Windows 7 RC Download Page Points To May Release

An anonymous reader writes "Someone over at Redmond flipped the wrong switch, it would seem. Ars Technica spotted that the Windows 7 download page on TechNet had switched to say Release Candidate instead of Beta. It's now back to Beta, but not before Ars got all the details off the page: 'The public RC will apparently be coming in May 2009, and not in April as previously rumored. The RC testing program will be available at least through June 2009, and the actual build will expire June 1, 2010. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions will be available in English, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish.' A screenshot and all the text on the RC download page, which was set to be published 'May 2009' is saved over at Ars."

Comments

Re:Excellent

[mc1138]

So far the beta while not huge amounts different, is a very nice polished UI update to Vista. It helps to both correct some of the problems Vista had, plus adds some spiffy new features.

The longer the better

[linuxci]

At least it looks like they're happy to delay the 'release candidate' presumably to allow some more time for bugfixes, etc. Although calling it a release candidate is really innacurate. A proper release candidate should be something that could be signed off as the official release if testing goes ok, however, it's widely known that there's going to be multiple release candidates.

Re:The longer the better

[Richard_at_work]

The problem with the 'issues' quoted in your linked comment is that they are actually personal opinions about changes, and not actual functional issues that need resolving. You are more than welcome to disagree with changes, and they may indeed alter your established personal routines for the worse rather than the better, but that doesn't make them issues that need 'correction'.

See my post earlier in this thread for an actual issue that requires correction: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1177883&cid=27355721

Re:The longer the better

[Kaboom13]

Lower memory usage, in exchange for a worse ui (unless you like low res icons), no security features (say goodbye to NX bit and other hardening features) and generally at this point worse in every way. Now when XP first came out, it was reasonable to keep using 2k for quite awhile, but now that 4 gb of ram is like $50, saving the 128 mb of ram you get from running 2k over xp definitely isn't worth it. Considering with some tweaking you can make the xp ui look and act almost identical to the 2k ui, the only thing 2k has going for it is nostalgia. If you actually try to use it (I run into machines still running 2k every now and then in my work) you will realize it's a piece of crap.

Re:The longer the better

[totally bogus dude]

Any project of sufficient complexity will likely have multiple release candidates, just because once all the release critical bugs are found and fixed... more will be found.

That doesn't mean a release candidate isn't actually a candidate for release, or at least is supposed to be. An RC is supposed to be, "we think we're done, unless you can show us there's major bugs remaining this is exactly what we're going to release". The final release should be nothing more than the last release candidate with the version strings to say it's a final release rather than an RC.

Vista had one RC, and when it was made available Microsoft made it absolutely clear that the RC was not actually a candidate for release; it did not include a bunch of changes and fixes that were going to be in the actual release. They abuse the term: Microsoft's "release candidates" are actually more like "late betas".

The term "release candidate" is actually entirely self-explanatory and leaves less wiggle room for misrepresenting the status of a project than "alpha" or "beta". The final release should be identical to the last RC. In practice there's often some small changes made or diagnostic/debugging code removed; but any actual changes in functionality or any non-trivial fix should cause another RC to be made. It is a bit of a balancing act between cost/time and thoroughness though.

However, calling something a "release candidate" when you have absolutely no intention that it will actually be the released version is disingenuous. If is not a candidate for release, then it is not a release candidate.

Re:The longer the better

[socrplayr813]

I understand it fine. That doesn't make it good.

Oh, you want to go up 8 levels? Yeah, that no longer shows in the box. So I should go to the tree? Wait, that doesn't fit in its box either? Wonderful... Now I have to click on a bunch of different folders in the breadcrumb thing to get there, or waste a bunch of time scrolling around in the tree (of which I can see very little). Alt-Up is fine and I like keyboard shortcuts, but that one is awkward to get to with my hand on my mouse and I don't see any strong reason why they can't have left the up button or given more space for the tree...

Their system is fine if you don't have a lot of files and you use the folder system they've set up for you, but I have hundreds of gigabytes of files broken up into very logical directories that are accessed from multiple computers. It is painful to get through them in the tiny open and save windows.

Again, don't get me wrong. There are things I like about Vista and you'll see me fighting for it more often than against it, but some things just seem to me like they needed more work.

Re:The longer the better

[AbRASiON]

I used to miss the up arrow toolbar button as well, until I understood how the breadcrumb trail worked. The latter is a _far_ better UI construct.

No it's not, it's slower to work with.
Look at Expose on the mac, blindly push your mouse in X direction.
It requires almost no thought at all.

This is the same as the inclusion of the up arrow.

"Oh man I'm in E:\Media\Porn\High definition\Asian girls\Mika Tan\Bondage sessions 5\ and I want to be in just E:\Media\Porn"
Now I can use my eyes to analyse the very clumsy looking breadcrumb bar, find the folder I want and click on it but this finding, selecting, confirming will take me maybe 1 or 2 seconds.
Or I can see the up arrow and i know I'm about 3 or 4 paths deep, I can just blindly hit that up arrow (as I know where it is, ALWAYS - especially as a maximised window user) and just go bam bam bam and I'm there.

To state again also, what's wrong with the option of BOTH - let us enable the up arrow if we want, 2 different ways of doing things won't kill people.
They are fiddling with the UI to try and create something 'clever and amazing' - they've seen too many movies of Mac OS or Ubuntu with the 3D stuff enabled and think they need to copy and they sure as hell aren't planning exactly what to do and how to do it.

Grey

[grey-shado]

I'm pretty exited for this, It will hopefully be so much better (cleaner and faster) than Vista. It seems Vista was a half made OS to compete with Apple's new OS.

Re:32 bit AND 64 bit

[Killjoy_NL]

I think I got marked redundant because some people are so overzealous in their damnation of anything MS that somebody with a more open mind who gives them a fair chance is dangerous/annoying in their eyes.

I got the karma to spare though, don't really care about it.

Anyway, I have 2 licenses for Vista Ultimate. 32 and 64 bit for my 2 pc's. I did read a while back that people who had Vista Ultimate or Vista (Enterprise I think, I'm not sure) could upgrade to Win7 $Corresponding_edition for free.

I looked up the link, here's the skinny
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-7-vista-free-upgrade,7018.html

Too bad I won't be eligible then, but I get the license for next to nothing anyway, so it's all good :)

P.S. For the mods, if you disagree with me, don't mod me down, mod me sideways :P

Yes, "accidentially flipped the switch"

[not already in use]

Kinda like they "accidentally" leaked the beta. Looks like Microsoft is finally catching onto this whole marketing thing.

Re:Vista is that bad for general and non gamer use

[Just Some Guy]

When I gave up struggling to fix XP and got Vista DVD, guess what happened? It downloaded all the drivers, everything started to work fine and guess what? Damn fast. It is not a high end Vaio, it has only 1 Gig of RAM with low end hard disk (not 7200 or anything). It even has the scandal Intel i965 integrated gfx.

I don't believe you. There's no way Vista is "damn fast" on any machine with only 1GB of RAM.

We bought a brand-new (last year) HP laptop with a dual-core Sempron and 2GB of RAM, and Vista has run like frozen molasses since we unpacked it. Now, people are quick to blame that on problems specific to the HP distro and claim that Dell's distros (particularly of the small business variety) are better, but as an end user none of that stuff matters to me. It's clear to me that Windows is not ready for the desktop.

Re:I for one am excited about this.

[Sporkinum]

No, not at all. I just don't see it as being a practical upgrade for most people. I did not go out and purchase Vista to upgrade my XP box. I ended up getting it with a new computer. I think the same is the case with 7. Not worth the cost to upgrade.

Re:Why still 32bit?

[perryizgr8]

because at that time (may 07), ms thought vista was going to be as long term as xp. so by their reckoning they would have been releasing another verion in 10 years, when the transition from 32bit to 64bit would have been over and we would be talking about our new 128bit cpus. but it failed miserably, so they had to rebrand it in desperation, only that the transition to 64 is not complete yet. so they have to have a 32bit version too.

Re:Wait... WHAT ?

[perryizgr8]

no, actually there are different dvd isos for each language, it is not an installation time option.
well it was that way during the 7000 build. maybe that's changed now but it's highly unlikely.

Re:I for one am excited about this.

[gbarules2999]

I agree. The issue I have with upgrading to Windows 7 is that I (and most people I know) simply don't care about any of the new features. Yeah, it looks nice. But other than that, that feature set on Wikipedia looks rather dull; certainly not worth paying money for. It's closer to an Ubuntu update than it is a full new operating system. I'll use it when I get it on a new computer, but no sooner.