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First Look At Windows 7 Beta 1
The other A. N. Other writes "It seems that Microsoft couldn't keep the lid on Windows 7 beta 1 until the new year. By now, several news outlets have their hands on the beta 1 code and have posted screenshots and information about this build. ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 column says: 'This beta is of excellent quality. This is the kind of code that you could roll out and live with. Even the pre-betas were solid, but finally this beta feels like it's "done." This beta exceeds the quality of any other Microsoft OS beta that I've handled.' ITWire points out that this copy has landed on various torrent sites, and while it appears to be genuine, there are no guarantees. Neowin has a post confirming that it's the real thing, and saying Microsoft will be announcing the build's official availability at CES in January."
In 1984 mainstream users were choosing VMS over UNIX. Ten years later they are choosing Windows over UNIX. What part of that message aren't you getting?
Your computer isn't going to be more responsive by adding extra load on the GPU, only (possibly) prettier.
You are telling me that there is no performance improvement in having a *graphics card* handle *graphics* instead of a CPU? You are telling me that rather then having to load a window from system RAM to the video card RAM every time you maximize or minimize a window is faster then storing both on the video card ram and then sending a quick set of commands to the GPU?
You do realize that in most cases, when you minimize a window in Vista, the GPU still keeps a fully rendered version of the "normal" size window in its memory? You do realize that that trick lets you hover over the taskbar and see "tail -f /var/log/messages" in PuTTY console while the thing is minimized, right? Can your CPU and the system memory do that? Turn Aero off and you loose all that, and eat more system memory.
We have powerful video cards these days and only a fool wouldn't exploit them to speed up the windowing system. Me thinks some are too blinded by hate and narrow imagination to appreciate cool things.
One thing is that with Vista, most people who "hate" it never tried it, or was cursed with a poor OEM install. Nothing's wrong with the actual OS. So once you have Windows 7, which -is- much better than Vista, on top of the fact that Vista is just great, but people don't realize it... When you give Windows 7 to a supposed "Vista hater", you end up with "2" levels of improvement, making them think its just "one". So of course the reaction is quite positive.
Besides the fact the Vista looking menu bar gave me the shudders, I had a sudden image of my computer being this dumb screen with a goldfish on it, nothing else, everything else being a click away on the Internet, paid for by the minute.
Thank God there are alternatives, even if I don't particularly like them.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
They pretty much managed to make dialogs and all the other shit look like it's rendered through a browser engine.
Is that the "future" of "visual candy"?
All of the marketing 'buzz' around this - oops, I mean journalistic excitement - certainly has a manufactured feel, which is right in line with every MS product for the past 8 years at least.
I approached Vista similarly to how I approached Windows 98 - having not used MS's products for several years, I thought I'd give it a chance and give them the benefit of a doubt for having worked out past deficiencies. I bought a laptop and didn't go out of my way to avoid Vista.
Vista has performed about as well as Windows 98. Explorer (the task bar portion) crashes 2-3 times a week. The system has been been 'losing' my audio driver lately, and gives conflicted information about this. The configuration options are still a strange mix of sophisticated and primitive, and very vague and indefinite compared to Linux. I would be a fool to think that Windows 7 is going to be any different. I'm quite confident that this will be, like Vista, a window washing on an old OS, and that I'll be sticking with Linux, which keeps getting better and better.
Juln
Like the MSI Wind that came without Linux drivers for the Wifi or webcam? Returns for the Linux version were four times higher than the Windows version (with working Wifi and wireless). Shock!
Put identity in the browser.