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Windows 7 To Be Released Next Year?
KrispySausage writes "A recently-released roadmap for the next major Window release — Windows 7 — indicates that Microsoft is planning to release the new operating system in the second half of 2009, rather than the anticipated release date of some time in 2010. This quickly-approaching release date would seem to be at least partially verified by news of a milestone build available for review by an anonymous third party." We've previously discussed the upcoming new OS version, as well as its danger to Vista.
I remember reading an article in 2001 in a computer magazine about the marvellous things that were going to be in Longhorn (now Vista). A wonderful new database-like file system, brilliant UI and other great things. I thought how wonderful this system was going to be compared to WinXP (which had just come out).
Then later I read about how the new file system (WinFS) was based on something called 'Cairo' and about how that too had been scrapped.
At that stage I was using Mandrake Linux (I switched to Ubuntu at the start of 2007), and wanted something better.
Anyway, so this chain of thought ends in, well now I am using Ubuntu, it does keep getting better all the time. I don't use MS Windows really at all now on my computers. Why do I care?
Meh, lets try and get back to where I stared. Can we expect a new file system? Can we expect radical 'new' technologies? Perhaps even voice commands? (Computer: open http colon slash slash slash dot dot org)
I wank in the shower.
That Microsoft cant do what others can?
I just got a copy of OSX 10.5 for my really old and outdated mac. Specifically to get a working copy of dashcode as I write OSX widgets for Crestron control. I was expecting the worst as installing the latest OS on a old PC never is a good thing.
10.5 makes my machine faster. I kind of looked at it skeptically but it actually boots faster and has a more responsive feel, even NeoOffice opens faster as well as Final Cut.
Why is Apple able to deliver an OS that is faster instead of slower? It's got as much eye candy as vista.
Maybe microsoft needs to have all their programmers re-trained?
FYI: Single processor G4 with only 784 meg of ram, and a crappy laptop video card.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you follow the links on the other article though, where they talk about redoing the kernel to what they are calling MinWin - it ran on 40 MB of memory and only had 100 files.
So it might be interesting where they draw the line between the kernel at 40 MB and 'the system' with 480 MB of memory. It sounds like mainly applications running that you could probably parse down.
A move in the right direction at least.
From TFA:
"The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot."
I've obviously been in *nix land for too long, I'm still of the impression that 256 Mb is pretty much all one needs for most tasks. Even EMACS!
Bloat is relative. Compared to Vista, 480MB is freaking Calista Flockhart-level of skinny.
As a primarily Linux user, who uses Gentoo for frequent rolling minor updates rather than infrequent major updates, I keep a constant backup of the working kernel and configuration files by use of a cronjob shell script such that if a similar thing happened to me, if I couldn't fix it myself quickly, I would just do a rollback.
What I'm trying to say is that no-one denies that an update to *ANY* operating system can, potentially, screw the system up - but the fact is that preparing for such an eventuality is of primary importance.
I don't use Ubuntu but I would suspect if a Ubuntu update caused lots of people to have baulked machines, then, like Microsoft, Ubuntu would publish a fix on their web site to help get you out of it and it would be up to the user to go find and follow those instructions to get their machines back. But I suspect most Windows users would never bother even checking the MS web site, rather they'd just reinstall their machines or give it to an expert to fix.
In your particular case, it might be a wierd combination of hardware that has caused you, and maybe a handful of other people, to have a problem with an update that most other people didn't suffer. But the chances are that someone else more knowledgeable than you would have seen the problem, fixed it and put it up on the web somewhere - all it would take from you is a little clever Googling to find that out.
Ultimately, this issue has nothing to do with problems caused by whoever created the update, but about you making some effort to analyse what the problem is, look for a fix, and if there isn't one, post some polite messages in appropriate places asking for someone's help - whether it's Windows or Linux, someone will always jump to your assistance if you demonstrate that you can provide as much information as possible as to what the problem is.
Unlike Windows, where you have an expert on "every street corner", Linux requires that you take some responsibility for your own machines and learn as much as you can about how it works - if you're not prepared to do that, then you should find or pay for someone to do that for you or, even better, stay away from Linux.
Unfortunately, there are far too many people out there lost in the "cool factor" of using Linux because it's different to what most other people run who don't think about the ramifications of doing so. Linux is *ONLY* a replacement for Windows if you spend as much time becoming accustomed to it as you did with Windows (albeit you learnt to use computers and Windows pretty transparently) and switching to Linux is not a decision to be taken lightly if you are pretty new to it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I'd say Windows releases are more like Batman movies, each ones sucks more than the one before until it gets "re-imagined" into a new series (Win2k), which starts the process over (XP, Vista).
Or maybe like Bond movies, where they're all pretty much the same, only the plots get less believable and you're left longing for the "classic" Bond who didn't need insane gizmos to get the job done. Yes, I like that analogy better.
http://www.mhall119.com
personaly i thought w2k was perfect.. truely built on NT with jsut a few usability things added.. the fact that w2k had device management and better error reporting for hardware was a perfect improvement over NT4 - also the support for things like directX and OGL was nice too - made it more usable - while w2k still had a the small (if you wnated it to be) foot print and prety decent preformance.
i am also glad that they updated the documentation from nt4 to w2k under defragment.. i will never forget reading that in the nt4 manual.. the recomended procedure for disk defragmentation was to back up the drive to tape.. format the drive and restore from tape.. just sadly funny for a server OS..
personaly i like w2k and still use it on my laptop.. i don't need the bells and wisles that xp and vista have - and with the lesser over head it makes my old p3 laptop run perfect
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
I understand the importance of getting the FP, but really... is google that difficult a tool to use?
One of the probably features of Windows 7 include MinWin, which is a much lighter kernel (25MB footprint on disk, 40MB footprint in RAM). Another is the likelyhood of MS's heirarchical filesystem that was pulled in the Vista release.
There are other features being discussed such as extensive touch interface ability, etc...
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
I'm interested in windows 7, simply because of this (supposedly) optimised kernel. Certainly I won't *ever* be purchasing Vista. I have one machine available that I need to use for vista builds of my software, but it doesn't get used (by me at least) for anything else, on account of being a pile of shit.
I liked windows 2k a lot, I learned Delphi programming on 2k box. These days I don't code on windows except for ports of my software, but XP is ok for games, and I still like and use MSoffice.
Unfashionable I know, but what can I say, I'm OS Neutral.
Yea like XP has so many bells and whistles that it's a problem?
Step one: Disable Windows firewall, Themes.
Step two: Pretend it says "2000" instead of "XP"
ps. They didn't just "update the documentation" for defrag NTFS on NT4 to Windows 2000. There was no NTFS Defragment tool in NT4. The idea was that NTFS is much less susceptible to fragmentation (it is) that it would not be necessary. Unfortunately, this is untrue in the long-term - even NTFS can't avoid the fact that sometimes there will not be enough continuous blocks free for a file.
Generally speaking, you don't need to run defragmentation tools on servers anyways. It's just not a big enough problem. For a busy file server, perhaps, but back in NT4 land a file server didn't have 1TB of word documents like a medium-large sized company today does.
They added an NTFS defrag to Windows 2000.
ps. There's no built-in defrag tools for Linux ext2/3/etc or MacOS even still. Because, it's just not a huge problem with modern filesystems. But it would be nice to have these tools available for those times when heavy fragmentation has occured.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -