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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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.