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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?
Longhorn went from something that is safe, secure and stable with lots of new features into a bunch of marketing fluff.
Windows Millennium anybody?
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?
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 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.
The security is my one hope for Longhorn. For it to gain acceptance of any kind it will have to excell in that area
However...
No IT departments or managment of any company are excited about Vista. The cost to install, test, coordinate, and train all your processes for a new OS are prohibative. This is one time wear the time honored saying: "If it ain't broke then don't fix it" applies.
If it wasn't for EOL and end of support I wonder if anyone would switch at all...
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
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.
You can only answer that question if you first answer why you switched to Windows XP SP2. Was it only to get some software you use to work? Are you having no special security concerns with the access modes in Windows XP? In that case, you're probably OK with XP and I can't see too much going on in Vista yet that'll interest you,
But if you're interested in a redesigned restricted user mode that allows for a much more "*nix-like" experience in that you'll grant only certain apps elevated rights, while by default working in more of a sandbox (i.e. what *nix users have had for years but Windows never really experienced too well due to incompatible apps etc), and in general staying more in control in what rights you give apps to run with, Vista should definitely interest you. Especially if you for some reason, like compatibility concerns, can't take the step to e.g. Linux.
I think any serious IT professional at a company should take a good look at Vista, at least if you intend to continue runing Windows. Of course, it could get child diseases so I'd still wait for a service pack or two, 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.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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
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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Not necessarily. In Pascal, that does what a layperson would think.
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