Slashdot Mirror
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."
Now the fate of 64bit future is being determined...
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
There are no new features in this build. If Microsoft has any new stuff lined up for the RTM then we're going to have to wait to find out.
All this talk about stable beta's seems a bit pointless. If you change the name and theme on the product, you can't real muck it up too bad. What's the point of this other than to try to put the name "Vista" in the grave?
Anyone know what these people are so excited about? Couldn't get much real info from the article. They comment that its snappier than other betas. How about compared to XP? That would be the real comparison I would like to see.
I am a linux person myself - Ubuntu on the computer I am posting from, but I did use Windows on my laptop before wiping it. I am also not opposed to having windows installed if I gain any benefit. That is what I want to hear from people, what are its compelling features (I don't play games).
When all else fails, try.
And we can start quessing which of the mentioned fine features will actually be in the release version of Win7. This has happened so many times before.
Remember when during waiting of win95 many magazines were worried what will happen to McAfee and other virus-scanner companies when the new windows is fully virustolerant?
Everyone seems to have the opinion that Vista was a failure. My wife (a non-techie) hates Vista because her ancient accounting app periodically crashes ever since switching to Vista. I assume many other people had the same sorts of issues with many other apps.
But now three years have gone by, and many of those apps have been patched, become obsolete, or replaced with working alternatives. That means the remaining apps are now in an ideal position to work correctly in Windows 7. Is it possible that Windows 7 could be exactly the same crap as Vista, but because so much time has gone by it doesn't matter as much?
I think we saw the same thing with the transitions from Windows 98 to Windows ME to Windows XP.
John
Well, I'm hearing claims that it will run well on a netbook with 512MB on ram and an Atom processor, which is a huge improvement over Vista. However, despite the supposed lower requirements and multi-touch gestures, I'm not sure what the benefits of Windows 7 are.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Rather than wasting our time with a new GUI, I'd like to see Microsoft get the ball rolling on full, proper migration to 64 bit. Perhaps I'm a "power user" but for a sound designer, this 2 gig limit per app/~3.5 max feels more and more like 640 kb all over again.
(Unfortunately, the existence/popularity of 32 bit windows precludes the vendors of software such as Cubase and the likes from actually doing a proper job of putting out 64 bit software).
I record my sleeptalking
What are the improvements? Have they added in WinFS yet?
I just had to repair a friend's Vista PC which had 3 Trojan programs running that had taken control of her internet even though Kaspersky antivirus was installed. The Trojan had worked its way onto her computer via a P2P program that her daughter was using to get music, and that stopped Kaspersky from being able to update its definitions, which it was set to do every day. I couldn't even go out to Microsoft's Windows Update site to get Windows updates, and Windows Defender (which was also installed and running) was disabled by one of the Trojan programs. It took me over an hour to clean it all up and get her machine running properly again.
Not even 2 antivirus programs could stop this from happening on the latest Windows PC.
This is what is stopping me from being even the slightest bit excited about Windows 7.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
I agree, but, well, lower requirements is a big one. I remember an article in /. that pontificated that "Vista runs fine on any processor 3 Ghz and above" which is a bar that none of my computers can reach. Some are limited by architecture to 2 Gbytes ram, another buzzkill. (And why should I buy bleeding edge hardware -- in this economy -- to run Vista when XP runs fine?) If Windows 7 (any version) can run on netbook-level hardware, it actually has a chance in hell of replacing some of my XP installations. [1]
And yet... and yet, when Vista was still in beta, we heard reports that it was faster than XP, and look how that turned out. So we really can't go by the beta, we have to wait for reports about the finished product. And then we find out if Microsoft really has made an effort to make the codebase more efficient, or if their real plan was to wait two more years for the hardware to catch up with Windows' gargantuan requirements.
Before someone brings it up, I'm aware that much of Vista's performance issue was the way DRM was implemented. But since DRM is part and parcel with the operating system, it counts. It's the total end to end performance that makes the user experience, so it's not legitimate to say "the new OS really is much faster than the previous release, all those pauses and long execution times you're seeing is because the OS has to check every bit to make sure you haven't stolen something".
Assuming, of course, there is some new feature I absolutely have to have. I didn't see any in Vista. Yes, it had a snazzy new interface. But since I turned off XP's snazzy new interface and all the irritating special effects when I installed it, why would I base a buying decision on yet another snazzy new interface I have to turn off?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Why not compare with 2K ? Also, 2K is better than XP by the same metrics you mentioned. Then why are you running XP?
This space for rent.
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 suspiciously like Mac OS X's Dock. Hmm, single icon per application, where I have I seen that before?...
For further confirmation that this is Window's take on the Dock, take a peek at this screenshot. Hmm, "Unpin this program from the taskbar"... Seems a bit like dragging the application onto the Dock, thereby "pinning" it. (Although at least Window 7's little "launched border" is easier to see than the glowing dot on the Dock.)
Of course, I'd have to use it to see if it actually works. Mac OS X's Dock works the way it does due to the way Mac handles applications - each application gets a single instance and has a single menu bar but can have multiple windows. Windows does it differently - each window is essentially its own application. So directly ripping off the Dock probably won't work.
Still, it's nice to see that Microsoft's stance on innovation hasn't changed. :)
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.
I don't - Slashdot seems to have found a way to load ads via Web 2.0 in the new discussion view; I'm sure ZDnet and their advertisers can come up with a way to rotate ads using Web 2.0 techniques...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Right. This is Windows 98 compared to Windows 95. No major change in theme or interface, but more stable and with a few of the sharper corners rounded off. See also windows 3.0 and windows 3.1. :)
What failed was developer training, not user training. Developers could basically assume a user was running root. That let them take shortcuts like writing shit to "Program Files" or messing around with system files.
You have to understand the history as well. Microsoft grew up as a single-user OS and slowly morphed into a multi-user OS. They didn't grow up with the culture that unix-like systems have where the system was assumed to be multi-user.
Bottom line is we will always need some variant of sudo (aka UAC). UAC is actually the best sudo implementation there is so far, at least in my opinion. Granted, there is still room for improvement, but that mainly lies in "integration". For example, the common dialogs need a way for me to load notepad.exe, edit "C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\Hosts", and give me a UAC prompt when I save the file. That way I don't have to remember to load notepad.exe with elevated privileges. Let me write a new file to a protected directory and UAC me then instead loading the app with elevated privileges. That kind of integration will make the new world of "dont run as root" more enjoyable. The goal is to make it so there is no excuse for nerds to disable UAC (thus running as root 24/7).
Most nerds seem to turn it off assuming it is "flasy useless eye candy". Little do they know they basically turned off hardware accelleration. You do know that Vista, with Aero enabled, will delegate most of the window drawing to the video card. In fact, the more ram on your video card, the better, Vista stores all the window data on that instead of your system RAM.
If you've got a card that does DirectX10 it will even hand the fonts to the video card and let the video card deal with font rendering and caching. Once you turn off Aero, the video card is just an old-school video card. Since a certain set of nerds seem to hate nice looking things, I bet most of them turn off the one thing that makes Vista way more snappy than XP--Aero.
I used to share the parents opinion of eye candy, until I tried out Mac OS. The shadows on the windows really make them look like they are layer on top of each other in a way that Vista doesn't. It actually makes the system that little bit more intuitive, that little bit easier to interpret the information on the screen and work with it. It's subtle but an improvement none-the-less.
Considering how well Mac OS runs on even old Radeon 9200 hardware I don't think it's much of a resource drain or bloated either.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I think you need to read those links again.
Read the description of Redering Tier 2, the highest level of acceleration. The TTF fonts are NOT rendered on the card. Instead, in ClearType mode, the raw pixels are sent to the graphics card in a format representing 3x normal horizontal resolution, and are then edge blended with the existing pixels for a convincing anti-aliased look on LCD displays.
Also note, they're talking only about DX9 there with no mention of DX10, and note the restrictions about what *isn't* accelerated.
Did you perhaps mean to give us a different link with relevant information?
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
EXACTLY! I tried Server 2K8 and I was like "Why? Why in the hell can't you just add a basic GUI on top of this and sell it to business users for the desktop? Why?" It is low resource,doesn't have tons of bloated multimedia junk that has NO business being in a business OS, and runs solid as a rock. So why can't those of use who just want to get our work done buy this on a machine without shelling out insane money for a server license? Why?
And as for the one who marked me troll, accept it: Vista is a flop. It is a giant festering turd of fail that the general public can't get away from fast enough. Why do you think EVERY single ad we see and every blog is either "I'm a PC" or Win7? Because MSFT knows that wasting more money on Vista is pointless because the public has spoken and they don't want it. For those of you that have gotten Vista to work or like it,congratulations! You are in the minority! I have sold more machines in this past year and a half and built more custom PCs than I have in the 15 years I have been in PC repair. Why? Because folks are happy to shell out extra money to me so they DON'T have to take Vista. I have been working with MSFT products since the days of Win3.1 and I have NEVER seen folks go so far out of their way to avoid a MSFT OS, even during the horror that was WinME.
Sadly from what I have seen of Win7 instead of learning from their mistakes and going back to their roots and making a solid, backwards compatible, low resource business OS they are instead going to pile even MORE bling bling on top and then really insult the customers by getting rid of quicklaunch and replacing it with an Apple Dock which they will probably screw up on the implementation anyway. I swear if I didn't know any better I would think Ballmer was trying to burn the company down on purpose. I just don't get who exactly they are trying to please. The home users HATE change, the gamers want an OS that sucks as little CPU and GPU as possible to give them better FPS and the business owners want low resource usage so they don't need expensive hardware along with backwards compatibility with all their old business apps. So who exactly are they pleasing with this desire to copy all things Apple? Because from the way my customers are happy to shell out for even older off lease business machines just so they can have XP over Vista it sure ain't them.
The one nice thing about all this is we may finally see real competition brought back into the OS market like we had in the 80's. Because I have the sinking feeling that Win7 is going to make MSFT customers run away even worse than Vista did. Oh, and before someone points out the Vista sales numbers please note that ALL Vista downgrades are counted NOT as an XP purchase but as a Vista sale. And you know it is popular when even Tigerdirect is using "Includes XP Downgrade rights!!" in giant letters as a selling point.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I'm not the original poster, but I really wish Apple would let me. But they insist on selling OS X only with their own hardware, and then don't make hardware I both want and can afford. To my eyes, iMacs are stupid because it doesn't make sense to throw away a hundred or two hundred dollar monitor when you get a new computer. Hell, the bulk of my current system is about a year old, but I have components in there from 2004, and that's just what's in the main case. The Mac mini is probably even less upgradable than the iMac, and has for a moderately powerful system today is an underpowered processor and small amount of RAM. (For about $200 less what I paid for my current over a year ago, you get (1) dual core processor instead of quad core, (2) the same amount of RAM, (3) basically integrated graphics shared with main RAM instead of an 8800GTS. Wow, great deal.) Now at the other end is the Mac Pro. Beautiful systems, but start at twice the cost of my current system (this time I think about comparable in power), which is well out of my price range. Then you add on top of that the fact that I like to build my own system, and Apple has put itself out of my market. But I very well might actually get one if it weren't for those other problems.
On the laptop side, last I checked they're in the same ballpark as a Thinkpad, so that's not so bad. But if I were to buy a laptop now, I'd probably get either like a netbook or a tablet... again, neither of which Apple sells.
So from my standpoint, I'd love to run OS X... but I'm not going to pirate it, I'm not going to give Apple if they are going to call me a criminal for hacking it to run, I'm not going to buy Apple hardware, and Apple won't let me run it otherwise, so I'm out of luck on that point.