Buy Vista or Else

theodp writes "Upgrade or keep crashing was the tagline when Windows XP was introduced. So how will Windows Vista be marketed? 'I'd hate to see something bad happen to your PC,' seems to be one pitch. Even if new features won't get you to upgrade to Vista, you should buy Vista for the security, urged Windows Chief Jim Allchin. Are commercials featuring Tony Soprano next? Bada Bing!"

Comments

Secure?

[SpasticWeasel]

From TFA: "People Near Me" feature, which searches over a Wi-Fi connection for other Vista users nearby and then sets up a peer-to-peer network with them. Yeah, that sounds pretty secure. Same old Microsoft.

Re:Secure?

[PCM2]

If this is the Windows Collaboration feature they're talking about, then it doesn't automatically connect everybody. You can invite the people you choose. And it's not a peer to peer filesharing network or even a standard Windows network. It's a Groove-like system that allows you to share files and screen real estate among the connected peers. So if you're showing a presentation from your laptop, you can let me connect to your projector using your laptop over the network and show my presentation from my hard drive, using your screen in a sense. I can also push the same file to everybody in the ad hoc "network" so that they can view it. Optionally I can also send them a copy of the file, but I don't have to... that kind of thing. It's actually pretty neat.

Re:Security

[bender647]

TFA describes many ways in which Vista will be more secure by design than the security-patched XP. For example, more attention to user privileges, sandboxing IE, a firewall that looks at outgoing traffic, integrated spyware checking.

I could pretty much care less about Vista until the games I want to play won't run on anything else, but you can't doubt that M$ will be paying more attention to security in the fundamental design of Vista than they did in XP.

Re:linux? OS X?

[DaHat]

Vista seems to be offering very little in terms of features

Lemme guess... you are basing that solely on what you've read on /.?

Allow me to list a few features coming in Vista that I am looking forward to:

• Application level audio control
• Application specific remoting
• Vastly improved networking stack (apparently superior to any other OS's)
• Support for user mode drivers
• New printer technology (way beyond postscript)
• Pluggable crypto system

Take a look at this MSN Spaces post which has some links to some videos on some of these improvements and more on Channel 9.

Re:linux? OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

While per-application audio control (I can't wait to be able to turn down my games and turn up teamspeak) and a new networking stack sound nice, remoting a single application has always been possible through netmeeting or with stuff like citrix. User mode drivers have been around for a while in other operating systems (libusb, libsane, various user mode filesystem drivers, etc). Not sure what a "pluggable crypto system" is but linux has had a good number of kernel crypto modules for a long time now for various purposes. As for Metro, the only thing it really brings to the table is XML. PDF already does everything Metro will, and will probably be much less encumbered than anything Microsoft releases as "open". (I also suspect that you could set per-application mixer levels in ALSA for any application not using OSS emulation, but it would be an undocumented hack and application dependent, rather than an OS feature)

Re:Security

[CyricZ]

The parent poster was saying that Mac OS X was based on BSD, which it is. Mach was derived from BSD, and Mac OS X builds upon Mach. Of course, it also integrates code from the other BSDs, which tend to use code from each other, too.

At one point there was a BSD-derived networking stack included with Windows. However, it is reported these days that a new implementation was written.