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Hands-On With Windows 7's New Features
Barence writes "Microsoft has released the first pre-beta code of Windows 7, and PC Pro has a series of in-depth, hands-on examinations of all the new features. The revamped user interface has clearly gleaned more than a little inspiration from the Mac OS X Dock, but it goes further than the Apple concept with 'jumplists,' new gadgets and an updated system tray. The much-vaunted multi-touch controls were there to play with, and it seemed to work well. Networking has been given the full treatment, with new features HomeGroup and Libraries. Windows 7 debuts a new feature called Device Stage that has the potential to be unbelievably handy ... or a complete disaster. Finally, several new features could make PCs easier to manage and secure for IT departments, such as BitLocker To Go and Branch Cache." All in all, these features together lead some people to the conclusion that Windows 7 will "suck less than Vista" — that last link from reader ThinSkin, who also points to a related sampling of screenshots from the current iteration of Windows 7.
wait, you mean _THIS_ is Windows Vista? Not again...I fell for this same trick in the last "experiment"
Does it out perform XP?
I didn't put Vista on my machine because every benchmark said it was slower than XP. Can I assume that 7 is going to be even slower?
If I read TFA correctly, what Microsoft does with this "Device Stage" thingie is not much at issue. What the hardware manufacturers do is critical.
I'm betting the latter. Do I have any takers?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I took a look at some of the screen shots, and quite honestly I get the feeling unpaid open source developers could have done a better job. It doesn't feel like a qualified UI expert sat down to really improve thing. If they don't put a proper effort into the UI design, then Ubuntu is going to be the better OS.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
And lets pretend that one can steal ideas just to score a slashpoint.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
If they didn't take a step back and seriously consider what should be part of the operating system and what should be a free standing application - i.e. the bloat, then Windows 7 will suffer the same reception as Vista in my opinion. Microsoft has many different initiatives in many different areas, but still seems unable to resist using their operating system as the launching platform for those unrelated initiatives. At the end of the day, people want an operating system that works and works with them and for a reasonable price. Their idea for many different "tiers" to their operating system should have been the first clue to their management team that it is time to reign things in and refocus efforts.
Do they have virtual desktops that actually work yet?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
From TFA:
A printer manufacturer, for example, might include a direct link to buy new ink cartridges for that specific printer from their website
The purpose of an OS is to provide a stable, secure framework for which to run applications.
The purpose of a device driver is to provide stable, and secure interface between hardware and the OS.
Marketing fluff does not belong in an OS, or a device driver. I surely hope there is an opt-out for this tripe.
I use Vista on my main machine(s). Updates don't take longer than XP, IE never locked up on me, and my programs are just as reliable as they were when I was using XP.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
FYI the XP licence for 2 CPU is 2 physical sockets (that's how MS defines it for XP) if you where to install it on a dual quad core box it would see all 8 usable cores and would run them perfectly fine
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
You joke, but what good is the desktop environment to me when I'm playing a game? I liked the days of DOS games much better.
How fast they forget...
Remember the joys of setting up your hardware in every single game? Running GAMECONFIG.EXE to say yes, my SoundBlaster is on IRQ 7, my display can handle 1024x769 in 256 colours, and no, I don't have an AdLib card.
Having a real OS might shave off a few fps, but it allows you to set up your hardware just the once, and have it work in all of your software.
Yeah, that big "K" in the bottom left hand corner of KDE doesn't remind me at all of a Windows logo with "Start" next to it. Oh and Time Machine doesn't resemble, in every single way besides interface, Volume Shadow Services.
Get the fuck over it, they all draw influence and ideas from each other, in all directions. If Jazz wasn't founded on "stealing," as you put it, then it wouldn't be the foundation of modern music, and in the same way it's a good thing for good ideas to be implemented across multiple platforms.
Wow, moderation abuse for the win. It's obviously trolling to state my own personal experience, am I right?
I know the moderation system gets abused all the time, and I shouldn't be surprised any more, but it really bugs me sometimes that people don't have the integrity to not abuse even this small amount of power.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Remember the joys of setting up your hardware in every single game? Running GAMECONFIG.EXE to say yes, my SoundBlaster is on IRQ 7, my display can handle 1024x769 in 256 colours, and no, I don't have an AdLib card.
Youngster. I wish we had GAMECONFIG.EXE. In my day we had boot into DOS because WinDOS wasn't good enough. Then we had to edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys and enable HIMEM for our games to run. Those were the days...
Seriously, the only people claiming vista is fine with no performance problems are the people who don't use vista as their main machine. Try spending a day at work on a Vista machine. You'll see what we're talking about.
Wrong.
I use Vista as my main machine. All the time. I develop on it, game on it, whatever. It works fine (I'd venture "great" but I don't want the wrath of /.ers).
1. Internet Explorer != Vista. IE sucks. Get Firefox. You'll be happier.
2. Latest Updates install quick. Plus, if you're spending a "day at work" then someone is pushing those updates at night for you. You don't see it.
3. Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V is fine for me. Maybe not for you, but you haven't given system specs or anything.
then you could always excercise your right as a consumer to not upgrade and keep what you have.
same as if you wanted to keep driving your old 1998 Olds cutless.
no one is making you move.
Oh, they're making me move all right.
To Linux or OSX.
I'll say this much, it says a lot about Microsoft as a company that they can't, or refuse to, put out an operating system that fills the needs of so many of us. Except for their singular monopolistic status, and their new success with a gaming console, they would have gone the way of Amiga or OS/2 "Warp", without having put out a decent operating system, like those Commodore or IBM did.
I have a huge investment in the Windows platform because of the work I do (audio and video production). With the economic downturn, I'm not interested in the >$12,000 investment it would take for me to move to Mac software (and in several cases, there is no Mac equivalent at all).
I've been very happy with the XP platform, but it's closer to the end of its lifespan than the beginning (although moving to the 64-bit version has helped). If I sound bitter about Microsoft, it's because so far this century they have let me down. And I doubt very much I am extraordinary in this regard. I'm betting that there are lots of professionals who use Windows to make a living, and people who support computers for a living, and people who sell computers for a living, that feel similarly disappointed in Microsoft's inability to fill what is clearly a large market demand. If Microsoft put out an efficient, powerful, well-designed operating system that didn't have DRM and ran well on the average platform, I would run out and buy it today, and I bet a lot of other consumers would, too.
Maybe if Microsoft had been broken up years ago, and there was now a "Baby Microsoft" whose business it was to make a really good operating system that people wanted, things would be different. But as long as they can squeeze institutional customers for license money, and generate some profits from the Xbox and Zune, they don't really seem motivated to do so. And as long as they put the demands of their "strategic partners" who insist on DRM ahead of their customers, who demand no DRM, there's going to be a lot of disappointed Windows users who don't really have a viable option.
I'm sorry that you think there is something wrong with consumers expecting quality from the companies that they buy from. I don't know how (or if) you make a living, but most of us seem to understand that it's appropriate for the people who give us money to expect value in exchange.
You are welcome on my lawn.
the convoluted menu system
How exactly is the menu-system "convoluted"? Well, Microsoft added a bunch of complications to THEIR menus over the years, but that's not an inherent part of the menu interface. Comparing Microsoft's menus against the ribbon is like comparing a sick racehorse against a sloth. The sloth may win the race, but that doesn't mean you should go out and harness one up to your buggy.
So...what's wrong with the ribbon?
It's an awkward compromise between Xerox' context-sensitive menus and Apple's menu bar.
It abandons the tight state-sensitive behavior of contextual menus because it's continually displayed and so can't restrict itself to only providing options for specific objects, but retains much of the clutter of menus because it has to display actions associated with multiple objects.
It abandons the scannability and location-sensitive behavior of menus because you only see actions related to the high-level of the window. You can't scan it to learn the range of actions available from the program.
If a "crappy vendor driver" is able to bring the whole machine down, it is very much an OS issue.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
"I'm sorry, but I've never, ever met a professional audio or video producer who used anything but the Mac. And, being an artsy fartsy type, I've met a lot. "
!?
Avid once announced that they were effectively going to discontinue their Mac support. They never followed through but most Avid DS and Media Composer systems run on Windows.
Mac support for Maya is still a little bit dodgy. It's largely Linux or Windows.
Shake used to run dramatically better on Intel/Windows but then Apple killed the Windows version. The Intel/Linux version was still astronomically faster than the G4 OSX version. Until Apple released Intel hardware the OSX version of Shake was noticeably slower than any other build of Shake.
3DsMAX only runs on Windows. If you took Maya, XSI and Houdini and combined all of their sales they still wouldn't even sell as many copies as 3DsMax.
Lustre is Windows XP only.
Assimilate Scratch is Windows only.
Flame, Flint and Inferno until very recently were Solaris only. Now linux.
ZBrush only this month got an OSX build.
TV stations run almost exclusively on windows based Avid solutions.
If by 'professional video producer' you mean those guys with DVXs and iphones shooting indie films. Then I'll agree with you. But people who actually work in high-end professional film and video post production mostly use Linux or Windows.
OSX does not support 64 bit applications yet. Our last project required 64 bit rendering. We literally could not have completed it on schedule with OSX.
That's something I don't understand. Why is it necessary to have all these memory-hogging "pretty" windows. I prefer to go with a clean interface. As one girl said after looking at my laptop "That looks boring". Yes true, but it runs like a speed demon and only uses 1/4 gig of RAM.
>>>user interface has clearly gleaned more than a little inspiration from the Mac OS X Dock
No surprise. Microsoft doesn't innovate; they let OTHER companies innovate and then copy the ideas. MS copied preemptive multitasking from the 1985 Commodore Amiga. They tried to do cooperative tasking but quickly realized that wouldn't work, so they switched to the preemptive model that Amiga used so expertly (and with only 256k of RAM).
Then they copied Windows 95 from the Classic Macintosh interface, including the dropdown Finder menu (relabeled Start) and the Trashbin (relabeled Recycle Bin).
They cloned the Netscape Browser, and stole market share by giving it away for free until Netscape was driven into near-bankruptcy.
And now, faced with diminishing interest in Vista, MS is once again pulling their bacon out of the frying pan by using that favorite schoolboy strategy - copy your neighbor. This time its Mac OS X.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
But the GUI came from Xerox. And by Windows 95, the elements in the GUI had been developed by many other platforms too (I'd say the OS had more elements borrowed from AmigaOS if anything - e.g., a combined GUI and command line, pre-emptive multitasking).
I don't see a huge problem here. Apple didn't invent the Dock; lots of platforms had one before OS X came along. Apple may have added some new things to the idea - just as Microsoft are now doing themselves.
When Apple copies an idea and adds something, it's "innovation" or "doing something that no one did before", or even "Apple invented it".
When Microsoft copies and idea and adds something, it's "stealing Apple's ideas".