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Windows 7 Hits Build 7600 (Possible RTM)
An anonymous reader writes "One Microsoft Way is reporting that Microsoft has significantly incremented the build number of both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2: 'Reports across the Web are pointing to a build 7600 for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. This is significant because the bump in the build number would suggest that Microsoft has christened this build as the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build. The RTM is expected to be given out to Microsoft partners sometime later this month and launched on October 22, 2009, the day of General Availability (GA). The build string is "7600.16384.090710-1945," which indicates that it was compiled just a few days ago: July 10, 2009, at 7:45pm. Microsoft only increments the build number when it reaches a significant goal, and the only one left is the RTM milestone. The last builds that were leaking were all 72xx builds, so such a large bump is suspicious but at the same time it is something Microsoft would do to signify that this is the final build.'"
Gaming.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
That's because Microsoft has been directly "leaking" 7 to the p2p sites this time around.
I put that in quotes because it should be obvious by now that the leaked builds of 7 have the blessings of Redmond. Remember, they will give it away to keep you from even considering alternatives.
"And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." William Gates III ca. 1998. http://tinyurl.com/nbo55t
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BMO
While I think all MS products are pretty craptacular, and I'm mostly a UNIX fan for desktop / engineering work, I did buy the $99 Win 7 Pro upgrade preorder just to keep up with a reasonably modern generation of windows. Pragmatically I realize that for at least a couple of more years there will still be a lot of software that runs on Windows and not UNIX / MAC / whatever, so it is good to be able to run Windows when needed (even if only from a VM under your desktop UNIX / MAC). ...), networked backup, transportable file metadata, good integrated search/metadata database based content organization functionality, decent file systems [think ZFS], decent backup, or decent drive content organization. Abolish the registry, turn it into a SQL database if you must, make it possible to in
Now that 64 bit hardware and 4G+ RAM is so ubiquitous, and relatively inexpensive, I find that virtually all the PCs my family has or would be likely to get would be best served by a 64 bit OS, and having 4GB or or likely more of RAM. Thus I feel that XP-32 has pretty much outlived its usefulness as a primary desktop OS for mid-range or better new desktop hardware. That's also true because it seems likely that evolving security patches, security products, as well as media application products will likely function better on Windows 7 / Vista than on XP SP3 as 2010 and beyond progresses and XP becomes more and more of a legacy OS and Vista/Win7 become more and more mainstream.
The things I like about Win 7 are that they upgraded Media Center / Player for H.264 / Divx etc. They didn't go nearly far enough in terms supporting of other codecs (no Ogg, etc.), bad media format / file portability, no intrinsic HD-DVD / Blu-Ray playback (WTF?!), still bad DRM, etc. But at least the more ubiquitous Media Center functionality with integrated H.264 is a good step forward. I'm not thrilled about Silverlight / WPF, et. al. but I concede that to the extent that they'll be perhaps popular, Vista / Win7 are reasonably convenient desktop media platforms to run them on.
They got a clue and included all the features (supposedly) of Home Premium (e.g. Media Center) into the Pro. version, which I applaud -- doing otherwise in Vista was simply deplorable. Personally I think they should have just let all the features of Ultimate be the standard for Home and Pro use, and I think their crippled feature edition product differentiation still sucks (no ubiquitous Home/Pro bitlocker and no Home EFS and no 'full' Home backup tools?! WTF?!), but at least they've taken a tiny step toward making their mid-range Pro edition useful for cases where multimedia support and less crippled networking/security/backup [relative to 'Home Premium'] is important.
So basically I think that 64 bit is the 'killer feature' for mid-range or better desktop use for either Vista or Windows 7. It is good they decided to include 64 bit versions for Home and Pro editions, they should REALLY push for 64 to be the primary installed product, with 32 basically being for some netbooks and really underpowered legacy hardware with 1-3 GB RAM. In the respect of facilitating 64 bit access, Win7 is better than Vista since they made you jump through hoops to get Vista 64 Home/Business in many cases. Maybe by the time they get to Win 8 we'll finally get decent backup / RAID / NAS support, a better filesystem with WinFS and reasonable metadata support and no crippled path length limitations on NTFS, better codec / transcoding support, and truly ubiquitous encryption access/support. By Win 8 they ought to bundle next generation "home server" cloud support into the "family pack" too and have some kind of distributed secure cross-PC "cloud" sync/incremental backup system with transparent file synchronization and off-site encrypted backup integration APIs for internet hosted services like Carbonite, Wuala, Mozy, Windows Live SkyDrive, etc. too -- it's all overdue by years.
They apparently just don't get it about providing good file security (including bitlocker, PGP, ACLs
On what basis would you expect it to have marketshare even remotely close to XP's ?
The pirates would have moved to Vista right away if it was worth a damn. That's half of the market right there. By Microsoft's own licensing numbers, Vista should have passed XP sometime last year. Apparently a whole lot of people bought Vista who didn't want it. Why is that?
If even the people who steal their software won't use it, that's a damning condemnation right there.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
While 0 is a valid IP address and should work in a hosts file, dude, STOP ABUSING the hosts file like a clueless idiot! Seriously, 14MB of plain text that needs to be parsed for every lookup? That's the most retarded thing I've ever seen.
At those proportions, there are WAY more efficient methods. Think about it, a hosts file can only match fully-qualified host names. If you want to block a whole domain you waste enormous amounts of space because you have to specify each and every host. Following that, you should instantly realize that security doesn't work with blacklists, i.e. if you know that domain evil.invalid is hostile, you can't afford to miss some hosts below it. Otherwise, what's the point?
And anyways, diverting traffic to 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0 is changing semantics in so many ways. Suppose you start running a local HTTP server for testing purposes and all that traffic is suddenly hitting it. It's just wrong.
"Blocking" hosts by listing them in the hosts file is an evil evil evil ugly hack conceived by clueless idiots that can't manage to run a local proxy where you could block domains with simple regular expressions and only for protocols which need them blocked. Or running a local DNS cache where you could blacklist domains so you get a semantically correct (for your purpose) NXDOMAIN error.
If you weren't abusing it like that the whole 0 vs 0.0.0.0 issue would fly past you because noone ought to modify the hosts file anyway these days. That's what DNS is for.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6