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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."
"... 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."
Reboot = Coffee Break
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?
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. Computers have to be rebooted?
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
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
"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!
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 hear that IE has spelling and grammar checking in forms now!
Windows 2000 was advertised before it's release as only having 7 events that would necessitate a reboot.
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.
Consider the time to open and access all of the files that needed to be closed for the reboot. Also consider the disruption in focus, it's not insignificant. Especially when done often.
Reboots don't happen unless they are a necessity. It is probably the least liked activity relating to a pc. Besides oh say, cleaning out the spam in your inbox or finding a "driver disk" for the brand new shiny piece of hardware you just brought home.
Stop hoping, and go out and get it today. It's called "Mac OS X 10.4"
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!!
There is no "userspace"! There is only MICROSOFTspace! I mean, what are you going to do, run the Win95 GUI layer on a XP kernel? Or vice versa? I don't THEENK so!
Under-the-hood features I expect to see: "improved" DRM, "improved" ability for IE to displace/take over from Firefox/Opera/etc., "improved" ability to prevent "untrusted" apps (like OpenOffice.org) from working, "improved" draconian license terms, "improved" patent coverage, and so on and so on.
"...a new searching mechanism..."
Finally, the searching dog will bark for us. Maybe it will follow the cursor. That's something we can all appreciate.
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!).
A Windows OS that terminates an application when I tell it to do so. Why should I have to press 'End Process' 5 times and click on 2 dozen 'End Task' dialogs in order for the app to shutdown (if it even does). Is Windows second guessing me?
:)".
Only after the 27th time Windows XP does finally say 'You know... I think you might like me to close that process for you. Here you go peasant. No, you don't have to thank me!
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.
...and yet...most people will not load Linux of you gave them a blowjob.
Figure it out.
Nobody says that. BSOD in 98 was as common as the clap in a sorority.
That said, following the same analogy, I still wouldn't do XP without wrapping it up first.
I'm hoping it fails miserably but it probably won't. Look, most of what they're touting as "features" we already have in other OS's. Yet, through their great marketing, these will be called "innovations." Like when all my MCSE friends used to talk to me about Active Directory. Yeah, Skippy, I liked it years ago when we called it NDS!
You are required by
Violators will be forced to watch reruns of Bill Gates interviews. (I know, it's not much of a punishment for guys like you, but it's the worst the
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
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
It has nothing to do with the registry, which can be read from and written to whenever you feel like it. It has everything to do with lazy programmers.
Your software would probably work perfectly without a reboot. Chances are, if the same installer installs the software on windows 98 as installs it on 2000 or XP, the message is just because the developers of the software were too lazy to check your OS version.
...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.
Ten years from now, you're going to find yourself digging through the backups anyway.
If you have so many things going on that you can't remember where you put it all, you need to either lighten your load or learn better organization skills.
Spotlight may have some uses, but it is no substitute for organization. If you get it organized now, it's far more likely to be in an organized state in your backups in ten years.
Well, that said, without something like Spotlight and very good incremental backup software, aliases do tend to break. However, if you expect Spotlight (or the MSLonghorn equivalent) to organize for you, you're going to be disappointed.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
this si graet news!!
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
I'm truely happy to see that seemingly I'm already fine with the way my things are setup. YMWV.
security enhancements
Haven't had any virus or spyware in years. Nor has my pc ever been hacked (that I know of).
a new searching mechanism
This is nice but by itself not enough reason to switch, I usually can find back my stuff
lots of new laptop features
I only have a desktop
parental controls
I'm not a parent, grown up and vaccinated thank you. I'll check back in a few years.
and better home networking.
in other words "Samba team, are you listening?"
shiny translucent windows I'm a very boring person. Eye candy is nice but personally I always switch to zippy and functional.
icons that are tiny representations of a document itself.
Already have it.
On the business side, Microsoft said Vista will be easier for businesses to deploy on multiple PCs
One word- Xclients. Otherwise, SSH and shell scripts are your friend.
and will also save costs by reducing the number of times computers will have to be rebooted.
09:37:20 up 203 days, 18:38
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
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?
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
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.
From the DSM VI: "Ballmeritis: A delusional condition whereby the patient erroneously believes products as released by Microsoft to be innovative. Frequently the patient also exhibits various symptoms of paranoia in conjunction with said condition."
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
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.