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Vista SP1 Release May Be Near
Tokonamu sends a note about the release to a private testing group of a new build of Windows Vista SP1, possibly presaging the imminent release of the long-awaited service pack. Speculation about a Feb. 15 release date has been fueled by a report out of Taiwan, according to the article. Microsoft also issued a new build of Windows XP SP3 this week, but it's getting next to no publicity out of Redmond, what with XP being the main competition for Vista and all.
That is a huge misconception about Vista. The thing that requires the beefy HW is Aero with all it's fancy stuff. Turn it off, and the hardware resources are minimal. I had it running on my Latitude X300 and it ran just fine. The system always felt responsive and peppy. Features to love about Vista include: Firewall profiles, quick standby times (and more important coming out of standby EVERYTIME), great power management, quick search in the start menu (one button hot key to bring up search window (AKA the Windows button)), etc.
Sure it has its quirks but in my experience the good far out weighs the bad.
"He Who Dares Wins"
The target is to ship a new client OS every 2 years and a new server OS every 4 years. With a minor client refresh every year to give OEMs something fresh (e.g. update the eye candy in things like Media Center, IE, Media Player, or whatever and support new hardware).
The new management is serious about shipping on schedule and trimming features to fit that schedule. There've been lots of internal changes to make this happen. Don't be surprised if things start to get a lot more orderly in the Windows release cycle.
Also, it's not the service pack that fixes things, it's giving the ISVs and IHVs a year to get their shit together that fixes things.
Seven? More like a few million.
the problem is that the changes they're talking about making would turn IT staff OFF from buying the OS. IT staff don't want the OS because the new permission system breaks stuff that worked well in XP SP2 and Windows software vendors are VERY lazy about updates compared to Mac vendors. I have apps at work that were "Vista certified" in DECEMBER 07! My staff can't upgrade until our key software is supported and Microsoft has really dropped the ball on motivating ISVs to get a move on.
It'd be just like them to break DIFFERENT stuff... add new features... just to set back the ISVs that DID try to update.
Actually, you can remove iTunes and Quicktime from your Apple OS without impacting on the running state of the OS in any way... unless you wanted to use those programs, so it isn't like IE at all.
Jonathanjk.com
Actually, you can remove the Quicktime and iTunes applications but you can't remove the Quicktime framework because Aqua depends on the quicktime framework
Well, with the iTunes update, it updates the iPodDriver.kext kernel extension, QuickTime also gets updated and it requires a reboot because the whole graphical system is dependent on the QuickTime libraries. Now, the reboot after the iPod driver isn't strictly needed, but Apple takes a "play-it-safe" attitude with kernel extensions and requiring a reboot to get all caches and autoloading information updated. Sure, some of Apple's apps are a bit ingrained into the operating system, but they don't do it in any exceedingly strange ways, and there is rhyme and reason for their reboots.
My point is that IE is a part of windows in such that if you removed it, you lose elements of windows explorer, if you remove itunes and quicktime, the OS isn't affected, you don't lose functionality. It's nothing like IE, get a clue please.
It's exactly like IE. If you remove ALL of Quicktime from OSX, you *will* break things.
Removing all of Quicktime and removing Quicktime are two different things, please understand which one i'm talking about. If I drag the Quicktime Icon from OSX into the trash and with iTunes, nothing in the OS is affected, if I remove all elements of Quicktime from the system then it affects the OS. However, when you remove IE from the system (after figuring out the process because it isn't a program you can just uninstall) the OS won't work the same way afterwards.
Jonathanjk.com
You dense idiot. That's his point for goodness sake.
You can delete the IE icon on Windows which won't break anything, because the plumbing is all still there. Equivalently you can drag the Quicktime icon into the trash on OS X which won't break anything, because the plumbing is all still there.
On Windows you can massacre your system to remove all the IE plumbing and afterwards your system will most likely be hosed. On OS X you can massacre your system to remove all of the Quicktime plumbing and afterwards your system your system will most likely be hosed.
See the similarity? Good.
While you can draw a parallel in abstractions, it's really not the same thing at all.
IE is a program that relies upon a rendering engine Microsoft tightly integrated into the OS in order to make it difficult for competitors to offer a rival browser, and as a way to force development that required IE instead of any browser. In addition, Windows also has graphics capabilities that are tied to its proprietary DirectX software rather than using cross platform standards such as OpenGL.
Apple has a browser, Safari, and provides system wide rendering functions using the WebKit engine. While you can't really tear WebKit out of the OS, it doesn't matter because it poses no real threat to competitive browsers. Apple also has a graphics subsystem, initially QuickDraw and then Quartz, which both served as the models for Microsoft's GDI and its new compositing engine in Vista. Parts of Quartz support the functions of QuickTime, so while you can remove QuickTime on an application level, eviscerating all support for anything connected to QuickTime would also bork the system
However, it really makes no sense to associate QuickTime with IE, in large part because there is no anti-competitive basis for QT being integrated into the OS, and no real downside. If you don't use QT, you can stop updating it and there's no problem. If you don't use IE, you're still in danger of security problems Microsoft built into the design, and applications can invoke the IE plumbing to do things you are not aware of and don't want to happen. QT has none of those problems if you don't choose to use it.
Tom Krazit of CNET and Eric Savitz of Barrons Deny the Jesus Phone
Oh, FFS. I really wish people would stop claiming that the audio/video VS network performance issues was a DRM issue. It's just simply not true, no matter which way you try to spin it.
Can you confirm actual performance improvements?
Vista is dog-fucking-slow on my C2D Conroe 2.66GHz machine w/ 2GB of RAM, 7200RPM SATA HDD and a GF7950 compared to Ubuntu.
+++ATH0
I can pretty much guarantee you that no, the dozen or so gigabytes of Vista (x64 Ultimate, all options installed) install do not get loaded into RAM at runtime or loaded at every boot, just a subsection. Let's take a look in C:\Windows, shall we?
.NET stuff. I don't know what "SoftwareDistribution" does, but it does 75 MB worth of it. Speech engine is a couple hundred megabytes. There is 200 MB in SUA (subsystem for Unix based applications -- yes dear, you can compile some *nix stuff on here, so long as it doesn't rely on case sensitivity). 32-bit compatibility layer for 64 bit Windows takes about 1 Gigabyte. Wallpapers and Dreamscene from Ultimate extras are 200 MB. And finally, 6.6 GB of winsxs, which is the brutal hack meant to allay dll hell, where a bunch of cloned copies of dlls of various versions sit, again for compatibility.
A large part of it is actually backwards-compatibility dlls that will never get called if you use modern software, and are necessary to run certain older software while improving Vista overall (yes, there are some improvements in Vista) -- C:\Windows\assembly + C:\Windows\AppPatch + C:\Windows\inf + some other. Not everything in inf or assembly is necessarily compat, but it comes out to a couple gigs. System32 takes a bit under 3.5 gigabytes, and that's the meat of the OS. Media centre is another half gigabyte (150 MB in ehome, the rest scattered -- much of it is tutorial sample video). Couple hundred megs of log files, I don't know why. 330 MB on
Most of the rest is fairly insignificant, but adds up (stuff like 60 MB of prefetch data is about the upper limit of what I completely ignored, except of course I didn't ignore the prefetch one, did I?).
Notably, a very large proportion of this is backwards compatibility cruft. Do note that if you don't use old software, none of this will be loaded and really won't take up your RAM (if on the other hand you DO use old software, then it will use some tiny portion of this).
don't use vista yet, but am a PC gamer so sooner or later I might have to take the plunge, news on Vista therefor intrests me, if this SP1 is really good, it might hasten the move to Vista and make game companies more inclined to make directx10 only games. Or not, but I want to know when I should start to look into pirating Vista (Pay for MS software? What an odd concept.)
If you have the chance now to start playing with Vista, now would be the time to do so. Even without SP1, with the latest drivers from ATI and NVidia June/Sept07 & Newer, Vista is clocking framerates above XP on 99% of the systems out there.
The margin of FPS increase with Vista also grows if you LEAVE AERO/GLASS on and are running games inside a Window, or you run more than one game at a time (i.e. two MMO accounts/games).
Remember the brutal reviews of gaming on Vista was in the Jan07/Feb07 timeline when ATI and NVidia admits their drivers still sucked being complete rewrites, and even then on average Vista was only clocking 10-20% behind XP, which was like 5-10FPS in high FPS games. (The poor quality of Video drivers from ATI and NVidia also is the area that POed MS the most, as NVidia and ATI had plenty of time and access to MS resources to ensure the drivers would be top notch, and instead NVidia and ATI went alone in the final development.)
The video subsystem in Vista (despite all the DX10 info) has the potential to run circles around XP and other OSes, as it can not only meet XP draw to screen and render performance, it can suck RAM from the system and virtualize it for GPU operations, and Vista also does pre-emptive scheduling of the GPU, so when multiple games/applications are asking for use of the GPU, the OS manages this without application level yeilding/cooperation. So not only can you run Games in the Aero 3D view (dual 3D apps), but you can also run multiple 3D applications at the same time with minimal frame loss in each application as Vista is multi-tasking them to the GPU smoothly and keeping them from being VRAM starved. Even in a single 3D application/game, the Vista model of multi-scheduling the GPU can improve performance if the game isn't well optimized and shoves the GPU too hard to render crap and starves other parts of the game. Vista tries to step in to ensure that all calls are being processed more equally if it will improve game performance.
As for DirectX10, you will NOT see any great Frame Rates in DX10 games until a game is truly DX10 only. As the DX10 games now that are on the market are DX9 games with DX10 textures and some shadow and lighting added to them, and also try to push up the density of graphics, destroying the FPS gains of DX10.
A solid DX10 dedicated engine with NO DX9 underpinnings has a significant margin of performance gain as well as onscreen quality and consistency between GPU models/vendors. Look at XBox 360 dedicated games that are using the XNA and jumping off from a solid DX10 level engine, they blow cross platform games away in terms of FPS and quality.
The same is true of DX10 in Vista, and having a hybrind DX9/DX10 engine/game makes for a great DX9 game, and can give you some DX10 tastes and visuals, but is nothing like a sole DX10 game. DX10 unlike DX9 doesn't build off the previous versions of DirectX, so where you see 8.1/9.0 DX games that run well in both contexts, this is counterintuitive to building a real DX10 game. Sadly the game companies are looking at the market and the FUD about Vista, and are scared that games will be afraid of a DX10 only game project that requires Vista.
(PS And DX10 does truly require Vista, as the games expect the OS to manage VRAM virtualization, pre-empting the GPU - especially when using the GPU for both physics and visuals, and with the DX10 libraries on XP, these things don't exist, and the game will starve itself expecting the OS/Vista to handle these DX10 aspects. (There are many other aspects like this, but the VRAM virtualization and the pre-emptive GPU scheduler in Vista are the