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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."
this alone will be worth the upgrade: Rather than having to remember the single folder where something is stored, users will be able to put documents in any number of virtual folders. They can also establish folders that will automatically update, such as "files edited in the last week" or "documents from Jane." I've always hated the way files are stored on a computer... I understand it, of course, but I hate it. The whole point of a computer is to do the work FOR me, you know?
Beauty is just a light switch away.
To me there doesn't seem like there is much to warrent a $150(CDN) price. The security features should be offered free to XP users, and besides the the new interface and searching it looks more like a service pack.
It appears from here that how Monad is going to be released (i.e. with Longhorn, with IIS, .net, or something) is not known yet. Personally, I am unfamiliar with VMS (I am only familiar with ksh, bash) but nonetheless, I plan to familiarize myself with Monad. Maybe later on a ksh-like shell could run atop MSH? I hope MSH will be ready in time for Windows Vista release.
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"will also save costs by reducing the number of times computers will have to be rebooted."
I'm so excited! All these wonderful enhancement for Visa (once again, folks, the "t" is missing for a reason!) have got me drooling.
I just had a new machine installed at work. The tech let me copy my old machine stuff up to a network server, and back down on the new machine. Then he set me up for the Windows domain.
Can't log on - "Cannot connect to the domain. The domain may be down or unavailable, or the account might be wrong. Try again later." After several tries including Sysprep'ing the machine again, etc.
So we're trying tomorrow morning, because apparently the freakin' AD servers don't replicate often enough, nor do they replicate from the closest server to my subnet, but from the main one located thirty blocks away. So it will be, oh, two or three months probably before the freakin' AD server my machine logs onto is notified that I exist.
Brilliant.
Rest of the day I spent installing my stuff that had to be uninstalled because it was on the other drive I no longer have. So my Winamp, Firefox, Thunderbird, jEdit, SQLTools all work.
It's just Windows networking that doesn't work.
I JUST CAN'T WAIT for a Windows which won't have to be rebooted as often.
This will really justify buying that new 3GHz CPU with 1GB RAM and 100GB of hard disk necessary to run the OS ALONE.
I'm SO stoked.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I think they are referring to the fact that I had to reboot Windows today to install freakin' ZipGenius...a fucking archive program.
Okay, that's probably the programmer's fault, but still, why is it so easy and necessary for programmers to do this crap?
Because there's a Registry, that's why.
And Microsoft has never heard of rereading a config file.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
So lets see what else new they've added. A new UI? I could really care less. Indigo doesn't really add anything different to the OS experience. There have been programs to add transparency out for windows for a while and if I really wanted transparency I could have done it. I really could care less about it. Icon previews? Are they really that important? 90% of the time you know what file you want and you don't need a little preview icon to show you its contents. 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).
The only thing I see MS doing with this release is trying to creep up on the updates that Mac OS X or some of the linux versions have added. All the new great improvements like WinFS got scraped.
I really don't see any point in upgrading.
I'd say it's been a non-issue for years, at this point. My Windows boxes go weeks or months without a restart, and generally that's because I updated a driver or something. The old Win9x days of needing a reboot every day or two are long past.
other lovely "security features" include Protected Media Path, Component Revocation, Windows Driver Lockdown
This machine will be even MORE locked down than what was proposed under Hollings' "fritz chips" bill...
Designed to be "fully compliant" with hollywood's AACS media lockdown technology, It will be useless to anyone wanting to use a PC for more than an overpriced DVD player.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Windows doesn't need to be rebooted as often as it asks to be - developers tend to be lazy. As an example, I've seen apps that install a start-up item ask for a reboot, when they could simply launch the item as the final step of the installer.
Really, the only things that require a reboot are some driver changes and some OS updates. Of course, now that software is coming with increasingly intrusive copyright protection, some is actually installing new hardware drivers to ensure you're using the original media. I predict that in a few years, windows will only actually need a reboot as often as Linux (i.e. kernel changes and such), but as software adds more hardware drivers, people will end up rebooting just as often as they always have.
I am amused that XP still requires you to reboot in order to join an Active Directory domain. The NT domain system has been around for how many years now and you still need to restart just to join a domain? I am more amused that Mac OS X can join an Active Directory domain without restarting. In fact, a Mac OS X client can join several Active Directory domains simultaneously (plus multiple other LDAP-based directories), without restarting, while Windows clients can still only be part of one directory system.
Maybe you haven't run Win 98 in a while, but I have no need to change my IP, and in any event, Windows XP SP2 which we have here at work *does* require a reboot before any of the networking changes I make actually go into effect. (Try it, it gives you this little yellow triangle with a ! in it telling you you have to reboot.)
I don't really need to reboot either of them very often, although this is probably more because I don't install or remove lots of hardware, programs, etc. and generally have them administered in a reasonable manner.
The file permissions is a non-issue in my case--it's really a single-user machine--and it's not running any of the zillion XP services that make it pretty much require a firewall.
So no, I'm really not seeing any fewer crashes & reboots when comparing two machines, one Win 98 SE and the other Win XP SP2, both administered by me.
That said, I don't need very many reboots of either, all told, on average.
and those be? working suspend-to-ram? honestly, i can't think of "laptop features" in todays laptops that don't work with current windows versions.
ok, now here's a point. "Parental control" is basically censorship. Now I don't say that it's bad per se. I have a 9yr old son myself, and I'm most likely the first to say that there are websites that are not
Like X.org with the composite extension? Like KDE does it since when, last millennium? Where's the point in that, other than having a reason to grab the latest geforce/radeon/$INSERT_HIGHEND_GFX_CARD_HERE?
So they finally admitted that the "unattended installation" is still a pain in the ass, and that rebooting after every software install even more so?
To be a devil's advocate: does KDE have that much of transparency? IMS, X11 has no transparency, and I am not aware of any work done in that direction, and yet every KDE advocate in this forum mentions it along with icon previews. WTF?
(I'm just mad because I really really want transparent terminal windows in Linux. This is by far the sexiest aspect of OS X's interface.)
I must say that Longhorn is a disappointment.
:-)
It will have new features but I don't see anything worth upgrading.
As far as the reboots, XP/2003 has gotten much better than 2000 and the 9xs. You can install Office, IIS, MSSQL, and most security updates without rebooting. It is getting better. I appreciate not having to reboot at work since my machine has 5 database servers (Oracle, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL 4.1, MySQL, 5.0), 2 web servers (IIS,Apache), and a number of application servers running for development. Those services, along with my massive AD profile require up to 15 minutes for my machine to reboot so I don't like it.
MS has not slowed down in the consumer front since all new computers will come with it in 2006. I will still pick up a copy of course but I just hope that my PC (700Mhz Athlon w/512MB) still runs it. My main machine is a G4 with Tiger (best OS ever, hands down) so I don't need it but I do like Redmond Kool-Aid
Business adoption seems to be slowing although it isn't any different than before. If something works they why upgrade. I know of a few 1000-seat corps who still use Windows 98 connected to an NT 4.0 server. They're upgrade cycle will be 2003 an XP rather than Longhorn. Studies have shown that most busniesses are using 2000 on the workstation so they will skip Longhorn and wait for Blackcomb (remember that codename that vanished since Longhorn took so long). All of our workstations (over 1000) are XP. Engineering just got upgraded Dell PCs so they along with the rest of the company won't be upgrading anytime soon. We usually coincide OS upgrade with hardware upgrade, every few years.
Microsoft is showing the effects of having too many people dipping their fingers in the Kool-Aid. I was surprised though of the release of MSN Maps improvements so close to Google Maps hybrid release. MS has MapPoint technology on the web long before Google, although the interface was non-friendly just like Mapquest.
MS still has innovation (or just copy-it for that matter), they just need to foster it like Google does with its pet projects. With the talent that MS has, they should be able to come up with good ideas, and not take 10 years to do so.
MS touts the amount spent on R&D each year as a sign of their innovation but they've wasted more money than what their competitors will make over the next 5 years and they still have nothing to show for. Use that R&D money to give your developers a free day just like Google and you'd still be spending less than what you are now only you'd have something to show for, including much happier employees, which alone will help.
So now that icons can preview my documents does this mean a whole new class of icon viruses?
And how much of the document does it preview? Could this present a HIPPA violation by having patients files exposed on the desktops at the doctors office?
Just what we need, the OS actually accessing the contents of your documents to generate pretty pictures just smacks of potential exploits and security holes.
well thankfully os x runs on non-apple x86, otherwise i'd have to spend an enormous amount of money to get a good equivalent system.
what? you say it doesn't? how odd.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
The full implication of this arises when you need to rename a machine on a domain. You can't just rename it, because the domain account is tied to the machine name. So you have to unjoin from the domain (reboot), rename (reboot), and rejoin the domain (reboot). Three friggin' reboots to change a machine name.
Unless somebody out there in
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE