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Getting A Handle On Vista
visination.com wrote to mention a news.com article which runs down some of the basics on MS's new Operating System. From the article: "Among the key features of Vista as it currently stands are: security enhancements, a new searching mechanism, lots of new laptop features, parental controls and better home networking. There will also be visual changes, thanks to Avalon, ranging from shiny translucent windows to icons that are tiny representations of a document itself. On the business side, Microsoft said Vista will be easier for businesses to deploy on multiple PCs and will also save costs by reducing the number of times computers will have to be rebooted."
will also save costs by reducing the number of times computers will have to be rebooted.
They have said this with every major release. Are things really getting better?
I am being hopefully on Vista being a good OS. With alot of new featurs and hopefully alot better security it looks all in all to be pretty good. I dont ahve many gripes with XP and i overal like it, but there could be alot of improvlements, I hope, for the sake of the future of IT that these improvments turn out to be good and useful
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But seriously, this all sounds like pretty smoke and mirrors (how can I possibly pass on platoons of new widgets?) Any solid reasons for my work site, which has several hundred workstations, to deploy this when we just recently stabilized and standardized on WinXP SP2? No?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Even diehard MS fans have to be wondering what the hell is going on up in Redmond.
I'm no open source freak, but the trend seems clear that the time to migrate to Linux is here for anyone who doesn't have one or more must have apps that still only run on Windows.
I guess the real question is:
Do you really still want to be running Windows in 2006?
Longhorn went from something that is safe, secure and stable with lots of new features into a bunch of marketing fluff.
Windows Millennium anybody?
Transparency . . . Icons that preview the docs . . . sounds like KDE circa 2002. Really impressive, MS.
and will also save costs by reducing the number of times computers will have to be rebooted.
How about saving costs by reducing the number of licenses you will have to pay per family?
Realistically... I think not. On a new install - which is what they are referring to I believe, a Dell can get you back to a windows login in about 10-12 seconds. 10-12 seconds usually spent talking or doing some other chore. Not like it actually saves mountains of time. If you are doing LOTS of pc building.. well during that 10-12 second, you are working on another PC. Not like that time is wasted. Get real marketing ppl.
Fewer reboots? That's funny. I haven't rebooted most of my machines in months... and that's usually due to power failures.
C'mon MS, get your head out of your ass. Its not like you haven't had enough time to work things out.
Seriously, this list of wicked-cool new features sounds like a layman's description of my little 600mhz kick-around laptop running ubuntu.
What about the others out there still running windows 2k? Vista is too far off... and too expensive. Linux seems to look better and better with each PR release from Microsoft.
What I wan to know, is what is being changed under the hood. Everything mentiond except parts of "improved security" can run in userspace.
That reminds me when they said Windows '95 would run on a 386DX with 4 MB of RAM.
Already available. Called "Smart Folders" in Mac OS X Tiger.
Yawn.
Of course when touting a 'forthcoming' product, the pitch is going to be focused on the improvements its going to bring. Due to the length of time it's taking to get Vista out the door, the improvements and new features Microsoft are publicising now had better be impressive, otherwise they're going to be old news by the time the product actually ships. A new release of Windows is always going to be a 'big deal' to the computer-using masses sheerly because of its market penetration, but competitors like OS X have stolen the thunder on GPU-accelerated interfaces and improved filesystem metadata. At the end of the day, it wont be that these features are cutting edge, it'll be that they're available to the masses in something with high market penetration.
As for the new deployment features, I can't help but wonder how many organizations by the launch date will be considering deploying alternate operating systems instead, as Windows new foundations are compared directly with the latest and greatest Linux distrubutions have to offer...
Business Voyeur
I'm a UNIX guy who works in a largely Windows shop and I've been working with some really sharp Windows guys who know their stuff and know how to use the goodies that Microsoft is putting into the operating system and as a result I'm getting a new respect for a lot of MS stuff.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
MS claims they'll be able to reduce costs by reducing the number of times the system will have to be rebooted.. Hmm.. I could swear I heard this before.. where was that.... oh yes, now I remember
They said the EXACT same thing when Windows XP was on the horizon. They wanted to eliminate reboots after application installs and the like, and guess what... I don't think it really worked. I swear pretty much every time I install some app or another, it asks me to reboot the system, ESPECIALLY MS apps such as their own AntiSpyware, Visual Studio, etc. and every time they release some security update (on a nearly weekly basis) I *still* need to reboot. Drives me nuts, especially since I tend to have a many-windowed workspace open for many days at a time (or would, if it wasn't for their damn reboots!).
It is possible that they are overstating the RAM requirements, but holy cow, that seems like a whole crapload of memory to run... what, exactly? 128 MB is suggested for XP Pro, but I know that's more or less BS, because I run Pro, and tend to use ~300 MB on average, and I rarely have anything extra running besides Firefox, gaim, and AVG. So, does that mean they're actually understating the RAM requirements?
Anyway, just from reading the article, I am not inclined to spend the money on upgrading. As of now, none of the new features seem very impressive.
Alpha blending (or "layered windows", as Microsoft calls it) was introduced in Win2k, along with all of the fancy effects (fading menus, tooltips, etc). XP's biggest "lickable" contribution was the built-in theming engine (that was neutered out of the box by only allowing Microsoft-signed themes, but was quickly hacked when XP was still only in beta).
If you could care less, that means that you do care somewhat. Otherwise, you couldn't care less. So I guess you do care. Anyway, the time cost of a reboot is not measured from when you click "Reboot" to the time the login screen comes back up. It's measured from when you're warned that a reboot needs to happen and so you have to stop working, to the time you've logged back in, started up all your apps, gotten back to the point in the code or document where you were before you had to reboot, and context switched back into "work mode". Context switches are expensive for computers, and they're much more expensive for people. Reboots cause you to lose more work than the time it takes the PC to get back to the login screen.
I almost agreed with you about the laptop stuff being useless until you added this. I have a nice laptop, but playing DVDs on it is the last thing I want to do. When I'm using my laptop I'm working or playing. When I'm watching a DVD, I'm in my home theater area (if you can call a 4 year old HDTV, cheap 5.1 setup, and 4 year old progressive scan DVD player a "home theater"). If I do want to run a DVD on my laptop, chances are I want to do other stuff as well. If you're buying a laptop to be a dedicated DVD machine, why not spend $200 on a portable DVD player rather than $1200 on a laptop?
There you go, caring again. But you're wrong anyway. First, Aero (the new UI) is not mandatory (just as Luna, the XP UI was not mandatory -- you could still use Classic). Second, Avalon, not Indigo, is the updated presentation layer (Indigo is some networking thing). Third, it's not just about the transparency. It's about hardware acceleration using your idle 3D accelerator, and using vector graphics to have good looking, well-scaling graphics and images.
I'll buy this argument. Two Word documents, or even a text file and a Word document, look pretty much identical at 32x32 or 64x64 (and I really don't want 128x128 or 256x256 icons).
The same goes for searching. I'd rather have my files in an organized manner and not in some random "virtual directory structure." Sure I could use the search tool to find the file for me, but what if I've completely forgotten the file name or a a few words in the file, but I do know that it's a file from my history class that I took junior year. Sure I could search by date but it'd be much easier if I had organized all my files in terms of "My Documents -> School work -> Junior Year -> History 101 -> some_file.doc." (which I currently do).
You could use filesystem attributes to tag your f
That's easily the biggest feature I'd like to see.
If I've gone to the trouble of cntrl-alt-del to load up the task manager, lick on a process and tell it to end, I'm not saying "Yes, I would like Windows to send a command to the software to ask it to terminate." (which, as far as I can tell what it always tries to do first). I'm saying "I want this process to terminate. NOW". No dialogues. I don't want to know if the program is not responding (gosh, I just wanted to end the program but now that Windows thinks its not responding I might change my mind.. good thing Windows asked me!)
Other then that, I have no major gripes with XP.
The Internet is generally stupid
...but you may actually do a mistake by just thinking "XP is good enough for us" and shrugging it off with a premature "Any reasons to use this? No?" like you do.
Did you read the part in the parent about the site having several hundred PCs? An upgrade like that ain't exactly trivial, or cheap. So yes, I agree the default attitude should pretty much be "Is there sufficient reason to justify the time, effort and resources required to upgrade to New Shiny Hotness worth it, given what we have with Old and Working Just Fine right now?"
And offhand I don't see "Fewer Reboots" and "Nifty Icons" cutting the mustard.
Most of these things run in "hype-er-space", and whether they will ever be able to run in "userspace" is yet to be determined.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Maybe I would be surprised about what is running in the background... but so would Adobe, because this was one of those new-fangled MSI installers that detect what you have open. It pointed an open instance of acroread 6 and refused to proceed until I closed it. So perhaps the reboot request was "we found this obvious usage and killed it, but still, we have no idea whatsoever if these DLLs are in use by some other random process on the system. So you should close three days' worth of workspace and take a 5-minute break to pacify us."
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
From TFA: Is that all? No. Among the other features Microsoft has publicly confirmed are: broad IPv6 support ...
Mind you, I am no fan of Microsoft, but I'm thinking that this can really help speed along the efforts to get IPv6 in widespread use.
It's a good thing, methinks.
-Scott
My other sig is a Glock
But you've already indicated how such a system would work on Windows. The installer should rename the old binary and have it marked to delete on reboot and install the new binary. If an app gets restarted, it'll pick up the new lib. If the OS gets rebooted, all the old copies will automatically be deleted on reboot when nothing has an open handle to them.
One complaint that get levelled at open-source software is that there is no innovation. That it's all just clones of commerical software. But seriously, the big innovations in Vista are 'less reboots', 'translucent windows' (= transparent windows perhaps?) and 'icons that are tiny representations of a document itself'. Sounds familiar...
Wow! Gnome has made it onto the windows desktop?
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The problem is that the installer can not replace any files that are in use by any open program. The windows file systems (FAT/NTFS) prohibit removing a file that's in use (although with NTFS, you can rename the file while it's in-use). The only sure-fire way to make sure the file is not in use is to reboot.
"Suppose you have two DLLs, A.dll and B.dll. Process X has loaded A.dll but not B.dll. Now you want to upgrade them. What do you do? If you rename A.dll to A.bak and install a new A.dll and B.dll, then process X will get the old A.dll (now named A.bak) and the new B.dll. Gosh, I hope the new B.dll and old A.dll (now named A.bak) interoperate!"
Read Raymond Chen's blog. You know you want to.
The change from Win98 to Win2K is a tremendous leap forward in stability, networkability and functionality...so it made good sense for a company to invest in new hardware that can run Win2K (I am writing this on Win2K, which is the development machine). But what new stuff of Vista is really necessary for businesses? none, from what I can tell. Even the virtual folders/search facilities (a poor attempt at organizing information) are covered by using document indexing systems for companies that really need to do so. No business will justify paying money for new hardware when the job is getting done as it should.
That said, they've invested hundreds of millions of dollars addressing these issues. No, they haven't arrived where they need to be yet but they're getting awfully close. Remember, M$ started on a shoestring back in the days of the 8088. Back then, Mr. Gates had to move pretty fast and be pretty quick with what people wanted; there was a veritable world of people providing cobbled-together solutions for the IBM PC (was there ever going to be any other kind of PC on the market?).
Okay, so the enhanced stability of the NT kernel comes from code that may have come from a *NIX kernel. Who cares where it came from, as long as it works and won't get me sued? Yet there's the triumphant hue and cry from *NIX zealots that this is the only way M$ could make it work. Now, M$ wants to improve their platform by adding features other (open source) products already have. Are they to be criticized for this?
Lemme get this straight -- just because Ford was first to use an assembly line to manufacture inexpensive automobiles, no other manufacturer should emulate that successful example because it's no longer a radical new idea? C'mon people, I may not particularly care for Winduhs (it's fine for desktops, but keep it outta my server farm!), but dogging them for not being the first to have and implement some good ideas? Am I to understand that everybody would rather Windows was still at 3.1, and WFW at 3.11?
Then again, given his net worth I'm sure Mr. Gates will survive public excorciation for not producing the ultimate OS.
Not necessarily. In Pascal, that does what a layperson would think.
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