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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.
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.
That is undoubtedly true - but it's also a problem with Windows because half the Windows sys admins in the industry apparently can't figure how to configure AD or anything else on a Windows server so it works reliably.
I took the Windows 2003 Server course last semester at City College, and after that experience I'm not surprised. Besides having a mountain of Management Consoles, menus and dialogs to wade through to do practically ANYTHING, the computer LAB system - with students running canned exercises out of a textbook - managed to fail enough times to make me extremely wary of using this crap in a production environment. The teacher - who is an outside contractor who does Windows consulting including servers, etc. and knows Windows servers well - had plenty of trouble keeping the DHCP server running - freakin' DHCP!
Even the lab exercises wouldn't necessarily work the same way for every student and the teacher couldn't figure out why - just too many possibilities between server setups, permissions, domains, and the various components we were exercising.
The tech who set me up today is very sharp and hooks people up all the time here at City College. He's baffled and had to call the main IT office who had nothing brilliant to suggest but try joining the domain tomorrow. Try suggesting that in a real corporate production environment.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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.