista but at this point there is no plan for DirectX 11.1 to be made available on Windows 7.”

Currently, DirectX 11 does not have native stereoscopic 3D support, which means game developers have had to program with specific cards in mind. Windows 8′s DirectX 11.1 gets around this, but Windows 7 users appear to be hamstrung on the 3D front for the foreseeable future.

Source: Neowin (Thanks, PalZer0)

Windows 8 released just last week (or so), but the complaints against it from software developers have been going for a long time. Valve Overfiend Gabe Newell described it as “a catastrophe”, and Blizzard joined in saying it was “not awesome” for them either.

Today even more Windows 8-hate has been unleashed, with Valve’s engineer Drew Bliss using a speech at the Ubuntu Summit in Copenhagen to claim that Linux is a better, more open platform than Windows 8. “If you look at the way the world is going, where you see Apple completely in control of their system, and at least part of Windows 8 entirely controlled by the Microsoft App Store, Steam is going to be a little bit harder to do – both in the store aspect and in the content delivery aspect,” said Drew.

“We want to continue developing in open platforms and so we’re looking around, and obviously Linux has become a very viable alternate platform. So we are now looking into doing Steam for Linux and supporting as many of our Steam games for Linux as we can.”

Meanwhile, Serious Sam 3 developer Alen Ladavac from Croteam has taken to the Steam forums to blast Windows 8′s certification and restrictions as “horrible” and the whole OS as “a walled garden”.

(more…)

Word comes to us from Atomic MPC that users purchasing boxed copies of Windows 8 from Harvey Norman or Dick Smith under the belief that they’ll work as clean installs, not as upgrades, are in for a bad surprise.

The Windows 8 Pro box, which retails for a surprisingly cheap $58, was sold to Atomic on the understanding that it would provide the full version of Windows 8 on a clean install. This seemed to be the case at first, but activating the operating system caused it to spring up errors advising that the entered license could only be used for upgrades, not clean installs, rendering the product unusable.

Microsoft have stated prior to launch that this would be the case, but as Atomic reports, Harvey Norman and Dick Smith are currently selling the retail box with claims that it will work as a clean install. Buyer beware.

Source: Atomic MPC

Remember when Gaben said “Windows 8 was a catastrophe for the PC”? And then two days later Blizzard was like, “Yeah, man, we totally agree or whatever”?

Well now, a couple months on, and I guess, after a chance for Blizzard to really sit down and think about Windows 8, they’ve decided to change their mind: that’s right, they’re now pro-Windows 8. “We put our games on platforms our players are already on, so yeah, it will be available on Windows 8,” Blizzard’s senior software engineer told CVG in an interview.

He went on: “I think that we’ll go with the platforms that the most people are on. There’s no particular fear we have of Windows 8.”

Source: CVG