Slashdot Mirror
Ballmer Sets Loose Windows 7 Public Beta At CES
CWmike writes "The rumors turned out to be true. Microsoft will release a public beta this week of its next desktop operating system, Windows 7, hoping it will
address the problems that have made Windows Vista perhaps the least popular OS in its history. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will launch the beta during his speech at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday. Preston Gralla reviewed Windows 7 beta 1, noting 'Fast and stable, Beta 1 of Windows 7 unveils some intriguing user-interface improvements, including the much-anticipated new task bar.' MSDN and Technet subscribers should be able to get the public data tonight. The general public will have to wait until Friday."
Microsoft will release a public beta this week of its next desktop operating system, Windows 7, hoping it will address the problems that have made Windows Vista perhaps the least popular OS in its history.
So, Vista failed because they didn't provide a public beta for it?
How about addressing the increasingly long list of features people actually want instead of a resource intensive API to make my windows translucent? Or, making what was arguably Vista's best and at the same time worst feature (UAC) something that works without making itself so intrusive as to be the first time users desire to disable?!
New Task Bar? Do the words "Titanic" and "rearranging the deckchairs" come to mind here?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Hardly. If anything, it's the *most* popular. Popularity doesn't necessarily mean that something is liked, but having a lot of people dislike something as in the case of Vista means it's pretty damn popular. Just not for the reasons you'd like. It's easy to tell which is the least popular Windows ever: Windows 1.0. (It would be Microsoft Bob, except that's not actually "Windows".)
However, even for the "most hated" award, it's a tight race between ME and Vista. I'd say the hatred of ME is more intense, while the hate for Vista is more widespread.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Purchase of Vista?
One of the primary reasons Vista has slow adoption has been the tiers and pricing.
What's it is printed, the development costs are sunk. The need to have one tier of windows 7, and change 99 bucks for it.
It is far better for them to get everybody onboard the new system, then it is dealing with the hassle of corporations ahving so many versions.
It is also in there best interests to set the stage to ditch all legacy 32bit apps they sell.
Hell sell it for 59.99 and they would move 100 million the first year. Everyone on Vista will move over, as would people holding out on XP.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
At that time you could choose Windows ME or Windows 2000.
MS had a hard time to get people off Win9x.
Windows ME fixed that in a jiffy.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
You're confusing issues. They are reviewing the new version of Windows. The specific definition of Operating System is ultimately meaningless in this discussion.
The new taskbar and other UI tweaks are a part of the new version of Windows.
It was basically a less-stable version of Win98 with a system restore that solved your problem half the time you got it to work (which was about half the time you tried it), and the other half fucked your system up worse than before. It also included a lot of bloat and new bells and whistles, at a time when apparently most people preferred drums that worked (even if it was just an upside-down bucket) over broken bells and cracked whistles.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
For me, the biggest problem was the removal of real mode DOS access. For someone moving from Windows 98 and still relying on a lot of DOS programs that didn't always play nice with protected mode. At least with Windows 2000, you didn't have to deal with the 9x series' infamous flakiness and instability nearly as often.
The interface improvements (all of which were shamelessly taken from Windows 2000) were an improvement, sure, but in all other respects, Windows Me was less functional and less reliable than Windows 98SE. It wasn't that you it was so bad as to be unusable, but it was hardly worth the price of the upgrade.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
You want an analogy that isn't a car analogy? You've got your "the OS is just a wrapper around the BIOS. Applications should do whatever they want" folk. These are the tech equivalent of "government is the root of all problems, remove it from everything"... call them Regan republicans or perhaps Ron Paul style republicans.
On the other end of the spectrum, you've got the "your OS should do pretty much everything, applications aren't able to making proper decisions without OS intervention". Are these guys the far-left who want government to do everything? Are these guys the tech version of socialists? Dunno.
And if you want my opinion, the OS is more then a shim around the bios. Operating systems (like the government) had to evolve to meet the needs of a growing, more complex set of applications and requirements (ditto with our governments). Going back to a "pure" operating system that just wraps the Bios and presents a green console just wouldn't work, same with going back to a razor thin US federal government. The OS needs to enforce rules and needs to dictate what applications (citizens) can and cannot do or else the whole thing will fail.
On the other hand, if you let the operating system do too much, you will piss off your developers and worse, probably piss off various governments (think anti-trust). Let your government get too big, you'll piss off the citizens and worse, risk bankruptcy.
I'll let somebody else flesh this out.
So the bulk of the article gushes all over the taskbar, with a bit of Aero thrown in...
Are the pundits so brain dead that they don't know the difference between an OS and a UI? A taskbar is not an OS.
The koolaid must be good.....
I want to hear what they did with the DRM. I want to hear what they've done to make the system more stable under load. I want to hear that they now have a package manager, instead of DLL hell. I want to hear that drivers now ship with the OS, and I don't have to install 70 MB of bloatware just to "install" a keyboard.
Oh wait, but look at that icon on the taskbar..... Slurp, slurp, damn that koolaid tastes good.
Then you should go read the Engineering Windows 7 blog, not Slashdot. The audience for this review are the general crowd, not Slashdotters. What DRM are you talking about? I keep hearing about it, but no real life examples of how it's hindering ANYONE. DLL hell? When was the last time it affected you? Also, shipping all drivers will make the OS around a few TB. They actually try to include most drivers that are in popular hardware. Are you okay with that?
This space for rent.
The UAC dialog looks a lot difference then any other dialog that pops up. Train them to be very nervous and apprehensive when they see a UAC dialog. Hopefully they'll start calling you when they pop up so you can talk them out of installing $GOOGLE_YAHOO_TWITTER_TOOLBAR_#23.
Really though, I've been fairly successfull in explaining what UAC is and why they should pay attention to when they pop up. Nobody wants spyware, but most people never see the connection between "I just ran $RANDOM.EXE and now my computer is slow". UAC is an easy sell if you frame it as a barrier between $RANDOM.EXE and spyware-city. In fact, given a willing listener, it isn't too hard to explain "on XP, a program could access any part of your system you want, on Vista, it can only access a couple things like your documents and desktop.. the only way it can access your system and install spyware is through a UAC dialog".
PS: And yeah, I know UAC isn't a foolproof barrier. If UAC is used correctly by a user, the only real way for a program to get root access is the old-fashioned way, privilege elevation exploits. But you don't need to tell them that detail, it isn't relevant to them and will just confuse them. Only nerds like us will appreciate that :-)
I'd say it was worse than "rushed out before ready." Maybe more like "pushed out even though their was no point." After saying that Win98 would be the last of its line, they turned around and apparently diverted resources to pushing an OS that was basically Win98+bugs. Bugs that would never really be fixed anyway, since they were about to start pushing people to the NT kernel anyway in the form of Windows 2000 and later WindowsXP.
It's like if I were discontinuing a model of car because of several huge design problems, but after releasing the replacement model, suddenly started reselling the discontinued model again-- this time, with a spoiler that somehow made it harder to steer. It doesn't make a lot of sense unless it's a half-assed money-grab.
Seriously, Microsoft is right about one thing: if you set people down in front of Vista and dont' tell them it's Vista, they love it. Tell them it's Vista, and they hate it.
People are PRIMED to hate the OS based on the name and based on really over-blown and inaccurate Apple ads, and really bad experiences SOME users had in the first year (due to the "Vista Capable" debacle mostly).
Since SP1, Vista has been very usable. I've been using it almost since it came out, and it's a perfectly decent OS. In fact, I sorta hate going back to XP now... I miss too many good things about Vista, like the instant search features, new Start menu, and just some of the look and feel.
Nobody seems to remember how much people HATED the old "XP" when it first came out. It didn't really become popular until SP2 was released.
Most of the anti-Vista sentiment is simply irrational and baseless.
Are there some things not to like? Sure. I turn off UAC immediately. There are a few quirks in the new Windows Explorer that I don't like (and which seem to be unchanged in Windows 7). But really, beyond that? It's much more stable, and full featured than XP, and it looks a hell of a lot better. Yeah, it's a memory pig, but I run with plenty of memory for my needs, and have no problems. And after 2 years of use, it's "slowed down" far less than comparable XP machines have (the old "Windows Decay" problem).
Am I looking forward to Windows 7? Definitely. It seems to fix the memory-pig and performance issues that Vista admittedly does have (a bigger issue on laptops than my desktop), but the fact will remain that it's little more than Vista with some spit and polish... and everyone will love it because it's "not Vista".
Vista-hate is getting to be tedious and facile, and it really is more psychological than real.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
In all honesty, I find Windows 1.0 to be the least functional of all of Microsoft's operating systems. But the bar wasn't very high back then
I wouldn't say that. Us Amiga owners were using preemptive multitasking and virtual desktops that year, and Mac guys had a pretty nice system of their own.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It doesn't solve the 32-bit 64-bit dilemma that both Linux and OS X are addressing. It doesn't eliminate the behaviour of configuring user accounts to be admin/root by default.
So, you've never actually used Vista x64 then?
Sudo is a different beast then UAC to some degree. It lets the admin control what programs can get elevated (/etc/sudoers). Ubuntu doesn't tap into all the crap you can do with sudo. It just does what UAC does... pop up a dialog to confirm privilege escalation, then run said program under the requested privileges. Well, only kinda.
Windows (.NET anyway) lets the program specify what privileges it needs to run under and which privileges are merely a luxury. .NET will run the program under only the privileges the application has asked for. I've yet to actually need this kind of stuff so I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but it is my understanding the application has to request UAC, Vista doesn't just monitor the programs interaction and go "hey, this guy wants to write to a protected file, lets pop up a UAC and ask". Any program that doesn't request a UAC dialog and tries to write to a protected file will get a permission error.
What is my point? You are incorrect saying "not because I visited a website, or because I connected a photo frame to my PC. It also doesn't happen every time that I need those privileges". Vista will not pop up a UAC dialog in any of those cases (have you used it?). If it does, some software you have installed is trying to pull some seriously fucked up shit and obviously you should "cancel".
That may be so, but I'd take the review here with a grain of salt.
Preston Gralla is pretty much the epitome of a breathless Windows fanboi. Try reading some of his articles about Vista...
To anyone who has been sitting on the fence over whether to upgrade to Microsoft's new operating system, I'll say it loud and clear: It's time to make the jump. There are plenty of reasons to leave Windows XP and install Vista.
Windows Vista: 15 Reasons to Switch
The conventional wisdom, that Mac's OS X is superior to Windows Vista, is flat-out wrong. In fact, despite much belief to the contrary, Vista is a superior operating system.
Five reasons why Vista beats Mac OS X
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."