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Vista SP1 Release Candidate Available
Microsoft has made available the release candidate for Vista SP1, after a limited beta begun last September. Informationweek points out white papers telling business users that if they were waiting for SP1 to solve application compatibility issues, they needn't bother waiting: SP1 won't solve them, and in fact might cause applications to break that were running under Vista. Techworld outlines the hoops users will have to jump through to get SP1 installed.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
What the heck is going on here? That applications wont break is an upside? Wasn't the biggest selling point of MSFT has been the compatibility with the existing installed base?
This is a telling moment for all the CIOs and IT managers of corporations. The biggest reason why most companies could not migrate to a competing platform (or at least platform-agnostic technologies) was because they were locked into this proprietary system and it simply costs money to remove all the hacks and remove dependencies. Now they can't dodge the cost. It is inevitable. Given that, does it make sense to pay so much to get locked into another proprietary vendor locked system again? They were fooled once into vendor lock or vendor lock crept up on them unsuspected. But now?
The MSFT strategy is clear. They must make the cost of migrating from XP to Vista will be marginally smaller than migrating from XP to platform-neutral-technology. If the IT managers fall for this trap once more they will exactly be in the same situation five years from now.
The key is open standards. We don't have to bicker among ourselves the merits and demerits of open source vs closed source, or free software with paid software or whatever. Open Standards will level the playing field. That is all we should ask for. Let us duke it out in a level field and may the better philosophy win.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Why would anyone bother installing beta software before writing giant posts criticizing it and proclaiming the imminent death of Microsoft, when it's so much easier to farm mod points by cutting out the installing step? Heh.
One of the biggest reasons people and companies are not upgrading to Vista is backwards compatibility. Microsoft have a free product called Virtual PC that anyone can download. They should include a suitable version of XP with very Vista license and include Virtual PC in the standard install. If you can run all your mission critical apps in a compatibility layer like this (think 'Classic' on the old PPC Macs) then they could really move forward with Vista and make it a modern OS and drop the old cruft they've been carrying for years in the name of backwards compatibility. If they wanted to they could even include Win95/Win98/WintNT or even Win3.1 virtual environments.
If Parallels and VMware can make the desktop sharing between Mac OS X and Windows easy, why can't Microsoft make it easy between Win9X/NT/XP and Vista easy?
Problem is no one at Microsoft in interested in doing this. I was invited to Microsoft's London offices last month and suggested it to a few of their top engineers and sales/marketing people and no one wanted to admit that Vista was a relative failure. You can downgrade to XP but you need your own DVD/CD media, and can't run Vista and XP at the same time, it's one licence or the other. Madness!
Dear reader, I have a confession to make: I love Microsoft. I love it more than I love my family. This ought not come as a surprise to any that know me: a long line of jaded ex girlfriends will laugh bitterly and recall the passion they could never share in, and those few that can call themselves my friends accept that, on Patch Tuesday, their lives are nothing to me.
But above even my love for Bill Gates' corporate loin product is my love for my work. It is a sacred task that has been assigned to me, and I dare not let friends, nor family, nor even software allegiances stand in the way of the fairness and impartiality that is my trademark.
But why do I tell you this? Why do I bare my soul in such a vulgar fashion? It is that you may understand: even now, I will not let my love blind me; I do not write from the perspective of an enamored lover, nor a too-faithful user. No, it is as a Genuine Microsoft User hungry for the Next Best Thing that I pen this, my review of Windows Vista.
Part I: Making the Switch
"Aha," you are saying, having been inundated by countless negative reviews, "He will surely realize that Vista is in every way a downgrade from previous Microsoft products; he will slowly become disillusioned with its clunkiness, bloat, and arbitrary changes made only for the sake of justifying an overzealous Vice President's salary. Over the course of many painful pages, he will finally renounce his love for the Monopolist, and end with an impassioned plea for the adoption of the obviously superior Apple OSX while a swelling orchestral piece rises in the background."
Alas, no. Such a review, while undoubtedly entertaining, would be as far from the truth as, say, religion. No, this is most assuredly a glowingly positive testimonial: Windows Vista is easily the best operating system on the market today. Such an assertion, I realize, may offend some of my readers' base sensibilities; if that is the case, kindly allow me to show you to the exit.
But I have, once again, gotten ahead of myself. Firstly, why I choose to review the Vistas now, rather than immediately following the January launch, bears explaining.
It was a cloudy Monday morning, some two months back, when my erstwhile laptop, a venerable old Compaq, gave up the ghost. The screen, which had been flaky for a number of weeks, finally quit altogether.
After a brief mourning period, I began scouring the print classifieds, searching for a replacement. I soon found one, a dual-core offering from Hewlett Packard. The $600 price tag--considerably less than my weekly escort--made its purchase, and my subsequent review, a foregone conclusion. It arrived the following Thursday, in the hands of a perky blonde UPS driver; I christened it Alex, turned it on, transferred my data (a breeze thanks to Microsoft's new Streaming Automatic External Backup Restore technology), configured it to suit my needs, and resumed my work.
I have been using it, very happily, ever since and, today, shall pass judgment.
Part II: New Features (and what they mean for you)
Aero:
This brand new DirectX-based desktop rendering engine was the focus of Microsoft's Vista promotional materials. It is easy to see why: Vista with Aero is stunning; it puts, in this writer's humble opinion, all other human achievements to shame.
I have been to the Louvre; I have seen the works of the masters, of Monet and Michaelangelo. My heart swelled, and I nearly wept at the sight. But the feeling I get when I gaze at Aero... even that cannot compare. It is more than my simple words can express. My screenshots are but pale reflections of its splendor.
You must experience it yourself: study the subtle interplay between light and shadow, feel the cool ephemer
Sorry, gunna have to disagree with you there. A release candidate is just that - a candidate for release. Just because Microsoft has warped the term to mean "late beta", doesn't mean that's what it is. In many cases a release candidate becomes the final release.
RC's aren't meant to have major errors. RC's are designed to be feature-complete and stable. If a release candidate has major bugs, then it isn't release quality and thus should never have been labeled as such in the first place.
Note: I'm not condoning putting RC's on mission-critical equipment, but I fundamentally disagree that an RC should be inherently considered unstable.