Slashdot Mirror
Windows 7 Hits RTM At Build 7600.16385
An anonymous reader links to Ars Technica's report that (quoting) "Microsoft today announced that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have hit the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) milestone. The software giant still has a lot of work to do, but the bigger responsibility now falls to OEMs that must get PCs ready, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that are testing their new apps, and Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) that are preparing their new hardware. The RTM build is 7600, but it is not the same one that leaked less than two weeks ago (7600.16384). We speculated that Microsoft may end up recompiling build 7600 until it is satisfied, but it only took the company one more shot to get it right: 7600.16385 is the final build number. Microsoft refused to share the full build string, but if you trust leaks from a few days ago, it's '6.1.7600.16385.090713-1255,' which indicates that the final build was compiled over a week ago: July 13, 2009, at 12:45pm. This would be in line with the rumored RTM date but it is also the day Microsoft stated that Windows 7 had not yet hit RTM. Although the final build had been compiled, Microsoft still had to put it through testing before christening it as RTM."
English version will be available from Technet on August 6th.
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windows7/archive/2009/07/21/when-will-you-get-windows-7-rtm.aspx
Just like XP was a service pack for 2000 (XP is 5.1), nothing new here, same old Microsoft.
Do you D?
A fair few really stupid installers actually did this:
if (MajorVersion>5) and (MinorVersion>1) then { // compatible with Windows XP or later
}
Which is fine for 5.1 and 6.1, but crapped out in Vista (6.0), and would crap out if Windows 7 was 7.0 - so, 6.1. That's actually why.
Because it is a troll; there are changes in the core, many, now there are not as many dependencies and it features a modular design (check the add and remove windows features dialog, you can get rid of everything there and leave only the core os); also UAC was changed, the ribbon is included in the core as an API, performance was enhanced so much that it can run on old Pentium CPUs and netbooks, etc. etc. In fact the thing that less changed was the UI (Still using the same glass Windows).
Do you even know what changed?
Microsoft has greatly approved their testing process, with automated regression testing on literally thousands of machines. Full regression tests that used to take 3 weeks now take 4 days, with three of those days being failure investigation. You can read the Windows 7 team blogs for information on the process, but one key component is that daily builds off the main branch should be of very high quality, as close to release quality as feasable. This, along with the improved testing, allows regression tests to be run on virtually all desired interim builds and integrations, so that by the time RTM testing is hit, there are very few surprises.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-graphics-desktop-multicore-cpu,7643.html In Windows Vista, a single application could hold a system-wide lock on the GDI, basically creating a bottleneck, especially if there are other applications waiting in line to access the graphics stack. While such a design decision may have been okay in the past, it's been re-engineered for Windows 7. "This work also resulted in better rendering performance of concurrent GDI applications on multi-core CPUs. Multi-core Windows PCs benefit from these changes as more than one application can now be rendering at the same time," Chitre said, adding that the improvements worked to reduce response time issues. "Without the Windows 7 GDI concurrency, the rendering throughput of these applications is effectively limited to the performance of a single CPU core. Since only a single application can acquire the global exclusive lock while the others are waiting, this scenario doesn't benefit from multiple CPU cores. This demonstrates that GDI applications in Windows 7 are now much less dependent on one another."
IIRC, they also offloaded most of the GDI rendering to the GPU. In Windows XP and previous, all drawing and compositing was done on the CPU. Vista added GPU compositing, but which is what Vista uses to implement the frosted-glass effect. The problem is that, since drawing was still done by the CPU and the system does compositing on the GPU, it keeps two complete GDI buffers for each window. On laptops where most integrated cards use system memory this was doubling the amount of system memory required for the GDI. Windows 7 changes this so that both compositing and drawing are done on the GPU, eliminating the need for a CPU window buffer. One of the things this does is cut total memory consumption in half, and eliminates CPU memory consumption by the GDI subsystem entirely. The other advantage is power- Vista's use of the GPU for compositing means more recent graphics chips are much better behaved when it comes to power consumption than they used to be. By doing the drawing and compositing on the GPU, Win7 doesn't draw as much power on modern laptops since the GPU can do that for less power than the CPU.
I have Win7 RC installed and I haven't experienced this. My monitors are connected with standard DVI, and don't support HDCP. The Vista/Win7 protected path isn't even enabled unless you're playing Blu-Ray (not DVD). Your problem is most likely caused by a bug in pre-release video drivers or in Windows Media Player. WMP has had some of its codecs rewritten.
Windows xp went RTM August 24, 2001 so not exactly ten years ago but with XP IPSec VPNs have been supported from the beginning. I hate to sound like a prick but when coming up against such sheer ignorance its hard not to.
1. IPsec requires a ton of ports being available and open which just isn't the case as often anymore when going to a hotel. Hence why a lot of corporations are looking at things like SSL-VPNS. Direct access overcomes this limitation by tunneling all their IPv6 traffic in standard HTTPS packets which is pretty universally allowed.
2. You can configure your vpn to connect to automatically but what if i have a public web server that I want to connect to and split DNS (or DNS client views) so the internal and external zones are the same. I don't want my stupid VPN client trying to connect every time I go to www.slashdot.org with direct access you specify internal zones or internal servers that it should connect for while allowing it to route all other traffic normally.
3. Microsoft's best practices on direct access say to use Network Access Protection to isolate the clients and force security scans just like most modern VPN clients except now its completely transparent to the user which saves time and money.