Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
If MS hadn't been promising it for so long, it wouldn't be such a disappointment. IE7 is finally out, put it on a client's laptop, and it doesn't look that bad. I haven't seen it do anything terrible yet, but now that I've been using FF, I'm not really excited about the look and feel of it at all. I'll probably have the same 'oh, it looks a bit crayola-ish' reaction to Vista too. Oh well, as long as MS is trying to keep up with the rest of the world, all can't be bad.
Seriously though, all the people that are trying to predict this or that, call it good, or denounce it already.. well, all I have to say to that is wait for Vista SP2 before you make up your mind. That's when all the bugs will be worked out, and by then, two or more Linux distros will be better than Vista. By then, many more people will have figured out that the OpenOffice apps are good enough for what they want, and the little lightbulb in their heads will turn on and they will realize that a computer doesn't need MS products to be useful or relevant.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
True enough, but then again, people will claim the final release not to be sufficiently tested, either. Not that I will be using Vista nor am I a Vista fan (I run Linux exclusively for my own reasons), but people should realize that almost no software released today is free of bugs and exploits. For a codebase that large, I think Microsoft deserves some credit for keeping it as well as they have... while still maintaining legacy compatibility! Not that I am saying they are right for letting it grow so big, they should cut off legacy support in exchange for codebase reliability and the chance to regain their name around the "poweruser" group by removing old exploits, etc, etc. Basically not be bloated, as people claim. Maybe in their next release they will be able to start on a clean slate and have RCs that people don't complain about. Props MS for getting this far. Lets see how it sells. The name Vista/Longhorn have been floating for years... so they can't blame publicity if it isnt a hit :)
I also did page loading benchmarks using FireFox in XP and IE7 in Vista. I found IE7 rendered pages at least twice as fast in most cases.
I agree its probably not ready for retail but they are really damn close.
As we all know, Vista will have many key upgrades since there are
many important features that will be added after the launch as time passes. (such as Monad)
With only part of the 'features available' at launch, vista is far from 'complete'.
Let's see if it is ready after the final release AND when most of the stuff is complete and has been
properly integrated into Vista.
I would like to see how that new OS works then.
It's safe to say that this is the most disputed release of any operating system made by Microsoft. The software giant has not had huge delays prior to this release and therefore it had not yet stressed out a pre-Vista product like it is doing it now.
Microsoft loses whatever they do from now on. If they delay the product even further, share holders will complain and people will lose faith in them. If they release it too soon (i.e. as currently planned), it is likely going to require significant upgrades and probably also a super fast SP1 upgrade. That too will make people upset and techies will have to upgrade computers over and over again.
I am a Windows XP user and I must say that I am satisfied with this product as it is right now. I am not going to upgrade to Vista before we see the first, second and third wave of reactions.
Full Tilt
Where I understand your frustration is that individual media outlets tend to grab evidence that sells papers. Slashdot editors maybe happier reporting this, than the rejected story I submitted yesterday about the future directions on Windows. So yeah, I'm tired of people predicting that it will or won't work. But Microsoft gathers that very anecdotal evidence and understands what needs to be fixed and what doesn't! :)
Based on my experience with Microsoft products (which dates to the early days of DOS) they are never quite ready for the production environment until SP1. To judge based on an RC1 is just silly. At home I have already upgraded to a Linux environment and will not need to throw money at Vista. In the office I will be holding off until SP1 before I even start testing our production software on Vista. It is not worth my time or money to go through the hassle of making a Release Candidate my primary OS (which is what is truly needed to shake the bugs out). I don't forsee even considering a switch until January '08, and that is if they release close to schedule.
No animals were harmed in the making of this sig.
Well, there was that one puppy, but he is all better now.
Anecdotal evidence from a large number of the vista testers carries a bit more weight than from a small group. When damn near everyone is saying the same thing, those words carry weight.
I know that I've used it and uninstalled it in disgust. Bloated, slow, devoid of useful new features and _none_ of this has changed since I used a build in the 2003ish longhorn days. I was running it on a 4400+ dual core box with 2 gigs of ram and a 7800 gtx, so I'm not running it on a slow box or anything.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. Vista is the result of collusion between MS and manufacturers to push sales of hardware. The bloat is intentional. I know that sounds like I wear a tinfoil hat, but the hardware industry has needed a "killer app" for the masses for a couple of years now (xp or 2k3 server runs fine on a 1ghz box if you give it 512+mb ram and don't run databases, play games or play 1080i mpeg 2 streams) and Vista is the result.
If one was into conspiracy theories, they would pay very careful attention to the stock portfolios of the major players.
We all know (and I'm not a linux or apple fanboy) that it will be released regardless of whether it is ready or not. People will also buy it.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
The windows ME beta was actually quite good, much faster, seemed to be more stable.
What was released, was, as you say, CRAP. PURE CRAP
I actually went back to the beta until I installed 2k
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Has a Red Hat, Suse, Debian build ever come out bug free. Hard to say since so many of the packages that you can install via apt or whatever are not really associated. If apache has a bug it's apache's fault, not Windows.
This is a major disadvantage, but also a major advantage that both Windows and Mac to some extent share.
With any software you have to get it out the door. It'll never be perfect, and no matter how long they wait there will be an SP1 fairly soon.
To me what RC1 means is that nothing big and fancy is going to get ADDED. What you see if pretty much what you get. If a major flaw is found they might rearrange a piece of functionality, but most things are going to be bug fixes.
While in Beta they might completely take something out. In RC you probably are not going to get away with it, although you migth "delay" something to SP1 like Microsoft did with database mirroring in SQL 2005 in order to get it out the door.
As much as I hate patching, I'd rather get it out in the field and get some use out of it. Early adopters will get hit the hardest, but that is what they expect. Dell and the other manufactors will be the ones finding most of the bugs from now on anyways.
WINE them. On either Linux or MacOS X (Intel). WINE works on them both.
and CodeWeavers recently released a beta of Crossover Office for MacOS.
Dreamweaver and PhoSho run fine on it.
But really, The Gimp kicks the pants off of PhoSho if you know how to use it.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Every software product is rushed. Nothing large is ever released perfect, there are always known problems and things you could have done better.
As for Windows, the NT line has always been pretty solid. You could always install RC1 and expect it to work normally with maybe a driver going crazy every few days. Final releases were always an improvement in overall user experience from the previous version. (Though not an improvement in overall stability as it's pretty hard to beat the previous version that has been through every imaginable scenario on millions of computers.)
Vista seems to be another story. If you analyze the Beta and RC timeline of every NT-line OS up to now, you see that Vista is abberation. It's pretty obvious that Microsoft is lowering its standards in order to push the product out, and that's just going to turn around and bite it in the ass.
Service packs: They are a mix of patches and new functionality. We also do that in the Linux world, just in smaller steps as there is less to worry about compatibility and localization.
And stop badgering Windows 95. It looks lame now but it kicked ass on 4 MB computers with broken hardware back in 95. It ushered process isolation many years before Macs got it. It ushered a reasonably good UI many years before Linux got it. Plug & Play, ugly as it was, brought the end to fiddling with jumpers which is something that 99 percent of the population doesn't know how to do. It ran all your DOS and Win 3.1 stuff. So go easy on it. It may suck by today's standards, but in that day and age it was miles better than any of the alternatives.
Am I the only one who sees "Completely new TCP/IP Stack" and thinks "Massive security holes bound to be lurking just below the surface?"
Why would you rewrite the stack that you (finally) got the damn bugs out of?
I guess it technically isn't re-writing, since they lifted the majority of the stack from BSD in the first place, but hey, did this wheel really need to be reinvented?
What a strange bird is the pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can.
Based on your criteria, I don't believe Vista RC1 is really an RC.
.NET 3.0 with WCF and WWF are included.
Brand new hardware that passes memtest86+ and the lowest level drive diagnostics results in Blue Screens a'plenty. The same hardware works great with XP SP2 and
Linux.
In fact, I even had a blue screen while
installing RC1. Pre RC1 and RC1 both BSOD for me after 6 to 8 hours of idle time. Neither one work with my DVI plug-n-play monitor. Vista itself won't let
you install Virtual PC 2004 SP 1 (VMWare Server installs and works just fine BTW). Nero 6.x crashes immediately. Installing my preferred antivirus solution (AVG)
results in a BSOD. Windows Media Player experiences video corruption when it is put into full screen mode. WMP will, just for grins, hose up the entire desktop
every third or fourth time. Usability on WMP 11 is awful (after 3 tries I still have to hunt to find the "import all this music to my collection" dialog). Font rendering looks awful even with ClearType completely tuned.
The upsides -- the background pictures look nice and finally scale to reasonable monitor sizes (> 1280x1024) without hideous artifacts. Oh, and
I'm not sure Windows takes this category either. It's true that Linux has some big WiFi problems (WPA and chipset support, namely), but my experience with wifi in Windows has been even worse (!) than my Linux experience. Setting up WPA worked, although my successes and failures seemed to occur randomly. When actually using WiFi, I get failed connections, random disconnections, and the like regularly. Currently, my computer connects to the access point just fine, but all the while it tells me I'm disconnected. After five minutes or so it loses the connection and I get to wait for Windows to go through its exceedingly slow connection process again. On top of that, it's nearly impossible to figure out what's going on from the Windows wireless network configuration screens.
By way of contrast the same computer, running Linux, connects perfectly and stays that way, even if I turn off the antenna for a while. It works so well that I never even use the wired interface. On the other hand, I wasn't able to get WPA working when I tried it. I haven't taken a look at it for a while, so the software may have matured.
I'm not trying to say that Linux is particularly good with WiFi, just that Windows's wireless networking is as screwy as the rest of the OS.
Don't humour him, he's an idiot. How can you make complaints based on the number of service packs or updates? These OSes have a life span of many years, compared with say Linux distributions that have a major revision every 12 months. May I suggest that you look at how many security patches there have been for major releases of Debian (a Linux distro with longer life spans)?
BTW, NT4 should have had 7 service packs, but MSFT killed the last one. Quite inconenient of them. Another XP service pack would be nice too to lower the number of updates required on a new system. Maybe they're waiting for IE7 and wrap that in to it.
I disagree, I've had _far_ more problems getting Wireless to work under Linux or BSD.
Ubuntu was the closest. I had to update to get it really working (And even then, it broke my grub menu list... bastards...).
Go ahead and get my Wireless driver working under OpenBSD. Good luck with that.
The best you can hope to achieve in Linux is the same in Windows with their driver wrapper that uses the Windows driver and just emulates it for most cards. Yeah, _some_ cards work better in Linux but goood luck finding those at BestBuy or without some effort. Windows XP SP2 makes my wireless troubles go entirely away.
So if you say that Linux is better than Windows in the Wireless arena then I call bullshit because it's not 100% better.
As for your Windows problems, I have no idea. You remind of a random Linux guy who just can't get Windows to work nevermind the weird shit you do to tweak windows out.
I'm still looking for a good WiFi PCI card for my OpenBSD box... it's a bitch.
Apple obviously puts a lot of thought into how stuff fits together on their desktop, and their laptop just freaking works with everything. Wireless? No problem! Connecting to the Internet through my bluetooth enabled cellphone? No problem! Naturally the iPod works like a charm. Those media-rich web pages that I don't tend to browse on my Linux (or Windows) machines? No problem! Back in the day you could configure Linux to handle more file formats than Windows was capable of, but all that stuff just seems to work out of the box with Apple. It's an impressive experience and whenever anyone asks me what machine to buy, I tell them they should go for an Apple.
That's not to say I've got a love affair with Apple going on. My big desktop machine is Linux and will remain so for the foreseeable future. I also still do most of my non-web development work with Linux. I use the Apple laptop for a lot of experimental ruby on rails stuff. It's got all my favorite UNIX utilities on it, too. Ever try to get all your favorite UNIX utilities on Windows? Sure you can use Cygwin but that always feels hackish at best.
Of all the operating desktop environments I've used over the years, OSX feels like the nicest. I was using it pretty much the minute I had the laptop out of the box. Naturally your mileage may vary.
All that being said, my room mate has a Mac mini for some media work she does but she still prefers her windows PC for most things. It's possible that if you're only used to the one environment nothing else will do. I've used so many desktop environments over the years that the transitions don't feel so awkward anymore. And there are still things in the latest version of Windows that have been bugging me since 3.0 days (And which OS/2 happily copied.) I don't expect those to change when Vista comes out.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I don't understand why you linux and other alternate OS people don't just save yourself the trouble and get a hardware wireless to ethernet bridge. They don't cost THAT much and work great.
Here's the thing with OS X. I have bought every version since 10.0( to be fair I think I got 10.1 for free because I bought 10.0 ) and believe the ruler that these should be measured by is that a month after I install the New OS I wouldn't go back.
While the analogy is similar, there is a big difference. Linux is designed from the ground up to be fully customizable, that's part of the advantage of it. Windows and Mac OS X, however, are designed to be cohesive unified user experiences. Everything should have a logical and intuitive feel to its interface, in large part because the modifications you can make on the OSes is far more limited than you can in a Linux environment.
In Linux terms, it would be like if half the user interface was Gnome, the other half KDE, and you were locked out of making any changes to resolve it. That's sort of how Vista feels right now. It also will be a big turnoff to the average consumer who doesn't really want a ton of customizability, they want an unified interface they are familiar with. That, in large part, is why Linux has yet to really become "the OS" for your average Joe consumer while Mac OS X has done exceedingly well. Both have a *nix background to them, but the interface design is what sells OS X.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
I love the new Remote Desktop in Vista. Beats the XP one hands down. Working remotely I couldn't stand the pain of not having the cleartype. In Vista, Cleartype and even Aero work over the remote desktop (you have to do Vista to Vista remote desktop to experience Aero). Now isn't that cool? My remote experience is so close to local that it's easy to forget that at times.
The only area where XP is still preferable to Vista is device drivers. RC1 is better than Beta 2 in that respect, but still not acceptable. In fact the only reason I'm not running Vista full time is drivers. I couldn't make any of my sound cards work (SB Audigy & Intel HD Audio). ATI TV Wonder doesn't work either. That pretty much leaves my home PC audioless and videoless under Vista.