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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."
Only 2 more service packs until it's stable.
I suppose it's true to the idea that 7 is "just a Vista service pack," but still seems odd.
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.
I seriously doubt that they did a full regression test that quickly. More likely, they tested the areas which had recently failed tests, and were recently fixed.
That's how we do it at my work. Our product has around 90,000 test points that are tested in each 3 month release cycle. A full regression test takes approx 2 months. As bugs are found, they are fixed, and the fix is tested while the full regression test continues. The last month only fixes are tested.
Does this mean that they run the clock 10 minutes fast on the build machine to make them feel like they are ahead of the game ?
Nullius in verba
Not at all. Vista has taken the punches, got a fat lip and two black eyes - so Microsoft rebrands it and it loses the bad name of Vista. I just installed Windows 7 RC - and it's nicer. There is new programming under the hood, particularly the UI and feels speedier - although I have to question whether that speed was all a result of improved programming or attribute some to the fact that it was a clean install of Windows erasing a cluttered and used OEM Vista install.
But given the driver model is the same, the lack of noticeable bumps on the alpha, beta, and RC compared to Vista woes - I can only assume it's really a service pack with an UI overhaul. Which is okay; Ubuntu and OS X both operate on the idea of short upgrade cycles that allows them to focus on goals and be a lot more evolutionary in a short time instead of trying to be revolutionary (longhorn) and failing miserably.
I just don't like paying full price as if this were brand new windows. Ubuntu is free and OS X license is relatively cheap, especially family packs. I'll pay $50 for Windows 7 as a 2-3 year upgrade to Vista, but don't forsee $100 as being inherently fair at all.
IANAMFB (I am not a Microsoft fan-boy), but I have to admit that so far, it looks like it is at least a bit exciting (especially from the rock-solid RC). Pretty much what Vista should have been.
As a true technologist, I try to stay technology-agnostic because good things often come out of the strangest places. Truthfully, many flavors of Linux are great, Mac OS is great, and Windows 7 looks like it should be great. Considering all these various flavors of greatness, I'd say it's still as good a time as any to be a techie! Maybe I'm just tired of all the negative slant the world puts on everything and am being overly optimistic.
Let's enjoy this new tech, welcome it, evaluate it and let it find its place in our toolbox, like every other tool before.
Discuss freely.
6d
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.
So lets see here. UAC was changed, thats no different than changing SELinux or Apparmor on Ubuntu, not a major change. Modular design, again, not a huge change just severed a few ties between IE and core system libraries. Ok, so there are a few new APIs, still, not a huge change. As for performance? That should be natural progress of development.
Regardless, it isn't a radical change. Just a code cleanup.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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."
Wrong. Changing the specification (the "design flaw") is a change in version.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Anyone worth half a karma point here will recognise 16384 as a power of two.
In my years of software development, numbers like this jump out at you, usually while debugging something that has crashed due to overwriting something, and suspicious powers of two just scream 'BUG' at me.
Perhaps this move to manufacturing has simply been caused by microsoft not allocating enough bits in the build number, and one more recompile has tripped the manufacturing release...
struct BuildNumber
{
int IncrementalVersion : 14;
int ReleaseToManufacturing : 1;
int FinallyBugFree : 1;
}
(and if this really is the source code, we'll have to wait until release 32768 for a bug free version, assuming we don't hit -32768 first)
Windows 7 hits, RTFM
There, fixed that for you.
#DeleteChrome
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.
Win7 is lighter on system resources, to be sure, but the real catch was the OEM bit. OEM Vista installations were uniformly absolute shit. All kinds of pre-installed crap that ran at startup (including things which are practically impossible to cleanly remove, like Norton Internet shitware), some truly retarded default settings (yes, worse than the Microsoft defaults), and poorly-tested replacements for Microsoft binaries (usually functionally the same, but OEM branded and typically shadowing or outright removing the built-in software) made the OS run MUCH worse than a clean install on the same hardware would. Hardware troubles and beta drivers aside, I have not (in almost 3 years since RTM) seen Vista BSOD or otherwise catastrophically fail on a clean install. Yes, it happens on OEM copies. It would might happen if you installed a trojan or something retarded like that. Barring such stupidity, however, Vista is an extremely stable OS that performs quite acceptably on systems with 1 GB of RAM and a 1.8GHz single-core CPU (my initial Vista machine, a laptop over a year old by Vista's RTM).
That said, Win7 is definitely a major improvement in many areas. Vista, especially at RTM, really did have some truly stupid bugs.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
You realize DirectAccess is just a machine level VPN rather than a VPN controlled by the user ... right?
You realize that having that connection always on is not a good thing when you get infected with some silly virus that wants to probe everything it can talk to and infect, right?
There are about 50 billion reasons why this is a retarded idea, and about 3 for why its good. Considering VPNs can be configured to auto connect already its really silly that you're all excited over another VPN package made by MS, which has traditionally had an absolutely shitty track record for providing a secure connection.
So go ahead, be excited that you have Direct Access, but just try to get a clue and realize its just another form of VPN which you need to watch for security issues and requires you to be locked into MS due to the use of a non-standard protocol.
Go read up on IPSEC if you'd like to catch up to how everyone could do this 10 years ago, including Windows with 3rd party software.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
It's funny that whenever linux or FreeBSD removes a Giant lock it's hailed as major news here, like the transition from 2.4 to 2.6 because they are actually huge leaps forward. However, when MS does it it is just regarded as a bug fix. Essentially, all code is just a bug fix then, as it's all written one line at a time and relies on the the years of work to the code base that preceded it.
There are huge improvements on Windows 7, like multitouch support, etc. It's a really nice OS akin to XP. The problem with the zealots is that they create a list of complaints about MS and then when they fix it, you guys complain even more. MS actually pays their devs salary so they have to charge for their OS. Suck it up, if you don't want to buy it don't.
IMHO, the RC is more stable than Vista. I've been using it as my primary dev platform since a few weeks after it was released, and have had no BSODs yet even running mostly Vista drivers with it. It's rock solid and FAST and the new features are definite improvements.
But the commitment to quality that is present in Win7 and was sorely lacking in Vista should be applauded by all.
If anyone in the dev community has seen further, it is because we stood on the shoulders of giants.