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Early Testers Say Vista RC1 Not Ready
digihome writes "A number of partners and analysts who have downloaded Vista RC1 say the code is solid but they are not convinced it will be ready for release this fall. A Directions on Microsoft analyst said, 'I would call this at best a Beta Three and not a Release Candidate One.'"
Microsoft has always rushed it. No new version of Windows has ever been ready for primetime. Windows 3.0? Crap. Windows 3.1 made it barely usable. Then there's 3.11 to add the microsoft networking. Windows 95? Crap. There's four versions of that, at LEAST; Win95, OSR1, OSR2, OSR2.5, and OSR3 that only went out to a handful of corporate customers. Win98? There's a second edition. Windows ME? CRAP. PURE CRAP. Windows 2000? There's what, six service packs now? And at least one of those broke more than it fixed. Windows XP? Two service packs, and there really ought to have been a third by now due to the sheer number of updates that get installed after SP2.
All microsoft operating systems are crap until near their end of life. It's like a law of nature.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
While it might perhaps be best to withhold judgement until vista actually ships, I would tend to agree with your sentiments. I assume many others will too. For the future: Macs are the longtime favorites of publishers, artists, etc. If you are comfortable with apple and their offerings, give it a shot -- many of the tools with which you're already familiar run well in OSX. Otherwise, you might be quite honestly surprised by modern offerings in the linux software universe. If you'd rather avoid gimp, vim, and other popular OSS tools, you still have a variety of options. For graphics, you might instead try inkscape and/or run photoshop in wine (it is quite useable, stable, and more importantly: stable). For development and editing: http://www.nvu.com/index.php or again go the wine route with dreamweaver and flash. By all means do what works for you.
This isn't a beta; this is a release candidate. Despite the feedback from beta testers who wanted a Beta 3 or at least an RC2, Microsoft has released RC1 and already forked an RTM branch off of it. It's full-steam ahead with this thing.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Windows 2000? There's what, six service packs now?
Four service packs. SP4 was released June 2003.
BTW, its kneejerk posts like yours that make Slashdot a diminishing resource for all things Microsoft.
I disagree. I know a lot of "knowledgeable geeks" who like Windows just fine. No OS is perfect, but it's good enough and that's the best we'll ever get.
Are you actually using RC1?
While I personally feel RC1 (rather pre-RC1) is really Beta3, it is quite feature-complete, stable and very useable as a replacement for XP already.
While trying to use Vista on a machine with less than 512MB of RAM is insanity, if you have 1GB of RAM, it's very likely that you'd have a smoother experience with Vista than XP at this point (rather surprising for me considering the dismal performance of 5472.5).
... that one of the guys quoted says he installed it on a Mac with Bootcamp. Running a beta OS with a beta boot manager?
Perhaps our definitions are different from yours. Most of the people I know who actually like Windows are full of ridiculousness, thinking Centrino is a CPU and so on.
"Good enough" is not a measurement, it's a range. Anything that falls within it can be said to be "good enough", and I will grant you Windows falls in that range. However, so does everything superior to Windows, which makes "good enough" a totally unsuitable metric by which to compare operating systems.
Name one thing Linux does worse than Windows, on a totally technical basis. Or perhaps you might convince me that OSX is not superior to Windows, again, on a technical basis. (The measurable fuckups in the user interface are acceptable technical issues - they still won't make OSX look worse than Windows.) Hell, just talk me into believing that Windows is a better candidate than BeOS for the user desktop, even in its current state, and I'll be amazed. Or hell, QNX! netbsd! Just about anything but Windows, which is a dog.
Sure, I can get work done on Windows. Sure, Windows' UI is miles ahead of most, except the ones that successfully mimic it like Gnome and KDE - both of which are pretty much ripoffs of windows, which is an evolution of earlier windows, which is the direction from which basically the entire design of Motif came. What a tangled web.
The simple truth is that Windows is technologically retarded compared either to OSX or Linux, its two most significant competitors. There are compelling reasons to run it, but they are all related to software logistics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It was NT4 with 6. Sort of.
/. a poorer Microsoft resource when we can't even get /. editors to get the summaries straight. It's just articles and comments, for better or worse.
NT4 SPs 2 and 6 broke more than they fixed. SP3 was rushed, as was "6a" (which shows up in winver as Service Pack 6) to fix the problems that the prior SP broke.
You could make the arguement for Windows 2000 having 6 as well, 4 proper SPs, a post-SP4 rollup, and the malware removal tool. Suffice to say, you can't simply download one or two items to be patched to date with Windows 2000, even in a bare configuration.
Moreover, I wouldn't worry too much about being critcized as making
But a quick list from the top of my head (ways it's better than XP):
And that was just off the top of my head. There is LOTS of other stuff if you bother to do some research. I can't speak for Ubuntu... one thing is for sure, Vista has a much cooler name.
regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll
Start/Run and voilà all those crappy media preview stuff is gone while image thumbnailing still works.
It's better to let that COMponent uninstall itself than to hack around in the registry yourself.
Oh, yes... right.
I take it you never installed Windows 95 on a computer with 4 MB of RAM.
OK, so neither have I.
But I have installed it on a computer with 8 MB of RAM.
My mother used it for work. She said she'd come into the office, turn the computer on, go grab a coffee, and when she was back, the system was usually up. Or nearly so.
Windows 95 didn't kick ass on computers with 4 MB of RAM. Especially not with broken hardware.
It did make you kick the bloody machine senseless (misery loves company, after all) and kick the ass who said 4 MB was minimum system requirements.
</rant>
Ignore this signature. By order.
'I would call this at best a Beta Three and not a Release Candidate One
.NET 3.0 and other new API systems are finalized for syntax, so developers can start testing new products against the OS and not have to worry about API changes.
.NET 3.0 APIs were changing on a monthy basis up until July, as you will notice that there were .NET3.0/WinFX releases each month, with the APIs for the developers changing. And that is just ONE new API subsystem of Vista.
Ok, why is this a RC and not a Beta? Well in the MS world since about 1992 that I can personally 'testify' to, a product makes the RC milestone when it is feature complete from a DEVELOPER standpoint.
This means that the product is feature complete and 99% of the OS bits and all the APIs are how they will be in the final release.
Why was Beta2-Pre-RC1 NOT a RC. Simple, from a developer's standpoint the OS was not feature complete.
RC1 is the FIRST release that that
Sure things will be optimized, and this will be polished, but this IS A RC solely based on the definition that MS has used FOR YEARS. It is feature complete for developers...
(So aside from all the Joke at MS and other FUD, this is technically a RC, and even though it is not a 'finished' polished product, it is the first feature complete versions, especially from the API standpoint.)
This is NO different than they did with Win2k RC1 which was actually less stable than Vista RC1, but AGAIN it was API feature complete for developers, hence why it was called a RC and not a Beta, just as this release.
As for proof of this, look at the Win2k Beta history, or even lookt that Vista Beta History, the
So once again repeat,"This is a RC, this is a RC because it is API and Developer complete."
PERIOD.
Um... Are we talking about Vista? Let me run you through the process to delete a file.
1. Right-click file.
2. Click "Delete"
3. Get a dialog box: "You'll need to provide administrator permission to delete this file."
4. Click 'Continue'.
5. Get an OS-modal dialog box: "Windows needs your permission to continue. If you started this action (Delete file), click Continue."
6. Click 'Continue'.
I do not call that "WAY better file operations dialogs".
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
Well, I'm sure BSD heavily influenced Windows sockets, just as it did for virtually every other OS, but the new stuff in the Vista TCP stack is actually pretty impressive. The performance gains they've seen in testing are upwards of 400% for many types of common links.
Read more about here and here. There is also a good video about it on Channel 9.
So it's not really a question of reinvetion but of dramatic improvement.
You must be using Beta 2. Try using a later build. The UAC dialogs are no longer modal and pop up far less often.
What I was talking about specifically is the better feedback and progress information you get during file operations. For instance, if I copy a lot of files from point A to point B, and point B contains some files with the same names, it prompts me at the end of the operation (not at indeterminant points in between) and allows me to selectively choose what to do with each file without cancelling or screwing up the operation as a whole.
Sounds like a simple thing, and it is, but it's a HUGE improvement over the piss poor way XP does things.
A quick clarification since I think many Slashdot users don't realize this - the $200 is a family pack license which covers up to 5 users. So it's hugely cheaper to legally upgrade multiple Apple machines than Vista. An extra Vista Home Advanced license is $243, a whopping $16 discount over the charge of $259 for one.
This doesn't even consider the fact that newer Apple operating systems run better on old hardware than their predecessors. Tiger on my ancient laptop still runs great and is a wonderful upgrade. By contrast, I don't have any PC hardware, even computers bought at about the same time as my Macs, that will run Aero [Vista's MacOS X-like interface] at all.
D
Nope, it definitely says Windows Vista RC1. I know it's not Beta 2, because the terrible fading mouseover animations are gone.
I also have a few other complaints: Aero Basic looks terrible without anti-aliasing. And Desktop is treated too much like an Explorer window: After I enabled "Show hidden files and folders" in Explorer, two desktop.ini files appeared on my desktop.
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
The term release candidate refers to a final product, ready to release unless fatal bugs emerge. In this stage, the product features all designed functionalities and no known showstopper class bugs
Notice the terms 'final product' and 'features all designed functionalities'. If those two are not met with, we are still not at RC, but on the way from "beta", probably. Ok, let's say there are no fatal bugs in this RC, then apparently (according to testers) still a lot is missing from it to make it a 'final product'.
Now I wouldn't want to be the head product manager of Vista, but I guess a problem in this complex product will be the fact that they're constantly changing its main features and goals, so it will hardly ever be a final product. If someone should just make hard demands on what it should do, it might actually work out to at least something final.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Apparently Vista is capable of doing this, the technology exists in some form.
However, RC1 does not demonstrate any capacity to do it all, besides the ability to resize fonts. The interface doesn't seem to be vectorized as Microsoft said it would be awhile back.
The main problem with RC1 right now, in my opinion, is the drivers. nVidia's in particular are horrendous; performance in the 3D Aero interface is great, but open any 3d app and it all goes down the crapper.
This post is totally correct.
WPA under linux is a fucking nightmare without the right hardware.
I'm relatively new to linux but after trying Ubuntu 5.04, 5.10 and 6.06 each time I've had more and more problems with wifi / wap, it's a bastard.
What's more annoying is I could've sworn that 6.06 was meant to be "WPA out of the box!" maybe I mis-read something but it totally isn't.