SAN FRANCISCO, Redmond, Friday (UnGadget) — With Vista just out the door, Microsoft is drawing up plans to deliver its followup, Windows 7, codenamed Vienna, by the end of 2009. That would be a much faster turn-around than Vista, which shipped more than five years after Windows XP.
Vista's uptake has been stupendous, with copies flying off the shelves and midnight queues on release day turning into major street riots, with police deploying water cannons and rubber bullets, to rival the release scenes for the PlayStation 3. It is expected to give a significant boost to the computer hardware industry, per the Mended Windows Theory of economics. But Vienna aims even higher.
"We have a radical vision for Vienna," says Ben Dover, corporate vice-marketer for development. "It's definitely the one to wait for. You should avoid buying any other operating system or even looking at them until you see Vienna... Except Vista, of course. That's pretty good. But Vienna is just so amazing. Wow! It's the most fantastic thing ever. Incredible. Mac OS 10.4 can't possibly hold a candle to it."
So what will be the coolest new feature in Vienna? According to Dover, that's still being worked out. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe it's hypervisors, or a new user interface paradigm for consumers, or rotating cubes like in XGL, or WinFS, which is definitely due to ship with Windows NT 4 in 1994. Or whatever Apple puts in Mac OS 10.6, really. Hell, I dunno. What's really shiny?"
The much-derided Digital Rights Management system in Vista will be worked over. "We'll be including user-downloadable 'tilt bits,' which you can configure to your own liking. It'll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, but of course that's only if you want to play premium content."
Independent blogger Wiki Jellff was incontinent in his praise. "I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will surely go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, that will be all fixed with $NEXT_VERSION. And they'll finally be ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF. Also there will be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It'll be awesome! I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION."
"It's too early for me to talk about it," added Dover. "But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."
It's not about the packaging format (deb vs rpm) or the package/repository manager (apt vs yum). It's about how well the repository is maintained. Fink on MacOS X uses apt/deb, and it's a horror. Debian takes great care with the quality of its repository. Ubuntu uses that Debian quality to build from; it's slightly flakier, but livably so for new candy.
"The third is a land mine in physics, waiting for young civilizations to liberate enough power to fry them. Heinlein did that one, it's a nasty one" Which Heinlein was that? (I don't disbelieve you, I just don't remember it.)
HOLLYHELL, Monday — In an admirable display of synergy between hard-headed business sense and sensitivity to artistic rightness, New Line Cinemas has hired Adam Sandler to direct The Hobbit, the prequel to The Lord Of The Rings.
"Peter Jackson may have made us three billion dollars and paved our goddamn driveways with Oscars," said a spokesdroid, "but when he dared question the three nickels and a gum wrapper payment, well. We knew we just couldn't work with someone so risibly unprofessional."
Sandler is likely to be working under renowned producer Uwe Boll. "Okay, here is what I am thinking, ja? Your Bilbo Baggins will be a WOMAN in Nazi Germany. A naked woman. And the One Ring will not show up. And she gets raped by Hitler! Gandalf will be played by Keanu Reeves. I AM THE DIRECTOR! I mean programmer. PRODUCER."
Jackson has lost weight, shaved his feet and gone back to his roots to make a warmhearted New Zealand-based family film in the style of his earliest works, under the working title Zombie Cancer Bukkake Pus-Nodules, with a budget in the range of over forty New Zealand dollars.
Work at New Line continues. "We at New Line are convinced that Professor Tolkien would have agreed with us that Adam Sandler will realise her artistic vision eleventy-one percent. We've bought three years' worth of shark futures."
"Wine needs a significant capital infusion if it will ever become truely viable in the commercial world... "
I think you've missed it's happening already. We have production software running on Wine on Red Hat because we really couldn't justify yet another unreliable Windows box there. This is for a years-old binary written by a company that long since went bust.
Wine is now of "beta" quality, i.e. it's more surprising when things don't work than when they do. Wine is already a better Windows than Vista is.
Note, by the way, that Wine on Linux does this better than Windows does - you can run different apps in their own wineserver process (Crossover calls this "bottles") where they can all see the Linux box but have separate drive trees and can't see each other except as you wish to let them.
Note also the careful evasion of answering on SpaceLikeWord95 and so forth why they didn't or couldn't define it in what's supposed to be the standard. This looks like a sore point for them.
If you consistently report breakages, they are likely to get attention. Wine is still at "interesting beta" stage, but for non-cutting-edge applications, I'm still more likely to be surprised by a Windows app not working than surprised by it working.
(Still hanging out for Mono to support.NET 2 and Wine to support VC++ 8. Bloody annoying.)
It's still crappy at present, but Direct3D support in Wine is advancing in leaps and bounds. They're close to finishing D3D 8 and 9 and are starting on D3D 10 and 10.1.
I'm amazed how much Windows software really does Just Work in current Wine.
Excellent. We need more companies who understand they can do well by doing good.
(We just got a Netgear WG602T wifi access point yesterday. It includes a note that the product includes GPL and LGPL code, a URL to get the source code, the full text of the GPL and the source code on the driver CD. I'll be emailing them a happy customer note congratulating them on their good taste and good behaviour. I'm sure they're far from perfect, but you get good behaviour by being encouraging when it happens.)
Wine is currently supporting most of DirectX 8 and 9 - look at the two-weekly releases, it's advancing in leaps and bounds - and is starting work on 10 now. At this rate, Wine will support DirectX 10 before the Vista drivers actually work properly.
We're talking about broad focus here. I think I can put it in a sentence:
Good interfaces are friendly to both technophobes and geeks.
Ubuntu is a winner because it treats newbie confusion as a reportable bug that needs fixing. That's its big win over Debian, who (love 'em as we do) treat newbie confusion as a cue to supply pointers to manuals.
But that's just a start. The way to get there is to always make your interfaces technophobe-friendly but with depths to reward the geek.
Examples: MacOS X. LiveJournal. Firefox.
Every part of the system needs to be considered (or reconsidered) in terms of being obvious as well as deeply right.
MP3 (MPEG 1 Layer 3) and MPEG2 audio are pretty much the same, with slight differences in the profiles. MPEG2 is likely to sound slightly better at stream rates over 224kbps. Otherwise the decoders take the same amount of CPU.
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SAN FRANCISCO, Redmond, Friday (UnGadget) — With Vista just out the door, Microsoft is drawing up plans to deliver its followup, Windows 7, codenamed Vienna, by the end of 2009. That would be a much faster turn-around than Vista, which shipped more than five years after Windows XP.
Vista's uptake has been stupendous, with copies flying off the shelves and midnight queues on release day turning into major street riots, with police deploying water cannons and rubber bullets, to rival the release scenes for the PlayStation 3. It is expected to give a significant boost to the computer hardware industry, per the Mended Windows Theory of economics. But Vienna aims even higher.
"We have a radical vision for Vienna," says Ben Dover, corporate vice-marketer for development. "It's definitely the one to wait for. You should avoid buying any other operating system or even looking at them until you see Vienna ... Except Vista, of course. That's pretty good. But Vienna is just so amazing. Wow! It's the most fantastic thing ever. Incredible. Mac OS 10.4 can't possibly hold a candle to it."
So what will be the coolest new feature in Vienna? According to Dover, that's still being worked out. "We're going to look at a fundamental piece of enabling technology. Maybe it's hypervisors, or a new user interface paradigm for consumers, or rotating cubes like in XGL, or WinFS, which is definitely due to ship with Windows NT 4 in 1994. Or whatever Apple puts in Mac OS 10.6, really. Hell, I dunno. What's really shiny?"
The much-derided Digital Rights Management system in Vista will be worked over. "We'll be including user-downloadable 'tilt bits,' which you can configure to your own liking. It'll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, but of course that's only if you want to play premium content."
Independent blogger Wiki Jellff was incontinent in his praise. "I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will surely go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, that will be all fixed with $NEXT_VERSION. And they'll finally be ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF. Also there will be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It'll be awesome! I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION."
"It's too early for me to talk about it," added Dover. "But over the next few months I think you're going to start hearing more and more."
The whole reason I'm running Ubuntu is that my wife played Frozen Bubble at a friend's house and wanted it on her laptop at home. The whole reason!
It's not about the packaging format (deb vs rpm) or the package/repository manager (apt vs yum). It's about how well the repository is maintained. Fink on MacOS X uses apt/deb, and it's a horror. Debian takes great care with the quality of its repository. Ubuntu uses that Debian quality to build from; it's slightly flakier, but livably so for new candy.
"The third is a land mine in physics, waiting for young civilizations to liberate enough power to fry them. Heinlein did that one, it's a nasty one" Which Heinlein was that? (I don't disbelieve you, I just don't remember it.)
New Order did quite well at it, and own every note they ever recorded.
Yes. It's amazing how good a response you can get by asking nicely and not being a dick about something.
That could be the most frightening thing I've seen this week.
HOLLYHELL, Monday — In an admirable display of synergy between hard-headed business sense and sensitivity to artistic rightness, New Line Cinemas has hired Adam Sandler to direct The Hobbit, the prequel to The Lord Of The Rings.
"Peter Jackson may have made us three billion dollars and paved our goddamn driveways with Oscars," said a spokesdroid, "but when he dared question the three nickels and a gum wrapper payment, well. We knew we just couldn't work with someone so risibly unprofessional."
Sandler is likely to be working under renowned producer Uwe Boll. "Okay, here is what I am thinking, ja? Your Bilbo Baggins will be a WOMAN in Nazi Germany. A naked woman. And the One Ring will not show up. And she gets raped by Hitler! Gandalf will be played by Keanu Reeves. I AM THE DIRECTOR! I mean programmer. PRODUCER."
Jackson has lost weight, shaved his feet and gone back to his roots to make a warmhearted New Zealand-based family film in the style of his earliest works, under the working title Zombie Cancer Bukkake Pus-Nodules, with a budget in the range of over forty New Zealand dollars.
Work at New Line continues. "We at New Line are convinced that Professor Tolkien would have agreed with us that Adam Sandler will realise her artistic vision eleventy-one percent. We've bought three years' worth of shark futures."
You're not wrong. Wine is already a better Windows than Vista.
"Wine needs a significant capital infusion if it will ever become truely viable in the commercial world... "
I think you've missed it's happening already. We have production software running on Wine on Red Hat because we really couldn't justify yet another unreliable Windows box there. This is for a years-old binary written by a company that long since went bust.
Wine is now of "beta" quality, i.e. it's more surprising when things don't work than when they do. Wine is already a better Windows than Vista is.Was that XP or Vista? (I'd expect XP to do much better than Linux, since laptops have basically been tuned for it and it for them.)
Note, by the way, that Wine on Linux does this better than Windows does - you can run different apps in their own wineserver process (Crossover calls this "bottles") where they can all see the Linux box but have separate drive trees and can't see each other except as you wish to let them.
Note also the careful evasion of answering on SpaceLikeWord95 and so forth why they didn't or couldn't define it in what's supposed to be the standard. This looks like a sore point for them.
We need an embedded Mozilla in there as well for that.
Cancer's organic, isn't it? So's smallpox, ebola and bubonic plague.
If you consistently report breakages, they are likely to get attention. Wine is still at "interesting beta" stage, but for non-cutting-edge applications, I'm still more likely to be surprised by a Windows app not working than surprised by it working.
(Still hanging out for Mono to support .NET 2 and Wine to support VC++ 8. Bloody annoying.)
It's still crappy at present, but Direct3D support in Wine is advancing in leaps and bounds. They're close to finishing D3D 8 and 9 and are starting on D3D 10 and 10.1.
I'm amazed how much Windows software really does Just Work in current Wine.
(Hey, I laughed out loud.)
Excellent. We need more companies who understand they can do well by doing good.
(We just got a Netgear WG602T wifi access point yesterday. It includes a note that the product includes GPL and LGPL code, a URL to get the source code, the full text of the GPL and the source code on the driver CD. I'll be emailing them a happy customer note congratulating them on their good taste and good behaviour. I'm sure they're far from perfect, but you get good behaviour by being encouraging when it happens.)
Wine is currently supporting most of DirectX 8 and 9 - look at the two-weekly releases, it's advancing in leaps and bounds - and is starting work on 10 now. At this rate, Wine will support DirectX 10 before the Vista drivers actually work properly.
Wine: A better Windows than Vista!
What usually happens is that someone who does know how to file a bug report notices the n00b complaint and files one.
Good interfaces are friendly to both technophobes and geeks.
Ubuntu is a winner because it treats newbie confusion as a reportable bug that needs fixing. That's its big win over Debian, who (love 'em as we do) treat newbie confusion as a cue to supply pointers to manuals.
But that's just a start. The way to get there is to always make your interfaces technophobe-friendly but with depths to reward the geek.
Examples: MacOS X. LiveJournal. Firefox.
Every part of the system needs to be considered (or reconsidered) in terms of being obvious as well as deeply right.
The Microsoft stuff is bad documentation that looks good. As the Wine and ReactOS projects perennially discover, it tends to lie a lot.
MP3 (MPEG 1 Layer 3) and MPEG2 audio are pretty much the same, with slight differences in the profiles. MPEG2 is likely to sound slightly better at stream rates over 224kbps. Otherwise the decoders take the same amount of CPU.