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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?
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
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.
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
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.
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?
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