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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."
I don't see why this is surprising. This is just Windows Vista service pack 3 after all. Naturally the beta is going to be more stable than the initial Vista beta.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Are Magazines/Tech review sites/Editorials real anymore or are they just industry backed reviews (aka advertisements)? Is advertisement driven content real journalism?
I remember almost every tech journal I picked up a couple years ago reviewed Vista as the "New Coming". Yet, a year later these journals are bemoaning how Vista "sucks" (which it does btw).
Excuse me for being cynical but I will take this review with a pinch of salt as other reports show that, at least benchmark wise, there is absolutely no difference between Vista and Windows 7.
As for Windows 7 feeling "so much more responsive".. well, depends who is paying you to write that review innit?
"This beta exceeds the quality of any other Microsoft OS beta that I've handled."
Is this person a politician because that is saying nothing.
Too bad 2009 is going to be another year of hearing Microsoft lies and exaggerations regarding yet another Microsoft OS release. BFD, is what I say after 20 something years of the same junk year after year after year. I gave up when Windows 2000 came out and they started shoveling more user level stuff into the kernel and they never fixed the security system. That was in 1999, over 8 years ago and they still are trying to build an operating system worth a hill of beans. Well, it's all about marketing at MS so what you see in print is not what you get and never has.
in 2009, I'll be wading through the MS marketing drivel for what's going on in the embedded, netbook, and MID areas with regards to the ARM Cortex chips and especially the A9 dual core versions. A8 is amazing on the performance front and power front. This should prove very interesting along with what Android, Ubuntu, and others do on these platforms.
So long MSFT, 2009 is probably going to be another tough year of marketing against real solutions. And though you may have smashed the OLPC and dashed their plans of helping millions of children, they kicked off a resurrection of the light weight small form-factor device you just can't compete on. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The task bar needs quite a bit of work. I bet that is one part of the OS that will change quite a bit from Vista. Looks like it is still a work in progress because right now it looks boxy and ugly.
It also looks like Aero wasn't turned on for these screen shots. Probably a driver thing. Vista without the glass doesn't look nearly as good.
I think like Vista, this version will be a lot of little things that improve the OS not huge ones. Then you'll go back from Windows 7 to Vista and go "jeez... how did I live without this Windows 7 feature" just like when you go back to XP and get pissed how crappy the taskbar is, how "in your face" the windows were, how crappy the file dialogs were, how crappy taskman.exe was, or how generally insecure the default setup was. Vista is a huge improvement over XP but it is hard to describe what improved. Just a lot of little annoyances are gone or smoothed out. Windows 7 will probably be the same.
And can I rant for a second? Look, I know why the ZDnet guys are doing this, but we live in Web version 2.0 these days and they could easily have made it so their gallery didn't require a complete page-load between images. But like I said, I know why they do require a page-load.
Comparing Windows 7 to Vista is useless, at least to someone like me. I love XP, having never had any serious problems with it whatsoever. It's by far the most stable OS I have ever used. Tell (and prove to) me that Windows 7 is better than XP, and I will show great interest in switching. Tell me 7 is better than Vista, and you don't have a chance.
All that being the case, why on earth do we care about Windows 7? If Microsoft couldn't get people to migrate off XP with benign economic circumstance and ready availability of credit, why do we think it's going to happen this time?
ian
I'd guess that 'black hats' are glowing because this gives them a good jump on:
1) finding out which security holes still exist from prior MS work, and
2) a good look at the "new" OS structure to find out what other holes might be there, well before final release...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
There is simply no way for them to do that without alienating TONS of business customers.
Look at it this way, I work at a college, we have thousands of computers. Only maybe 100 of which replaced in the last year are able to support 64bit operating systems and those still only have 1 -2 gigs of ram. If they released 64bit only the chance that we would switch anytime in the next 7 years (which would be how long it is going to take on our 5 year amortization cycle) is zero. We would be forced to continue to use XP, or migrate to linux.
I suppose vista could be an option in that case. However, our plan was to skip vista in the hopes that by the time Win7 was released many of our software vendors would have upgraded their applications to run properly on vista and windows 7. If microsoft released a 64bit only win7 then many of those vendors would probably skip fixing their 32bit apps to run on vista and thus require us to move to 64bit windows 7. Faced with such a huge cost in hardware to do that, I'm not sure what we would do.
Maybe you should consider a Macintosh. It's not for everyone, but a full Unix environment just a terminal away. If you like to program, the APIs (Cocoa, CoreAnimation, CoreGraphics, Display PDF, etc) are much cleaner and better designed than Windows or GTK (I haven't looked at Qt since the 90s so I won't comment on that). That's why I upgraded from Windows XP to OS X. (I still need to run a couple work-related programs under VirtualBox/Windows XP)
Now, if they're only released a 64 bit for OEM (forcing new computers to have support), that could help the switch.
Then we would have a headline on Slashdot shouting "MS forces 64bit down the throats of people" and stories about how poor grandmas are unable to run their 32bit drivers for knitting.
This space for rent.
I'm no fan of MS, but what exactly do you propose they do? They offer 64-bit variants that can run 64-bit applications of their supported platforms. They provide the platform to allow this specific thing. They provide the tools to develop for this.
What you have is commercial application providers flat-out ignoring 64-bit capability, as it is easier to target the 32-bit subset that works both on Pentium 4 and such and new. You have to make the vendors release 64-bit enabled builds. Linux suffers from this as well, to a lesser extent. In the OSS world, they rebuilt 64-bit readily. However, Acrobat, Flash, Sun JRE all took a long time or are still taking time to completely support 64-bit. The commercial world just has a hard time justifying bothering where there is backwards compatibility and 99.9% of their usage won't exceed the limit per process restrictions.
MS could have not published any 32-bit platform to accelerate ubiquity. Imagine the backlash at not supporting Core and Pentium 4, requiring those users to go to Core2 or Athlon64. Even then, it wouldn't have alleviated the issue as these vendors would still want to sell to XP users. MS could have omitted 32-bit compatibility, completely shooting backwards compatibility in the foot.
So while I'm not crazy about Windows, their x86_64 bit strategy is not any worse than other platforms, it's the commercial third-parties that cause your grief.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Well done.
But - You could see Vista as MS finally paying the piper for the insecurity that was MS-DOS, Windows 3, 95, 98, ME... And then still not enforcing any sort of security in 2000 and XP.
It all depends on what your angle is I guess. Vista finally made people annoyed enough that software writers had to actually think about running software in a moderately secure context... In that regard, it was a good thing. I might not particularly love the way MS handled it (say, compared to Mac OS), but it was still a step in the right direction.
If the Windows user base can finally be trained to run in a standard user mode, with proper mechanisms to perform administrative tasks, we'll all be better for it... and I'll give a lot of credit to the *nix communities for really pushing this need for all those years. A lot of us might hate MS for various reasons, but if they really can put out a better product, good for them.
It's slow as hell. as one of those that have ran it, I'll tell you right now. the speedy feel of the XP days will never EVER come back, until your computer has way more processing speed and data channel speeds that exceed what the newer Microsoft OS's will use.
Not true... It just won't come from Microsoft. Linux, Solaris, *BSD, and Apple all have that snappy feel. Maybe Microsoft should look at the code in Linux. It is open... ;)
Sure, MS may be right about driver and application incompatibilities. But, when I bought a brand new laptop, pre-loaded with Vista, that has the Vista logo on the box, I don't want to hear that it's the fault of the network chipset provider that the wireless network works marginally at best. MS and the hardware vendors need to get their shit together, so that they don't tell me that a computer is "Win 7 Compatible" or comes pre-loaded with Win 7 when it really isn't.
If you're trying to install a new OS on an old machine, that's one thing. You definitely need to do your homework to make sure that the off-brand network card you bought will work with the new OS. However, a new machine pre-loaded with the OS should run. If MS can't make sure that the OEMs have working machines before they slap a "Vista" or "Win 7" sticker on the damn thing, they should stop making software, period.
2. In a story about Macs, mentioning that you use any form of Windows will take you to karma hell, praising OS X will get you modded up, mentioning Linux will affect your karma based on your luck of draw moderators depending on which kind of fanboy they are. In any case, you will get a ton of long highly modded up replies about how OS X is better
3. In a story about Linux, mentioning that you use any form of Windows will take you to karma hell, praising Linux will get you modded up, mentioning OS X will affect your karma based on your luck of draw moderators depending on which kind of fanboy they are. In any case, you will get a ton of long highly modded up replies about how Linux is better.
4. In any other story, mentioning that you use any form of Windows will take you to karma hell, and praising Linux, OS X, BSD, Plan 9, OS/2, BeOS etc. will take you to karma heaven.
Anyone wanna make a graphical represenation of the above to make it easier to understanding on a glance? So, Vista/Windows 7 stories are the only opportunity for Windows users to come out of the woodwork and not pretend they like other OSes. It's amazing how many of them there are actually are around these parts.
This space for rent.
There is no such thing as Windows 7. This is not a new code base, it is not an overhaul of Windows framework. Windows 7 is Vista Service Pack 2. The Windows 7 bullshit coming out of Microsoft's propaganda machine is a concerted and direct effort to bury the name Vista and all the bad press associated with it. That anyone has bought into this crap is astounding. Vista was several years delayed. Now we have hordes of people believing that MS got a new OS out the door in 18 months? Wake up already.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
Why are we so concerned about eye-candy? How about the actual system underneath?
Is it stable, scalable, administrable? What sort of resources does it need? Ram? CPU?
Sure, 'pretties' are nice ( especially for the end user ), but its a lot like a cake: If the cake is full of holes, lopsided or not fully cooked, does it really matter what flavor the icing is?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So in this case the weakest link was not Vista.
A bigger problem was Kaspersky AV not recognizing the trojans.
The biggest problem was a teenage girl who didn't think it mattered if she downloaded britney.mp3 or britney.exe
Kind of like how AMD came out with the Athlon XP line around the time that Windows XP shipped?
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
You can write javascript that enhances a page. One can quickly write an implementation that keeps each image a standard page (good for SEO, good for multi-tab) but can also swap the image and not reload the page. Then you can right-click "Open new tab" or just click on it and not refresh the entire page.
Javascript = good.
Shitty Javascript = bad.
The "Mojave is really Vista" campaign was one of the most embarassing marketing campaigns I've ever seen. Here is a company that willingly admits that the reputation of their OS is so terrible, they have to dupe people into trying it by renaming it something else. And now the same "I'm so embarrassed by my product I won't even mention its name" continues.
What happened to Microsoft's cojones? They should stand up and fight for Vista until its reputation is at least partly restored. Then they could introduce products under new names, without the overhanging cloud of shame.
As for the "review", this part is enough to make me laugh uncontrollably: "Here are some screenshots to whet your appetite:". What is this, a review of a new cellphone skin for teenagers hanging out at a mall? What is happening to ZDNet? Not that it ever was a source of great knowledge, but this?
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Over 100 comments and we still don't have a concise list of substantial features Windows 7 offers over Vista? As someone else pointed out, a name and theme change does not really qualify as substantial change. Ok, so WinFS was never promised for this version. What exactly are they offering this time besides a fix to the taskbar? I have yet to see an article that outlines changes outside the UI. Is this an elaborate prank?
[alk]
Microsoft changed the interface of Office 2007 to make it much better all around(atleast for casual and new users). Look at the bad rap that it gave them on here and elsewhere for being unfamiliar to power users and people who are used to toolbars and 'File,Edit,View' menus. Look at what happened to KDE 4.0 And you want MS to radically alter the UI of a OS with 90% market share? Can you imagine the comments here starting with 'My grandma who used Windows since 95 got Windows 7 and.....' ? I bet the ribbonish interface itself in Windows 7 will not be well received by some people.
This space for rent.
I can't help but shake the same feeling that I had when the Wall Street was being pushed through Congress... the first time around, EVERYONE hated it (except some of the Dems) but the second time around they "marketed" it better, the media said "oh it's SOOOOO different this time, you'll LOVE it" and then people said "well, I guess it's ok. let's try it" Isn't that basically the same thing that's going on here? MS says "Oh, pox on Vista, you want Windows 7, that's where it's at!" Whoever it was that earlier said they turn off all the UI snazziness on XP -- I totally echo that sentiment -- I use "classic view" and pretty much the only reason I switched to XP was for some of the performance and native-driver issues (and for software compatibility). Having a flashy OS doesn't make me want to buy it, because if it did, I would buy Mac. (Or install Ubuntu again)
XP was the same. I tried it once when it came out, and it took like 10 minutes to completely boot on my 300 MHz processor (which I believe was pretty standard back then). My thoughts were exactly the same as the stuff everyone is saying about Vista now. I wonder if in 5 years everyone will be saying how Vista is speedy and some new Windows version needs unreasonable hardware...
I stuck with Windows 2000 at the time and migrated to Linux later, but whenever I needed to set up a Windows computer for someone, I used 2000, because I never could shake the feeling that XP is bloated, just like everyone feels about Vista.
So what exactly is it that makes XP OK (in comparison with previous versions, like 2000) and Vista too bloated (in comparison with previous versions, like XP)?
Vista is hated. Weather it is a technical failure or a PR failure is moot. No one wants it. And XP64 is not really functional at all. And God help you if you run a lot of general use software on either. The point is that the cliff is looming, and there is still not a clear winner. It could be that the economy is doing what no one else could; Slowing down the consumer.
No I'm telling you video cards from 10 years back already provide hardware accelerated blitting (even translucent), filling, rectangle drawing, etc. So your desktop _is_ hardware accelarated by the video card without anything Aero, and it has been like this for years.
Of course you don't get all the fancy shader tricks but like I said, not everyone actually appreciates those.
Vista is a lot like ME - a transitional stage where you have both the old and new stuff side by side, with just enough of each to make it crap.
Take how they changed the filesystem layout and had shortcuts for all the old XP directories, or introduced annoying UAC messages when programs tried to do nasty things like adding start-up items that was common in XP, for example.
Hopefully there will be none of this in Windows 7. Anything that hasn't learnt to do things the right way in Vista by now will just stop working, like a lot of stuff did going from 98/ME to XP. That's a good thing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It is called "sudo" and if your theoretical linux games would need root access to install mods as well. Or do you run your linux box as root all the time?
Heya, Obvious Troll! How's the obvious work these days? Economy treating you well?
Your first spraying of words-before-a-period, while it contains quantity, amazingly lacks what would be needed to form an actual coherent sentence. But from what I can salvage from it, I'll answer that almost all Linux games I've seen have two sets of data, one stored in the global settings (where you need root to do stuff) that applies to everyone and one in your home directory (where you DON'T need root to do stuff) that just applies to you as a user. Stepmania can read songs, characters, movies, and all other mods from ~/.stepmania. Any Q3A-engine game (Q3A itself, OpenArena, World of Padman, etc) can read its mods from its respective home directory entry without being root. Any Unreal-engine game can read its mods from its respective home directory entry without being root. Freeciv, BZFlag, Frozen Bubble, Puzzle Pirates, anything. Any decently-written Linux game (so, not cheap ports of crappy Windows games) will understand this and won't write to the root-owned stuff unless you very specifically tell it to. Why on earth Windows has to do this is beyond me.
I'll admit, I run as root most of the time in Linux too, at least when I'm in a GUI. Know why? For most of Linux's history, it was a pain in the ass to not run as root. Only until recently have they had a good way to elevate privileges in the GUI.
Linux: Ur doin it wrong. Exactly what is it you needed to do that required non-stop elevated privs in a GUI environment? No, "constantly reconfigure my hardware" doesn't count.
Let's just stop here because you obviously don't know much about how video cards work. You can 'cache' anything you like in video RAM without using the 3D capabilities at all, just like you can DMA stuff around without taxing the CPU, and draw stuff to the screen with just a few FIFO commands, it is not, (I repeat: it is NOT) what makes your system 'slow' unless you want to blur title bars, wiggle windows when you move them or add all kinds of other visual effects just because you can.
The only valid point you make is that with a full-blown GPU-accelerated desktop you can throw in much more eye candy without slowing down the system. My point is, that if you don't need/want/care about this eye-candy, about everything essentially already _is_ GPU-accelerated, even without Aero. Windows Vista doesn't NEED anything besides age-old window drawing, it just offers you the option to throw (in my opinion) useless eye at you that only distracts from the actual GUI.
Also I doubt your claim that Aero actually does TTF rendering on the GPU, do you have any references to back that up?
Why the heck can't they build a 32-bit subsystem on top of the 64-bit windows? I'll ignore the fact that Linux does this fairly seamlessly, and instead focus on the fact that this is exactly how MS made the jump from 16-bit to 32-bit. The fact that they did not do this with Vista is shocking. How on earth did they craft an operating system that uses 10x the resources of its predecessor, but appears to offer nothing in the way of new features, save for a security setup and UI that was state-of-the-art in the late 90s.
How the hell did you get a +3 Insightful after spewing such nonsense?
Run as root most of the time? On most Linux distros you have to ignore warnings, some repeated multiple times, about using the root account. Sudo is installed by default for a reason...because running as root on a desktop is just plain absurd. Making excuses to cover your own incompetence at sudo only highlights your utter lack of security focus. How hard is it to open a terminal window (or use a Gnome applet which puts a terminal line on your taskbar) and type "sudo system-config-display" or whatever you need to run as root?
Sudo cannot be like UAC since sudo came first.
Sudo also offers about a bunch of additional features and controls that UAC can't even comprehend. Restricting commands that users can run as root? Check. Grouping commands? Check. Enforcing environment restrictions like requiring a valid tty and dropping non-standard environment variables? Check? Granting commands to groups of users with a single line? Check. Allowing users to edit specific files with sudoedit? Check.
Have you even used sudo?
You are telling me that I should WANT an OS that requires the freaking GPU just to draw the desktop without running like a slug? Really? Let us not forget people: We are talking about an OPERATING SYSTEM here, not the latest bloateware 3D game. I just want the OS to freaking boot and then get the hell out of my way so I can run MY programs. I don't need nor want your "flippin 3D super desktop search live enabled web 3.0" crap in my OS! Just freaking start and move! Is that really so freaking hard?
I ran just about every kind of Vista out there, from beta 1 through SP1. And do you know which one WASN'T a giant resource hogging web 3.0 bloated piggy? A freaking pirated version where they had stripped the living hell out of it so much the entire OS fit onto a CD. I might have stayed with it if the driver support for my hardware didn't suck. Instead I'm using good old ever reliable WinXP Pro. But if Win7 is more of the Vista "We want to be Apple so damned much it hurts!" crap I have a feeling I am going to be running XP for a LONG time. I am just glad I build my own desktops and getting motherboards with 2K/XP drivers is pretty much standard issue.
And if any of the guys from MSFT are reading this: STOP trying to be Apple! If I would have wanted a freaking Apple I would have bought one,okay? You are a business company, NOT a home entertainment company. Make a decent low resource using business OS and stop trying to be "Steve Jobs Jr" because frankly it is embarrassing. Allow me to make a prediction: If you force everyone to get rid of their quicklaunch and taskbar and replace it with a freaking dock(gee, I wonder where you got THAT idea from?) then all you are going to do is severely piss off your customers who will either: Stay with XP,move to a Mac,or go to Linux. And I apologize if this came off a little ranty, but ever since that monkey Ballmer took over it seems like they are going out of their way to destroy themselves trying to be Apple. Vista, Zune,I'm sure others can point out even more Apple envy. They are really turning what was once a solid business OS into a giant media oriented mess. And give up the crazy MPAA DRM already! They are NEVER going to pick you over Apple because EVERYBODY has a freaking iPod!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
How hard is it to open a terminal window (or use a Gnome applet which puts a terminal line on your taskbar) and type "sudo system-config-display" or whatever you need to run as root?
How hard is it to click a button when the UAC UI pops up? Still we have a lot of bitching about it going on. Users, especially non-power users, don't like anything that gets in their way of installing smileys.exe
This space for rent.
Not really, although I'm betting that's your whole point.
IMHO MS just "doesn't get it" and is doing stupid things by design, maybe the problem is too much "design by committee" or something.
The problem with Vista / Win7 / etc. wasn't that they tried to do TOO MUCH, it's that they tried to to TOO LITTLE. They're about 10 years BEHIND the current hardware (the mainstream CPU has been '64 bit' for YEARS even on low end parts). Given Moore's law it'll be even more pathetically inadequate in 2009/2010 when we're supposedly to be using Win7. By then we'll have at least cheap 16GB RAM, 64GB SSDs, 2TB HDDs for a song, 8 core 64 GFLOP CPUs, 2 TFLOP GPUs, better HD screens, 4Mbit/s+ broadband into more and more houses, and still we'll be stuck with .... notepad .... and corrupted registries and driver cleaner / crap cleaner / applications that won't install / uninstall / backup / transfer properly most of which being 32 bit.
Now for netbooks / mobile internet devices, OK, yes, for those, design a lean efficient low bloat OS. That is not the same product as your desktop / laptop offering.
I have relatively little problem with 'bloat' if it gets me major new generations of CAPABILITIES. Wake up, the HARDWARE we use today is LIGHT YEARS ahead of the SOFTWARE's capabilities to even USE it in 99% of the cases. Lack of 64 bit applications and applications that intelligently use RAM is one example -- 8GB of RAM costs as little as $40 today. Every one of my family's desktops has 8GB installed now, and if it wasn't for the stupid limitations of the motherboard / chipset, I'd have put 16GB or 32GB into the heavily used machines for these kinds of (commodity) RAM prices.
My quad core CPU is still something like 90% idle doing most OS / web / desktop stuff even under Vista with all the eye candy on. If I complain about it being *slow* it is probably because it is ALGORITHMICALLY broken in some buggy brain damaged way (like the horrible network throughput when you're playing audio or something) not because it is inherently trying to do something that exceeds the capabilities of my actual hardware given well designed software.
The main problem is that we can't even take good advantage of the multi-gigabytes of RAM, multi-terabytes of disc, multi-cores of CPUs, multi-teraflops of GPUs we have. A typical 'power user' desktop today exceeds the compute / RAM / storage capabilities of a 'supercomputer' in the 1990s, yet we're using a OS design / implementation that is BARELY any better than what we had then -- e.g. NTFS, FAT32, 32 bit OS being the most common, et. al.
I wouldn't care too much if they wrote vast portions of the whole OS in something uber bloated / slow like VB or JAVA as long as the performance critical bits were fast and the overall thing was well designed for reliability, stability, and easy extensibility to take full advantage of the system.
There needs to be a REVOLUTIONARY improvement in things like filesystems (say start with ZFS then migrate MOST EVERYTHING to use a full featured relational database model on top of that with MAJOR emphasis on metadata, schema use, RDF, et. al.). There needs to be a REVOLUTIONARY improvement in things like BACKUP. Ever had a 1.44 MB floppy or CD go bad on you and lose valuable data? Didn't that suck? The average joe in 2009 will be having 1TB drives! Can you imagine losing a LIFETIME of data in one catastrophic event -- ALL your family pictures / movies from maybe 3 generations of family, ALL your documents, ALL your personal files, et. al.? That's going to be a common occurrence due to viruses, hardware failure, or whatever, and the OSs like VISTA are just PATHETICALLY mis-designed to help people manage their storage / data / metadata, do backups, do searches, synchronize, transfer, etc. -- basically they're beyond uselessly bad at giving storage management resources. Heck not a day goes by that I am not even limited by the silly 128 character 'path length' 'limits' even in the latest VISTA 64.
No, Windows Home Server is not a solution. Forget backwa
--Instead I'm using good old ever reliable WinXP Pro--
I can't believe I'm reading that. I was in the tech support industry when XP came out. It was a *NIGHTMARE*. It seems that MSFT's way of business is to have a product in beta for 3/4 of it's "service life" then when they FINALLY work out all the bugs in the damn thing THEY DON'T SUPPORT IT ANYMORE.
I agree with you on most of your points though. I still miss the days when winblows was exactly what it should be now : AN APPLICATION. Leave the OS to do what it's supposed to be doing...BEING AN OS instead of a one-click bloated pos.
A.A.M
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.
Windows 7 also has the snappy feel, as one of the person who've tried it. Either the OP has a bad computer, or bad drivers. Windows 7 is way snappier than Vista and approaches XP greatly.
Of course, I realize you don't care because you're a fanboy, but I had to post it anyway.
Can it copy files from one place to another in a reasonable amount of time now? Without tweaking?
Does the interface still hang for no apparent reason when browsing for files?
Are they still using hard links for the user profile directories?
I've tried Vista several times and as of a few weeks ago, with the latest beta SP, it's still crap at some of most basic things an operating should be good at.... navigation and pushing data around.
I agree with you on most of your points though. I still miss the days when winblows was exactly what it should be now : AN APPLICATION. Leave the OS to do what it's supposed to be doing...BEING AN OS instead of a one-click bloated pos.
You mean like Windows Server 2008 Core? It's where the thing installs to like 300MB or something and isn't even CAPABLE of doing most of those tasks you don't think an OS should be doing.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Sure, but there's the same post on Slashdot every new Ubuntu release too. But somehow, since it's for Windows, it's BAD! Just pointing out the irony.
It's not hard to beat Vista.
MS doing what it does best: lower expectations down to the gutter with a piece of s****.
Then release a new piece of s**** disguised as a piece of candy, with some artificial flavoring to disguise some of the nasty taste.
Compare: DOS 4.0 (sucky), DOS 5.0 (much better)
Compare: DOS 6.0 (sucky), DOS 6.22 (much better)
Compare: Windows 95 (sucky), then Windows 98 (much better).
Windows ME (sucky), then Windows XP (much better)
Windows Vista (sucky), Windows 7 (???)
One word: Cleartype.
That really is the only reason I moved from 2000 to XP, because otherwise there isn't much difference.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You are telling me that there is no performance improvement in having a *graphics card* handle *graphics* instead of a CPU?
When the CPU runs at 3+ Ghz and the graphic in question is a 2 Mpx, simple 2D image? fuck no, there isn't. The difference in performance only starts when you add the idiotic extra 'flash', but no modern (or even not-so-modern) computer should have any trouble displaying a Win2K-like interface regardless of the GPU.
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.
Not all of us *have* powerful video cards, and despite your own blind hate and narrow imagination, plenty of us prefer simpler interfaces rather than the garish piece of shit that's Vista's default theme.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Ha! Shows just how little you understand the Linux ecosystem. If Linux based desktop technologies were proprietary; produced and promoted by a single company then MS would have every chance of killing them off: but they aren't. The desktop environments that front the Linux base (Gnome and KDE) are Open Source. Nothing can kill them bar lack of developer interest, and the two main candidates are alive, healthy and kicking. They will keep plodding on, growing, improving and snapping at MS's heals year after year after year. They are relentless and will not stop: not EVER. And this is a GOOD thing. It will keep MS (and Apple for that matter) on their toes and will force them to push their boundaries. Because if they stop for too long then they'll get caught and overtaken. Conversely, the more MS (and Apple) innovate, the more it inspires the likes of Gnome and KDE. All this means is that year on year, the choices you and I have as users get better and more interesting. We are the ones who ultimately benefit from all this. So all hail the Desktop wars, and long may they continue!
So far this is the only option people have brought up when they talk about Vista. If this was the only thing that makes Vista better than XP... is it REALLY worth it? If so, why not add that to the classic start menu? I mean, if you add the Desktop Search to XP you get the same basic functionality from what I understand. What else makes Vista "worth it"? From everything I've noticed working with it and trying to get it to connect to an XP Home printer share (unsuccessfully I might add) it's utter crap. All the options are so buried that it's not funny (and quite ironically forcing you to use above said feature in order to be able to use the PC efficiently)
So if I understand this, the reason Vista is so good is because they hid everything from you and make you run everything with the keyboard. You may as well run DOS, Unix or Linux if you like typing the commands you need to run so much.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
UAC is far worse than sudo -- with sudo you have one point when application is started as root, and the only thing user has to say is to confirm that he actually wants to run something as administrator. Applications that run as root are still trusted to actually so the right thing because user isn't supposed to know what precisely a particular application should or shouldn't be allowed to do. When anything fine-grained is necessary, there is PolicyKit that controls access to services -- then user's input is only necessary if policy demands it.
UAC is all about not trusting the application or system configuration -- user is asked to make all the decisions. It's like bizarro PolicyKit -- fine-grained access control, but no actual policy behind it, so user has to make all decisions. The root of this problem is, of course, Windows' still-shitty IPC and per-process privileges/permissions handling -- until that is fixed, expect more braindamaged security from them.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Now that's offtopic for saying the parent was on topic, and the parent is fixed by labeling him a troll.
Yep, the mod system is here for your amusement.
Uuuh.....did you actually bother to READ my other post? I said Server 2K8 was a GREAT OS and that they should have put a WinNT style GUI on top of THAT and sold it as a business desktop instead of the nightmare of a home OS that is Vista. Now can you HONESTLY tell me that you think Vista was built with the business user in mind? Up until now they took a rock solid business OS and then stripped out a few business centric add ons and you had the home version(like XP Pro and Home) or they took a great server OS like Win2K server and simply stripped it down to make a rock solid basic desktop like Win2K Pro. This is the first time we have seen them try to shovel a HOME operating system onto the business user. Is there anyone who can look at Vista and think it was built for anything OTHER than multimedia? Hell the thing has bling bling coming out its butt!
And I haven't actually bought a retail machine in ages BTW. All my operating systems are retail or OEM and I build the hardware myself. If I need a laptop it boots long enough to see that the hardware works and get imaged in case I need to return it then it is wiped-no exceptions. And believe me I know about having to tweak a MSFT OS, it comes with the turf. Hell I still have the DOS commands for Win9x to copy the CD and install from HDD memorized. And while the machine I used for Vista wasn't anything top of the line, it should have been MORE than enough to handle it. let us not forget we are talking about an OS, not an application. I shut down UAC, I turned off indexing, I downloaded and ran every Vista tweaking utility I could find as well as editing the reg with suggestions from every Vista tweaks site I could find. What did I get on this 3.6GHz P4 with 2Gb of RAM and a 6200 followed by a 7600 graphics card?
Slow as a slug, hell it reminded me of the days when folks would put Win95 on a 286, it was that painful. A HDD that thrashed all the time and finally gave out from the strain, a network that would die if you looked at it funny, file transfers that were awful(and this was after SP1, before SP1 I would burn a DVD to move a file 3 feet because the network was too damned slow), freezes for 10-25 seconds for no damned reason whatsoever,2 or 3 times a week it would either BSOD or just vaporlock,hell I could probably go on all day. And from talking with my customers and checking forums I know that I am FAR from alone. Compare that to the SAME hardware on XP SP3-under 45 second boot from cold, extremely responsive, fast network transfers, not a single loss of connectivity or a single BSOD, no freezes, no thrashing, just a well functioning stable OS.
I have owned, ran, sold, and fixed every MSFT OS since Win3.1. And i REALLY wanted to like Vista, I really really did. This isn't some Linux or Apple zealot trying to spread FUD here. I even ran the beta hoping that I could help fix the bugs and make it a better OS. But they didn't build an OS for me. They didn't build an OS for the business users, or the gamers, or even the home users, because they HATE change. No, they built an OS for those inside MSFT that want to take over Apple's turf, and frankly it shows. Vista is an OS that IMHO just screams "I can be as cool as an Apple Mac! No really I can!". The problems with that are MSFT customers didn't want an Apple, they just wanted a new Windows, Apple knows how to have pretty without dragging down the OS and MSFT don't, MSFT owes a LOT to business customers who they frankly burned real bad with the lousy backwards compatibility and high hardware requirements of Vista, and finally that the home users absolutely HATE change and Vista is frankly change for change sake.
I truly hope they change for Win7, I really do. I hope they put out a low resource, rock solid stable business OS instead of seeing posts all over the place on how to turn Server 2K8 into a desktop just so you can have a MSFT business OS. But from what I have seen of the beta it screams "But I REALLY can be a Mac this time! I Promise!", and if they are going to force me to run a Mac clone anyway then why the hell shouldn't I just get a Mac?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Get Vista running on a DX9 capable machine.
Open up a reasonable number of apps, with windows scattered around the screen. For extra credit, have them being actually animating something (video playback, whatever)
Open up Task Manager and look at the CPU utilization bars.
Turn off Aero Glass
Grab a big foreground window and shake it like crazy over your other windows.
Turn Aero Glass back on
Repeat shake
Note that without Aero Glass you get a huge CPU spike due to all the rendering that doesn't get offloaded to the CPU, while with Aero Glass you won't see a similar spike in CPU activity.
My video compression blog