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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.'"
"First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceedest on to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it." Amen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
"As Microsoft strives to migrate their core technologies from the desktop onto the Web, so too is their propaganda machine migrating from the established press to the informal social web. Microsoft shills are invading social web sites everywhere - in forums, discussion groups, comments to news items, edits to Wikipedia, manipulation of search engines, comments to blogs - posing as innocent participants to promote their agenda and counter wide spread complaints about their shady marketing practises. Even in the comments section of blogs by Microsoft employees on their own corporate site they employ sock puppets to say the things the author felt inappropriate to say directly. They race to place their shill postings at the top spot in the comments section of news and blogs, or perhaps they are given advance notice enabling them to do this where they are a sponsor. The evidence is here on Slashdot for all to see, without embellishments from me. What I say here is amounts to only a digest of hundreds of postings by others. A careful investigator can see for himself the evolution of discussions on Microsoft related issues, especially those accusing them of their usual hard ball tactics. As one reads from Slashdot's historical record on through to recent times, the evolution of Microsoft's efforts to pervert Slashdot's discussions becomes readily apparent. Microsoft's ambition is to twist internet discussions around a full 180 degrees until these discussions become a platform for propaganda from Microsoft's "Ministry of Truth". A study of the comments of the shills posted here can be cross-correlated with postings on other sites. Their pattern of saturating a discussion with shill postings, and the repeating of mindless memes becomes obvious. Their harassment, ridicule, and suppression of criticisms is designed to intimidated those who would speak out against them. They seek to establish and enforce a discipline of giving Microsoft "fair treatment" and their propaganda the same consideration and respect a real person would deserve. In the process they are destroying Web 2 as we know it. This insidious attack on the infrastructure we rely upon to form our opinions in a complex world has both a direct and an inhibitory effect on free speech as a side effect. We must stop this while it is in its infancy. Once it fully established, it will become much more difficult to root out, and other ruthless corporations, organizations, and even governments will want to emulate the success of Microsoft's campaign. This is the nightmare vision of the end of the social internet as we know it."
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1284651&cid=28502473
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
You can fool some of the people All the Time ...
"And that's our target market", said the marketing droid.
This is quite astute.
I'd also like to point out another story detailing a strong statistical anomaly in the speed at which anti-microsoft and pro-linux stories get "buried" on social news sites.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Windows 7: There are so many versions to choose from...
As opposed to, say, Linux distributions?
Performance numbers so far show the games to run at the same speed _or_slower_ under Win7.
Google begs to differ: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/25/windows-7-edges-out-vista-for-gaming-in-thorough-benchmark-tests/
However, common sense does tell you not to benchmark a beta OS.
Microsoft's (technically unsupported) ISO mounting tool: VirtualCD
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/620/xp_small_free_way_to_use_and_mount_images_iso_files_without_burning_them/
The only things that run better (like video) are due to MS spending all of their time streamlining the DRM code that will prevent you from using *your* legally purchased files wherever you want.
The DRM systems are only active when DRM-encumbered media is being played. Further, the apply no more restrictions than any other DRM-enabled player capable of playing such media.
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
It does seem like this may be the RTM build, although the timing is a little early yet.
My first reaction was the build number 7600 is very similar to the XP build of 2600 (yeah, I'm grasping at straws here.) It would be in MS favor to strongly relate this to XP and try to distance themselves from refencing Vista, which the correlation I just noted might help backup in people's minds.
However, the timing is just a little too early. The stated general retail release date from June's Computex is October 22. Historically, a MS OS RTM is released 30-45 days prior to the general retail date. That would place the RTM as beginning of September at earliest. Even a generous 60 day RTM date would place the date in mid-August, a month from now. Pressing and stamping aside (and what's to say a RTM DVD can't be downloaded over the net from a registration server similar to how volume and open license customers can already do), that's a little early yet.
And can anyone draw any significance from 16384 being 2^14? Or would that just indicate something like the 14th build of the master OS?
Build numbers by Microsoft follow an algorithm that encodes some odd information. Usually, it's desired by Microsoft to have a simply power of 2 for significant build milestones, especially for RTM builds. Why skip build numbers? That way you can still make builds of previous versions for commercial support, in order to make available patches for say, RCs and Betas, which both have a support lifetime as well. (Crazy short lifetimes, but they do.)
Messing with version numbers is a crazy stupid wrench in the "smooth" gears of the build system, and it requires authorization from significant master project managers. They would NOT be doing this if they were not important.
RTM builds also happen fairly early for things, especially because they have to have the RTM build, before they can complete localization, which means that if they want a synchronous release across X number of languages, they need to complete the RTM early enough that each of those localizations will be complete on time. Some of the localizations are just left for a late release anyways. But Japanese and German being Tier 0 languages pretty much means that they are important major goals to get as close to synchronous release as possible.
More interestingly is that this build was started at 7:45pm on a Friday... The build takes about 14 hours to complete, so someone was on call the whole weekend for completing the build... which potentially could have even TAKEN all weekend...
I think this is all just a really round about way of saying it, but "I. HATE. SAUERKRAUT!" No, really, you're totally on to the build number being of the form 2^x, but not that 14 has any significance to the build itself.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Nice comment. One question: How do you know how long it takes to build windows? Is it public information? or do you work for Microsoft?
I worked for Microsoft. I'm actually one of the few people who have compiled Windows.
They may have improved the build time since I worked for them, but the build times were a monotonously growing function of time when I left...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
So I've never heard of you before, but you seem to like throwing your initials round APK, or Alexander Peter Kowalski.
Your initial comments seemed idiotic, you were complaining about your 15mb+ hosts file being slow to load. Sorry, but what the fuck? You have a 15mb+ hosts file? are you really that clueless about IT?
But you try and justify it all by talking about security so I figured hey, I'll see what this guys credentials are. Well, a quick search turned this up:
http://www.ca.com/us/securityadvisor/pest/pest.aspx?id=51276
A piece of software that can arbitrarily run applications invisibly? Sorry what, did you really try and throw such a security threat onto consumer's PCs??
But wait, it appears you didn't stop there, I also found this:
http://www.thorschrock.com/2008/05/19/how-to-respond-when-people-threaten-to-sue-you-on-the-web/
So not only do you produce an app. that is a massive security risk, not only do you fail to see why it has been validly categorised as such, but you throw a hissy fit and threaten to sue? Not only that, but continue to spam the comments section of that site for over a month continuing to whine?
People make mistakes though so fair enough, I figured I'm sure there's more to this guy. I found this:
http://www.thenewtech.com/forums/chit-chat/today-4378/index32.html
Er, a program built entirely around breaking the hosts file using it for purposes it is simply not intended? Again, do you have any idea about the subject you preach? Do you realise that your very own programs pose a security risk? Do you realise how trivial it would be for Malware to hide malicious redirects in hosts files of the size you are talking meaning yet another one of your programs is a vessel for anti-security?
And there's more:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/51009562/m/3680937305
Threatening to sue again on online forums because people didn't like the fact you were using them to advertise your dodgy Delphi programs?
Other than that, all I could find was a couple of dead web pages of yours and mention of a couple of long obsolete Delphi programs.
Your complaint is about the performance of using the hosts file for something it's never meant to be used for and the resultant performance drops of reading such a large file.
The fact that using the hosts file so incorrectly inherently severely decreases performance of DNS lookups anyway seems lost on you.
You talk of security yet you produce applications that are security threats.
You threaten to sue anyone who points out that your applications are security threats, you threaten to sue people who do not like you using technical forums to advertise your programs.
You complain here about how people obviously aren't programmers because they disagree with you yet your language of choice is object pascal via Delphi, hardly the language of choice for an expert programmer and second only to pre-.NET Visual Basic for the horifically bad bloatware it results in.
Do us all a favour, quit posting anything to the internet, spend a few years updating your knowledge to learn a worthwhile language like C++, Java or one of the .NET languages. Get a clue about security and understand why your applications are a far bigger security risk than anything you talk of and finally, stop threatening to sue anyone you disagree with.