So, let me get this straight. We have an unknown person posting an unverified claim about a hacked bit of third party software not working, and some unknown sound problems with unknown hardware with unknown drivers on a beta operating system, and everyone is assuming this shows some great conspiracy to impose draconian DRM and prevent circumvention of sound recording?
This is flimsier than one of baldricks cunning plans!
It just goes to show, people will believe what they want to believe.
Could it be because DirectX is more feature full than OpenGL? Seriously, shader support in DirectX is light years ahead of OpenGL. If you're coding for a platform it's not a major issue, because the hardware is defined, but on a PC, DirectX is far and away the best abstraction layer if you don't want your games to be limited to either NVidia or ATI, and still use the full power of those cards.
Then your apps are written wrong. If your apps follow the rules, they should work on Vista. Word 2.0 runs on Vista, so there's no good reason why any old software should run on Vista, unless it was playing fast and loose with rules, that it just happened to get away with before.
Not true. UAC uses a "secure desktop", which is when the screen dims, which effectively runs on a separate session precisely to prevent messages being sent to it from other apps
I agree. I found the reasoning in the article iffy. What the article seemed to be implying was that the most improbable thing you can quote is no more improbable than the probability of an article being wrong. This is clearly nonsense.
When you state that an article is wrong, you must also quantify how wrong it is. Clearly being a factor of 2 wrong in your calculations is much more likely that being a factor of 10 out. The chance of being several orders of magnitude wrong, as one would have to be to bring the LHC risks to worrying levels are vanishingly small.
Interestingly of course, this article suffers from the same problem. It may well be the one in a thousand that has to be withdrawn.
Anyone who thinks Windows 7 is anything more than a Service Pack for Vista needs to get their head examined. Why do you think your Vista drivers work in Windows 7?
Could it be for the same reason that windows 2000 drivers largely work on XP, that is, microsoft care about backwards compatability, and the driver model is fairly stable?
Besides, MS started writing windows 7 back in 2006, so it's 2 years from then to the beta, plus probably 10 months to RTM. Bear in mind that at least one reason why vista took so long was the massive security rework that took place for XP SP2 and diverted most of the development effort from Vista I know linux tends to break driver compatibility with minor revisions, but that doesn't mean all minor revisions have to break driver compatibility.
Windows 7 is massively more than a service pack, as it contains new functionality, which automatically means it's not a service pack. It probably isn't really enough to call it a major release, and instead it's more of a point release, but that's a marketing decision, and probably the right one to draw a line under vista.
Your childish rant is obviously suitable for the majority/. audience, but it's pretty far off base.
It will be when they charge you more, or they start charging based upon how much data you use, instead of the maximum peak bandwidth of your connection. You could argue that data volume charging is fairer anyway.
Maybe, but few of us have been actually paying enough to actually cover the cost of providing that full bandwidth 24/7.
The ISPs assume that their customers will only use the peak bandwidth very occasionally, so that upstream they only have to provide enough bandwidth so that, on average, they are able to meet the minimum service levels. If the amount of bandwidth customers actually use rises dramatically the ISP will have to add a lot of extra capacity (and charge people for it) or introduce bandwidth caps.
Is this the "report" which shows no performance difference between Vista and 7?
Frankly, that report, which received wide coverage, was totally full of crap. A new OS will not magically give your PC applications more CPU power, RAM or any other performance boosts. It could, however make things worse, by having poor I/O performance. Honestly, if a pre-beta version of windows 7 had equal performance to a release version then it shows they're on the right track. The other thing is that the report glossed over the responsiveness of the new UI, and implied it was a trick of sort, to make the OS appear faster. Well, duh! How else do you measure speed of a UI if not how responsive it is to user interaction? The UI of windows 7 is smooth and responsive, which was the primary problem with Vista. Applications perform just fine in Vista, it's just that the start menu and other UI aspects of the OS appear laboured and sluggish.
The big problem is that OEM vista installs suck big time. I don't know how they've done it, but all the crapware and dodgy drivers they end up installing on the vista install slow it to a crawl, whereas a clean retail version install works fine, so long as you have enough RAM.
Why not? NT is based upon VMS, and has much lower thread start-up overhead than Unix (although slightly greater process overhead). The IPC is very similar. The thing with parallel programming is the language, not the platform, and functional languages like Haskell and F# are making a great deal of progress, it's just that we developers need to learn the new way of thinking.
I've been using Vista 64 for 18 months or so, both at home and at work and I think you should trust 64 bit Windows. It's very good, and as long as you can get drivers for your hardware (initially a problem, but not so much any more). As far as software compatibility goes, it's pretty good. The only difficulty I've had is with some video codecs and overclocking software which needs to install low level drivers. Graphics drivers were iffy for a while, but they're fine now.
Anecdotally, I've observed that people who have installed Vista 64 are much happier with it than those with 32, but that may have more to do with clean user installs against crapware infected OEM installs.
I hope that Windows 7 will be 64bit only, or at least 64 bit by default
The specs are available, and the source code, well, you can write that yourself. You have that freedom, which is the ultimate freedom, and can get involved with moonlight.
I'm sorry. I simply have no respect for your cry of "freedom" because it sounds too much like "I'm too cheap to pay for your hard work, and I'm too lazy to do it myself"
Roughly 98% of internet users will be running Windows or Mac, both of which have official Silverlight implementations, and the install is 5Mb and unbelievably easy. I guess that silverlight for Windows Mobile is either available or soon will be, and probably iPhone too.
Why would they bother? They'd have to bend over backwards to implement something for just a couple of percent of internet users, who probably won't use it anyway simply because Microsoft wrote it.
Why does this matter? Get some pragmatism, because we're talking about web sites, which just render and present data, not mission critical servers that need to run for 10 years or more.
And why is this a problem? We're talking about websites that will be changed and re-written regularly, not business critical servers that need to be available for 10 years, and honestly, when was the last time you went delving into the source code for any media codec? Of course, it's not like the flash player is OSS either, and if anything it's less OSS friendly than silverlight.
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So, let me get this straight. We have an unknown person posting an unverified claim about a hacked bit of third party software not working, and some unknown sound problems with unknown hardware with unknown drivers on a beta operating system, and everyone is assuming this shows some great conspiracy to impose draconian DRM and prevent circumvention of sound recording?
This is flimsier than one of baldricks cunning plans!
It just goes to show, people will believe what they want to believe.
Last I checked Kylie was a girls name, so I don't think your accusation against MJ is entirely fair.
That's awesome. In one month the time limited beta OS got almost as much market share (1%) as linux has (1.6%) in however many years.
Could it be because DirectX is more feature full than OpenGL? Seriously, shader support in DirectX is light years ahead of OpenGL. If you're coding for a platform it's not a major issue, because the hardware is defined, but on a PC, DirectX is far and away the best abstraction layer if you don't want your games to be limited to either NVidia or ATI, and still use the full power of those cards.
Then your apps are written wrong. If your apps follow the rules, they should work on Vista.
Word 2.0 runs on Vista, so there's no good reason why any old software should run on Vista, unless it was playing fast and loose with rules, that it just happened to get away with before.
As Raymond Chen would put it, "It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway"
This is probably the real point of UAC. To get developers to write software that doesn't need admin rights
Not true. UAC uses a "secure desktop", which is when the screen dims, which effectively runs on a separate session precisely to prevent messages being sent to it from other apps
I agree. I found the reasoning in the article iffy.
What the article seemed to be implying was that the most improbable thing you can quote is no more improbable than the probability of an article being wrong. This is clearly nonsense.
When you state that an article is wrong, you must also quantify how wrong it is. Clearly being a factor of 2 wrong in your calculations is much more likely that being a factor of 10 out. The chance of being several orders of magnitude wrong, as one would have to be to bring the LHC risks to worrying levels are vanishingly small.
Interestingly of course, this article suffers from the same problem. It may well be the one in a thousand that has to be withdrawn.
What if you forget, or need to travel at short notice?
Anyone who thinks Windows 7 is anything more than a Service Pack for Vista needs to get their head examined. Why do you think your Vista drivers work in Windows 7?
Could it be for the same reason that windows 2000 drivers largely work on XP, that is, microsoft care about backwards compatability, and the driver model is fairly stable?
Besides, MS started writing windows 7 back in 2006, so it's 2 years from then to the beta, plus probably 10 months to RTM. Bear in mind that at least one reason why vista took so long was the massive security rework that took place for XP SP2 and diverted most of the development effort from Vista
I know linux tends to break driver compatibility with minor revisions, but that doesn't mean all minor revisions have to break driver compatibility.
Windows 7 is massively more than a service pack, as it contains new functionality, which automatically means it's not a service pack. It probably isn't really enough to call it a major release, and instead it's more of a point release, but that's a marketing decision, and probably the right one to draw a line under vista.
Your childish rant is obviously suitable for the majority /. audience, but it's pretty far off base.
It will be when they charge you more, or they start charging based upon how much data you use, instead of the maximum peak bandwidth of your connection. You could argue that data volume charging is fairer anyway.
Maybe, but few of us have been actually paying enough to actually cover the cost of providing that full bandwidth 24/7.
The ISPs assume that their customers will only use the peak bandwidth very occasionally, so that upstream they only have to provide enough bandwidth so that, on average, they are able to meet the minimum service levels. If the amount of bandwidth customers actually use rises dramatically the ISP will have to add a lot of extra capacity (and charge people for it) or introduce bandwidth caps.
Is this the "report" which shows no performance difference between Vista and 7?
Frankly, that report, which received wide coverage, was totally full of crap. A new OS will not magically give your PC applications more CPU power, RAM or any other performance boosts. It could, however make things worse, by having poor I/O performance. Honestly, if a pre-beta version of windows 7 had equal performance to a release version then it shows they're on the right track. The other thing is that the report glossed over the responsiveness of the new UI, and implied it was a trick of sort, to make the OS appear faster. Well, duh! How else do you measure speed of a UI if not how responsive it is to user interaction? The UI of windows 7 is smooth and responsive, which was the primary problem with Vista. Applications perform just fine in Vista, it's just that the start menu and other UI aspects of the OS appear laboured and sluggish.
The big problem is that OEM vista installs suck big time. I don't know how they've done it, but all the crapware and dodgy drivers they end up installing on the vista install slow it to a crawl, whereas a clean retail version install works fine, so long as you have enough RAM.
Why not? NT is based upon VMS, and has much lower thread start-up overhead than Unix (although slightly greater process overhead). The IPC is very similar. The thing with parallel programming is the language, not the platform, and functional languages like Haskell and F# are making a great deal of progress, it's just that we developers need to learn the new way of thinking.
I've been using Vista 64 for 18 months or so, both at home and at work and I think you should trust 64 bit Windows. It's very good, and as long as you can get drivers for your hardware (initially a problem, but not so much any more). As far as software compatibility goes, it's pretty good. The only difficulty I've had is with some video codecs and overclocking software which needs to install low level drivers. Graphics drivers were iffy for a while, but they're fine now.
Anecdotally, I've observed that people who have installed Vista 64 are much happier with it than those with 32, but that may have more to do with clean user installs against crapware infected OEM installs.
I hope that Windows 7 will be 64bit only, or at least 64 bit by default
But even if they did, no OSS zealot would use it because it was M$
The specs are available, and the source code, well, you can write that yourself. You have that freedom, which is the ultimate freedom, and can get involved with moonlight.
I'm sorry. I simply have no respect for your cry of "freedom" because it sounds too much like "I'm too cheap to pay for your hard work, and I'm too lazy to do it myself"
Roughly 98% of internet users will be running Windows or Mac, both of which have official Silverlight implementations, and the install is 5Mb and unbelievably easy. I guess that silverlight for Windows Mobile is either available or soon will be, and probably iPhone too.
Why would they bother? They'd have to bend over backwards to implement something for just a couple of percent of internet users, who probably won't use it anyway simply because Microsoft wrote it.
Yes, if you willing to only reach 98% of all computer users out there, go ahead, use Silverlight! See if we care!
Then why the hell are you spending your time moaning about the non-existence of something you don't want????
Why does this matter? Get some pragmatism, because we're talking about web sites, which just render and present data, not mission critical servers that need to run for 10 years or more.
And why is this a problem? We're talking about websites that will be changed and re-written regularly, not business critical servers that need to be available for 10 years, and honestly, when was the last time you went delving into the source code for any media codec? Of course, it's not like the flash player is OSS either, and if anything it's less OSS friendly than silverlight.