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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.'"
Yea, I don't know why this is such a shocker. They should really not rush it.
I never understood this MS terminology. From my point of view a Release Candidate is in a shape that I could just recompile the software without the debugging symbols if no major bugs are reported. No one considers this to be even a remote possibility in case of Vista RC1. My guess is that they will also need a RC2, RC3 and maybe even RC4 and than a RRC1 (real Release Candidate) before shipping.
My experience with RC1 has been mixed. Do I think it's light years ahead of the disaster that was Beta2? Yes, absolutely. It's stable enough to use as an everyday operating system. Is it ready for showtime? Eh. Perhaps. Is it what we have waited six years for? Heck, no. Where are all the interesting bits gone?
The more interesting question is that of nomenclature. I agree that this is Beta3 - but more because an RC everywhere else is something that is ready to go, it just needs spit and polish to get it ready, fix a couple of bugs. Then again, this is what Microsoft is telling people to test their applications against to check for breakages, so yes, I suppose you could call it a "Certification Beta" or what have you. But call it what you may, I think it's the Ultimate version, with all the games, and goodies, that needs more time. Enterprise-wise, it looks stable enough for use - networking is better than XP (even though it's a new stack), group policy has been better fine tuned, UAC is usable enough, and hardware detection is light-years ahead of XP. All of those basic things are ready and if thats what enterprise customers are expected to get, then I think it's good to go, after they fix the occaisonal dialog box with three different fonts.
I just wish there was something truly innovative to encourage an upgrade. Halo 2 doesn't count, especially for business!
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
I am not an anecdote. I am a free man!
;-)
Vista has major Explorer bugs, still in evidence. Thumbnail rendering (the default setting)is buggy, and causes crashes.
DivX codec is a big culprit here. On trying to render the thumbnail, the codec causes an excepton under Vista. Explorer SHOULD trap this, and render a grey square, or something.
Instead, explorer faults, and the entire desktop - including the menu, taskbar, and any current file transfers - goes HUP.
The "cure" is to check the option for opening all new explorer windows in their own process. That's incredibly wasteful of resources - of course, if you can run Vista at speed... you probably already have a Lamborghini. You can also tell explorer to never render thumbnails. Seems like a real waste, 'tho'.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.'"
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
You want anecdotal evidence? I'll give you anecdotal evidence! In my research lab we've been using Windows Vista to control the video cameras that point into the womens toilets, and we've had no end of trouble. Last week one of the female professors was about to use one of the lavatories and my assistant, curled up in a duct, pressed Alt-Windows-F10 to take a screengrab, causing Vista to *instantly* blue screen. He tried to reboot but got his beard caught in his shoelaces when he blinded himself fumbling with the optical mouse. Another assistant managed to capture a grainy, blurry image of a ragged, scholarly minge, but of course Vista corrupted the JPEG before we could all take it home! Thankfully I was able to load it into Paint and draw over the corrupted blocks, but her dithered red and yellow clitoris was not very arousing. So you can take your Vista and shove it, we never have this trouble with Linux.
All microsoft operating systems are crap. /* until near their end of life. */
There. Fixed that for ya.
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I've been really surprised at Vista pricing. It seems to me there's no reason to buy Vista at retail when you could buy a new computer when Vista comes out for not that much more money than the upgrade alone. I could see paying $99 to upgrade to Vista, or even meeting Apple's upgrade price at $129, but pushing $200 to upgrade XP Pro to Vista pro sounds like a bad dream.
From an aesthetic point of view, MacOS X is a no-brainer. You can run Photoshop on it, and if you decide the GIMP or other open source applications are your cup of tea, you can run them too.
Also, if you do video or plan to do video, the Apple applications are absolutely unbeatable.
D
No wonder you cant run it. Your video card is slower than most by a factor of ten. If only you had bought the 6600 you cheap bastard. Not only that, your Athlon is missing a bit. I'm surprised you can boot XP.........
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.
The performance is closer to Windows XP if you factor out the still awful sidebar. In some areas it equals XP's performance, in other areas it still lags a bit behind. Compatability isn't much of an issue either at this point. Honestly, compatability wise, considering the changes under the hood, the changeover to Vista should be a lot smoother than when everyone started transitioning over to Windows 2000 several years back.
The reason why Vista is definitely *not* ready for release though, is the overall design of the OS itself. Vista has no unified feel to its design, and certain key changes from Windows xp feel more cumbersome(or at the very least awkward to get adjusted to).
Vista really does highlight the differences in design philosophy that went into it versus Mac OS X. While technology implementation wise the two OS's are rather similar in what they can offer the user, OS X goes to great pains to offer a unified and relatively easy to use design. Vista, on the other hand, feels exactly the way it was designed: done in pieces by various different groups then pieced together.
The short of it is the core of Vista, baring a few more bug fixes and performance improvements, is certainly there. But, Vista right now is like that unassembled bike you got as a kid for Christmas. All the parts are there but you can't quite get it fitted together right.
In my honest opinion Vista needs about 3 more months and one more major release to get the final kinks out of the system performance and bug wise, but then it needs another 6 months of heavy and pure public beta use and feedback to get the interface and design unified into a user friendly operating system. As it stands right now, I think performance and bug wise Vista should be pretty much ok by the time the consumer release hits in January, but it is going to be far more cumbersome and even less intuitive to use than Windows XP is on release.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
What made you think it was a good resource for all thing Microsoft in the first place? All the rave reviews of Windows?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
This is being promoted by Microsoft as a Release Candidate 1. By stamping this a Release Candidate product, the product team is saying "We believe this product is completely finished, polished, optimized, bug free, and ready for mass production. Unless you, our fearless users, discover something, THIS is the product we mass-produce and distribute by the millions."
Except for the inconvenient fact that everyone who has seen it knows that's simply nonsense. In reality, this is a late alpha (unoptimized, feature incomplete, substantial bugs remain) or at best an early beta (feature complete, largely optimized, some bugs remain), but based on reports calling this a Beta is being generous. But to call it a release candidate is absurd. No way! Seriously, we're STILL hearing reports of features being removed from the product.
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.
One thing that Linux does worse at then Windows? Despite being a real Windows anti-fan, I can easily answer that question: WPA on WiFi. Actually WiFi in general.
This is a real problem for Linux. You can get there, but only for certain hardware, and there is often a lot of blood sacrifice involved. I have even seen WiFi drivers that kernel panic linux. There is a good argument that this is because the vendors are not supporting linux, and have heavily restricted access to the driver APIs. But you still cannot count it as a place where linux is superior to Windows.
There are lots of other places were linux is simply not polished enough... or better said: is rather rough. It has been improving, but still has a long way to go.
Well, the Windows $400 price tag is reasonable when you consider the simple and friendly $400 Bittorrent Rebate for home users.
Sony and the $600 PS3, however, require a lot more red-tape, requiring me to steal a wallet and use an out-of-town WalMart for my purchase. You can bet I'm not happy about that.
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.
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.
Take out half your RAM. Put in a hard drive 75% the size of your old drive. Remove your processor's clock crystal and replace it with one of half the frequency. Done.
-b.
The problem is we do not compare the two product correctly.
What I mean is Windows 2003 cost about 800$
Linux (Most distro come at NO cost)
Second Windows is supported by a huge corporation (and support device reseller (ie Wifi, SATA, MB, WinModem)
Linux is created by a bunch of "lunatic" (I'm one of them)
Windows aims to be as easy to use as possible (Lower cost of ownership = Low salary wages) (Check box, Wizard)
Linux aims to be as "powerfull"/features/customizable as possible. Complete Config txt files.
So Windows is easy and Linux is complexe (high learning curves)
When you ask "Name one thing Linux does worse than Windows" there are tons of stuff, others will probably point some of them to you. My point remains, Linux and Windows are not on the same playfield.
Don't you think ?
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.
No, I don't. I disagree completely.
Basically your argument is what windows users use when Linux is eating windows' lunch in the server market. which, by the way, it is doing. Only Linux and Windows are gaining market share in this space now (they seem to trade off gaining ground here and there, but that could simply be due to the release of various studies at various times.)
Linux is competing directly with Windows. Period. It's competing for the desktop (somewhat poorly) and it's competing for the server market (with great success.) It's competing for the embedded market (where it has made serious inroads against the incumbents, including the aptly-named wince) quite well, too; for instance, I work in a Casino, and I walked in one day and saw kernel messages on a slot machine that had just rebooted. Using Linux for slot machines is something of a no-brainer due to the high level of security and reliability, and low cost.
By the way, have you even used Ubuntu yet? The learning curve on that is, if anything, shallower than Windows. The install is easier, and using it is no harder.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
'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.
> The Gimp kicks the pants off of PhoSho if you know how to use it
What we need is a mod rating of "-1, crack baby".
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Toward the end of its life, a Microsoft OS becomes fairly reliable and stable.
This is bad, because people might decide it's worth sticking with indefinitely.
Therefore, themasses must be goaded into upgrading to a shiny! new! OS which is a 1.0.0 release at best and will require umpteen more rounds of patching.
This is, of course, accomplished by EOLing past versions, and pointing out that oh, by the way, the latest batch of 43 security vulnerabilities has been in every version since Windows 3.11 and will only be fixed in this shiny! new! version.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Dammit, twitter. Every time I stumble on one of your posts, it's like an icepick in my ear.
Typos aside, that's the one fair statement in the whole post. Microsoft has monopoly power, so there's nowhere to go but down.
Ah, typical twitter logic. "Hmm, I want to get my software on 90% of desktops in the world. I'm not building it for that nasty, tricksy Windowses. If I make it cross-platform, somebody might run it on Windows anyway. I know! I'll write it for Linux, then wait for 90% of the desktops in the world to convert! And if anybody asks for a Windows version, I'll tell them to fuck off! Then they'll convert to Linux for sure!"
Oh, bloody hell. I fell into a decade-long coma again? The first time, The Police broke up. Now Linux has conquered the desktop and Microsoft went Chapter 11, and they're just building keyboards and mice for Sun?! At least my hairstyle is back in fashion again.
Of course, the only reason you picked that quote from the parent post in the first place was because somewhere, deep down, you recognized yourself in it.
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