I know. My point was that this wasn't much different than any other OS version increment, be it on Mac, Windows, or Linux. I wasn't trying to imply that the changes were extreme.
They are, however, vastly more significant than a service pack.
There are a lot of changes even in the core. Its quite significant actually. Its no WinXP compared to Vista, but its definately comparable to Win2k vs WinXP, or any Mac releases, and then some.
People thinking its equivalent to a service pack haven't fully looked at the extent of the changes.
Either you're being sarcastic, either you totally missed what SQL Server means in that context. If the later, I'll give you a hint. The S on Server is a capital letter for a reason.
I love Active Directory, but just a little amusing anecdote... The company I'm working for is a 100% Windows shop across the board, has desktops in the 6 figures, yet does NOT use Active Directory...
Their "forests" connect for business reasons to the domains of all of their clients, which makes the machines/accounts in the domain hit the millions...so well, to make that work better, they wrote their own "Active Directory" from scratch...its still running on Windows server, but its not an actual Active Directory(tm) kindda thing.
But yeah, replacing AD for the sake of replacing it, is retarded. Windows Server isn't even that expensive, and for smaller companies, you can get Small Business Server, which is really, really cheap for what it provides.
I'm Canadian too, and I'm well aware of the levy. Still, you're putting a lot more interpretation into this than the court did, and adding things to it (FTP = copying, not downloading!) than the court did. The only precedent that can directly 1:1 be applied is the one of the "I pay the levy, thus I am not guilty of downloading", and thats not in the law anywhere, which was my point.
And there's nowhere that is -CLEAR- that downloading is ok. Copying for private use is one thing, you'll still have to argue that downloading from a public site is still a private action. Good luck with that, you'll still need a lawyer. If it was THAT clear as the previous post stated in the law, you would not, the case would get thrown. Downloading is still a very very gray area. And even if you add P2P...the previous post said "ALL downloadings is OK, the law is CLEAR about that".
Its really not...all the law is clear about is that private copying is ok, which will still need to be debated on in court if you get sued, to which extent it goes. (and yes, I read the entire thing, not just what you posted).
No, the law isn't "clear". There is a legal precedent about it. The law didn't change, so if you get sued, your lawyer has to quote a precedent, not the law as written in the books.
Hey, I know its a fluke, but my 2 years old (the model is like 3-4 years old, I bought it right before it went out of production) samsung B&W laser printer that I got for 35$ on sale at Bestbuy came with a "driver" install disk and instruction to install it on Redhat and Suse (my short term history is fuzzy, but I beleive 3 years ago predates Ubuntu's rise into the mainstream?).
I've seen a scanner once that did too. So its -rare-, but it happens!
I know. And I've never seen it do so, even under extreme circonstances, so I really have trouble believing it did. It would be all over the place in bug reports and forum posts, which it isn't. So either they were using that API to mess up directly with the kernel in some unholy way, running as admin, or they're exaggerating =P
Men don't ask other men why they need a tool often, but when a woman asks for a tool, it's always "What for?" It's really #$@! irritating.
Coincidences, nothing to do with male or female. Its extremely frequent (I dare say closing on the majority...) that someone asks a question like "how do I do XYZ", when they're totally using the wrong method in the first place. Like, a PHP programmer asking on an ASP.NET forum "how do I loop through an array and output all the values" (using a dumb example here). The answer is "You don't, you use a repeater". In the same way, you wouldn't make a WMI script for hardware inventory, you'd go straight to the hardware inventory API. But just in case, people will ask "Why does it HAVE to use WMI?", just in case you're an old C++ dev who's used to do it that way.
Its extremely irritating when you know what you're doing, but its the exception more than the rule once you hit edge cases, so people will just start their question with "I know its a edge case/usually not the right way of doing it, but could I have some examples on how to do XYZ?!".
Lets call it "fitting it". The same way when a Windows dev who never touched Unix goes on a Unix newgroup for senior devs... they won't quite fit in at first =P
Your male friend who asked just got answered by someone else, or the same person was in a different mood, thats all.
But I don't think you'll argue with me that Windows programming is helluva more complicated than Linux/Unix, and unnecessarily so.
Oh yes I will argue with you over that:) You just have to get the parallels right. You can't go and compare the entirety of the API of Windows to a subset of Linux's...if you take all of the GUI APIs, the management APIs,.NET, Win32, etc, then just go and compare to the stuff the Linux kernel exposes... that doesn't work. Add the primary linux GUI environments, the various librairies, all of the integration issues, and you end up being in a fairly similar mess. Gnome alone is such a mess...
"But Gnome isn't part of Linux, you don't have to use it to code in Linux!", well, you don't have to use Win32, and while it tends to hide under many APIs, it is possible to dodge it, for example. The documentation is some of the best on the market (it has to be: if you have an MSDN subscription, and there's an issue with the API, they have to help you out fix your issue, debug your code, and give you patches if a supported API doesn't work as it should... so while part of the API isn't as well documented as others, they're pretty careful that its only the rare edge cases, because it will cost them if you fall on it and have a support subscription...
The old stuff isn't as good as the new, but its similar to what you said of Linux... some stuff gets forgotten and no one uses it anymore. Usually, if you still have to interface with it, its because of legacy code within the company, and that would be true regardless of OS.
Seriously though....NET isn't cross platform, and it costs to deploy on the server side (unless you use MONO, but thats uncommon). The top notch documentation and API is the ONLY reason it catches on at all. When it came out, it was "new", and very very different (especially C#), and broke a lot of stuff... people would have ditched it faster than you can say "Vista" if you couldn't pick it up in days with MSDN at your side.
You probably just didn't have time to get all of the tools that are standard in a Windows dev environment, while on Linux/Unix, as soon as you sit down in front of a box, you make sure everything you need is there, which is the same thing I do when I sit in front of a Windows box.
Over a third of the API is already depreciated (as far as I can tell), and there is an ever-shifting set of best practices standards. I can only imagine the hell a proper programmer endures in developing truly complex applications for.NET -- all I was doing was a few WMI calls and a database interface and I still crashed the kernel many times trying to figure out what to trap -- in many cases, error handling is mostly about creating a catch-all and then trying to break your code to see what is generated and then guessing what to trap accordingly.
Wow there cowboy... only a very small part of the API is deprecated, the best practices changed a bit once, and only had additions as new features popped, but didn't change much in years... if you crashed the -kernel-, you were using legacy APIs through.NET, not.NET itself, and error handling is very well documented for the most part, and doing a catch all is a (no offense, since.NET is obviously not your primary dev environment) noob way of doing things and is heavily warned against since version 1.
Maybe you fell in the ONE edgecase where it doesn't work well, but 95%+ (probably more) of it works flawlessly, is clearly documented and predictable...even if you go really deep. It becomes a bit more messy when you're interacting with separate products that just happen to have APIs coded in.NET (especially if its not the only language, and thus is probably coded by programmers who have no clue wtf they're doing), and its poorly done... Happens a lot. An example is the SSIS API (thats by Microsoft too), which is in.NET, but was clearly written by C++ gurus...so its a total fucking mess.
Just as a confirmation, this all happened to me, and I'm a Canadian born citizen and I'm white, and speak perfect english. So just so you know, it has nothing to do with you being naturalized. They just flag some people for whatever reason, then give them hell.
White or not doesn't matter anymore. The US is paranoid. I'm your every day Canadian white guy, with a typical full time job, living in a metro area... standard stuff... And about once every couple of times i travel, I get pulled to the side for interrogation when trying to cross the border, trying to get me to admit I want to illegally stay in the US or something.
I'm sure there's SOMETHING in their records flagging me as a potential threat, but I'm most definitely not "not-white". Eesh, like I'd -want- to stay in the US, especially now.
To add to that, you also don't want to WORK for a company that uses these tests, even if you successfully nail the offer. Since they reward cheaters, the entire company quickly gets filled by manipulative assholes.
At my last job, one of the most highly paid programmer was a compulsive liar. Out of curiosity, I googled up his resume, knowing him well enough to be able to tell the truth from not... It was extremely carefully crafted and full of lies that were difficult to disprove. (I realize most resumes are made to make the person look good, but that was pushed to the extreme). The hiring process of that company was mostly full of yes/no questions. "Do you know technology XYZ?" "Are you comfortable in working in ABC environment?" And having talked with him, he would never say he didn't know something, even when it was the case. All that in addition to these silly personality tests.
So these tests that "reward cheaters", they're a corporate culture more than anything. Avoid companies who use them at all cost.
Thats what the previous poster was saying. He said that companies can't be bothered with a process, instead relying entirely on the skill of individual developers... and since individual skill vary widely (and often time constraints prevent a company from hiring only "top tier" devs), they end up totally screwed. Without a proper process, junior programmers can take a good codebase and ruin it within days or weeks.
A lot of companies (the majority by far from my experience) don't even know what processes are available to them. Not even Agile or Scrum, never heard of CMM, nothing, zero. So they just code away and everything falls in the hand of a project manager... and when he invariably fail (without process, even the best will screw up), they push all the blame on said PM. Its awful.
At the very least, the free Word document viewer is free and runs in Wine. Its still silly though, since its from a web page (which I figured was your point)
It will run fine on much lower than that even. 256 megs of RAM is enough (though not officially supported, it works on my side) to boot without hitting swap file (barely mind you), and if all goes well with WARP10, even Aero will work on a 800 mhz CPU regardless of videocard (though it doesn't right now, its not done yet).
1 ghz with 1gb of ram is not low end when talking Windows 7.
Thats the bullshit of drivers looking directly at the OS version... No different from web developers doing shit like "IF IE7 -> work, else -> break" or some crap.
Windows 7 driver system is fully backward compatible with Vista, so its basically the only way for a Vista driver to not work in Win7... Then again, Nvidia is known for their epic fail.
No, you wouldn't. The minimum requirements for Vista are pretty darn close to what you need to get work done in the first place. And while Windows 7's requirements are the same as Windows Vista, it actually runs fine on a 256 megs machine...with Aero turned off, I'd dare say it runs faster than XP (the OS is a decent bit leaner). I'm watching it go as I'm typing this.
I would have to move all the apps, and data
If you have 100 machines, you have an image that you can push to all the desktops, and the data is on servers. You don't let all the important data locally on desktop, do you? Thats insane. If you did anyway, there's a wizard to transfer the data. And if you do it the hard way and upgrade the machines one by one, they keep the old data even if you do a clean install (the data will be in a folder on the C drive)
Will vista or win7 really increase security? If so, how?
By allowing much, MUCH more applications to run without needing to be administrator...
That said, its the same thing for every new Windows (or OS in general, for that matter...) releases. Companies upgrade once their OS isn't supported anymore and thats basically it. Where you work is all XP. Why did they upgrade to XP (assuming the company is more than a few years old)? WinNT and Win2k were just fine back then, no? Same reason.
That said, beyond the security implication, the real reason (and the same damn reason to upgrade from Win2k to XP) is that Vista and Win7 introduce APIs and integration features that aren't available in XP. So sooner or later, apps will start popping up requiring it. When you find out your vendor doesn't support XP anymore, you'll have to either switch or suffer the loss of productivity, and it is going to be a bit late by then.
But if its like basically all other company's, you're going to skip every other release (because upgrading every 3 years is a bit much...), and not even consider it until around SP2 of the second release... so its normal that your company isn't thinking about it right now. At least, until the server gets upgraded to Win2008, and the sysadmin looks at the new management and integration features and start pushing, that is...
Oh yeah, 900 mhz is more than enough. WARP10 (the DirectX10 software renderer...so you can use Aero without a good videocard...not in the beta yet as far as I can tell, I'm just using it as an example) needs 800 mhz... so without that, you're well beyond what it will need, especially with 1.2gb of RAM.
please, if you do so, come back and share your impressions. i'm more inclined to trust fellow slashdotters than the people of PCMag/PCWorld or the Vista fanbois of other forums.
Then I need to still give full disclosure: I -am- a senior.NET software developer for a close Microsoft partner (though its a company that does NOT operate directly in the IT/Software field). So I am potentially still biaised. If it helps, I used to hate Microsoft like the plague and ran Linux only for years, long before Ubuntu and other friendly distros were out, so its not like I'm COMPLETELY clueless:)
Anyway, since my install is in a VM, I just tried simply reducing RAM to 256 megs. So it isn't completly representative since I do have a Core 2 Duo 3ghz and the VM is runnning with hardware virtualization enabled, so its not really a low end system, but people always complained about RAM bottleneck in Vista, never CPU, so it should still be interesting. Also on a VM I can't use Aero, but 1) Win7's Aero uses about half the memory of Vista's, and 2) you wouldn't use Aero anyway on such a limited system.
End result: the system does NOT swap on a clean boot, though with superfetch and other stuff enabled it does use up almost all of the RAM. Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Media player, are very responsive. It is most definately usuable, and I'd dare say its running "great".
By the way, if you use it on a tablet PC, they vastly improved the touchscreen support (not all of the new stuff is in, and without a multi touch screen you wouldn't be able to use it all anyway, but its still pretty cool). The writing recognition is better (the examples they give you to test it is with mathematical equations, and its as close to perfect as one could expect with today's technology).
If your tablet PC has 128 megs, I'm sure it will "Work", but that won't be comfy...well, let me try it i guess!
Slashdot Mirror
I know. My point was that this wasn't much different than any other OS version increment, be it on Mac, Windows, or Linux. I wasn't trying to imply that the changes were extreme.
They are, however, vastly more significant than a service pack.
There are a lot of changes even in the core. Its quite significant actually. Its no WinXP compared to Vista, but its definately comparable to Win2k vs WinXP, or any Mac releases, and then some.
People thinking its equivalent to a service pack haven't fully looked at the extent of the changes.
Either you're being sarcastic, either you totally missed what SQL Server means in that context. If the later, I'll give you a hint. The S on Server is a capital letter for a reason.
I love Active Directory, but just a little amusing anecdote... The company I'm working for is a 100% Windows shop across the board, has desktops in the 6 figures, yet does NOT use Active Directory...
Their "forests" connect for business reasons to the domains of all of their clients, which makes the machines/accounts in the domain hit the millions...so well, to make that work better, they wrote their own "Active Directory" from scratch...its still running on Windows server, but its not an actual Active Directory(tm) kindda thing.
But yeah, replacing AD for the sake of replacing it, is retarded. Windows Server isn't even that expensive, and for smaller companies, you can get Small Business Server, which is really, really cheap for what it provides.
I'm Canadian too, and I'm well aware of the levy. Still, you're putting a lot more interpretation into this than the court did, and adding things to it (FTP = copying, not downloading!) than the court did. The only precedent that can directly 1:1 be applied is the one of the "I pay the levy, thus I am not guilty of downloading", and thats not in the law anywhere, which was my point.
And there's nowhere that is -CLEAR- that downloading is ok. Copying for private use is one thing, you'll still have to argue that downloading from a public site is still a private action. Good luck with that, you'll still need a lawyer. If it was THAT clear as the previous post stated in the law, you would not, the case would get thrown. Downloading is still a very very gray area. And even if you add P2P...the previous post said "ALL downloadings is OK, the law is CLEAR about that".
Its really not...all the law is clear about is that private copying is ok, which will still need to be debated on in court if you get sued, to which extent it goes. (and yes, I read the entire thing, not just what you posted).
No, the law isn't "clear". There is a legal precedent about it. The law didn't change, so if you get sued, your lawyer has to quote a precedent, not the law as written in the books.
Hey, I know its a fluke, but my 2 years old (the model is like 3-4 years old, I bought it right before it went out of production) samsung B&W laser printer that I got for 35$ on sale at Bestbuy came with a "driver" install disk and instruction to install it on Redhat and Suse (my short term history is fuzzy, but I beleive 3 years ago predates Ubuntu's rise into the mainstream?).
I've seen a scanner once that did too. So its -rare-, but it happens!
Especially if you use Sleep, or to a lesser extent, Hibernate... a pseudo-boot time of 2.5 seconds is much nicer than 21 :)
I know. And I've never seen it do so, even under extreme circonstances, so I really have trouble believing it did. It would be all over the place in bug reports and forum posts, which it isn't. So either they were using that API to mess up directly with the kernel in some unholy way, running as admin, or they're exaggerating =P
Coincidences, nothing to do with male or female. Its extremely frequent (I dare say closing on the majority...) that someone asks a question like "how do I do XYZ", when they're totally using the wrong method in the first place. Like, a PHP programmer asking on an ASP.NET forum "how do I loop through an array and output all the values" (using a dumb example here). The answer is "You don't, you use a repeater". In the same way, you wouldn't make a WMI script for hardware inventory, you'd go straight to the hardware inventory API. But just in case, people will ask "Why does it HAVE to use WMI?", just in case you're an old C++ dev who's used to do it that way.
Its extremely irritating when you know what you're doing, but its the exception more than the rule once you hit edge cases, so people will just start their question with "I know its a edge case/usually not the right way of doing it, but could I have some examples on how to do XYZ?!".
Lets call it "fitting it". The same way when a Windows dev who never touched Unix goes on a Unix newgroup for senior devs... they won't quite fit in at first =P
Your male friend who asked just got answered by someone else, or the same person was in a different mood, thats all.
Oh yes I will argue with you over that :) You just have to get the parallels right. You can't go and compare the entirety of the API of Windows to a subset of Linux's...if you take all of the GUI APIs, the management APIs, .NET, Win32, etc, then just go and compare to the stuff the Linux kernel exposes... that doesn't work. Add the primary linux GUI environments, the various librairies, all of the integration issues, and you end up being in a fairly similar mess. Gnome alone is such a mess...
"But Gnome isn't part of Linux, you don't have to use it to code in Linux!", well, you don't have to use Win32, and while it tends to hide under many APIs, it is possible to dodge it, for example. The documentation is some of the best on the market (it has to be: if you have an MSDN subscription, and there's an issue with the API, they have to help you out fix your issue, debug your code, and give you patches if a supported API doesn't work as it should... so while part of the API isn't as well documented as others, they're pretty careful that its only the rare edge cases, because it will cost them if you fall on it and have a support subscription...
The old stuff isn't as good as the new, but its similar to what you said of Linux... some stuff gets forgotten and no one uses it anymore. Usually, if you still have to interface with it, its because of legacy code within the company, and that would be true regardless of OS.
Seriously though... .NET isn't cross platform, and it costs to deploy on the server side (unless you use MONO, but thats uncommon). The top notch documentation and API is the ONLY reason it catches on at all. When it came out, it was "new", and very very different (especially C#), and broke a lot of stuff... people would have ditched it faster than you can say "Vista" if you couldn't pick it up in days with MSDN at your side.
You probably just didn't have time to get all of the tools that are standard in a Windows dev environment, while on Linux/Unix, as soon as you sit down in front of a box, you make sure everything you need is there, which is the same thing I do when I sit in front of a Windows box.
Wow there cowboy... only a very small part of the API is deprecated, the best practices changed a bit once, and only had additions as new features popped, but didn't change much in years... if you crashed the -kernel-, you were using legacy APIs through .NET, not .NET itself, and error handling is very well documented for the most part, and doing a catch all is a (no offense, since .NET is obviously not your primary dev environment) noob way of doing things and is heavily warned against since version 1.
Maybe you fell in the ONE edgecase where it doesn't work well, but 95%+ (probably more) of it works flawlessly, is clearly documented and predictable...even if you go really deep. It becomes a bit more messy when you're interacting with separate products that just happen to have APIs coded in .NET (especially if its not the only language, and thus is probably coded by programmers who have no clue wtf they're doing), and its poorly done... Happens a lot. An example is the SSIS API (thats by Microsoft too), which is in .NET, but was clearly written by C++ gurus...so its a total fucking mess.
Just as a confirmation, this all happened to me, and I'm a Canadian born citizen and I'm white, and speak perfect english. So just so you know, it has nothing to do with you being naturalized. They just flag some people for whatever reason, then give them hell.
White or not doesn't matter anymore. The US is paranoid. I'm your every day Canadian white guy, with a typical full time job, living in a metro area... standard stuff... And about once every couple of times i travel, I get pulled to the side for interrogation when trying to cross the border, trying to get me to admit I want to illegally stay in the US or something.
I'm sure there's SOMETHING in their records flagging me as a potential threat, but I'm most definitely not "not-white". Eesh, like I'd -want- to stay in the US, especially now.
Does it actually -replace- the I95 though? Some info in there is specific to each and every travel...so does it replace it, or is it additional?
To add to that, you also don't want to WORK for a company that uses these tests, even if you successfully nail the offer. Since they reward cheaters, the entire company quickly gets filled by manipulative assholes.
At my last job, one of the most highly paid programmer was a compulsive liar. Out of curiosity, I googled up his resume, knowing him well enough to be able to tell the truth from not... It was extremely carefully crafted and full of lies that were difficult to disprove. (I realize most resumes are made to make the person look good, but that was pushed to the extreme). The hiring process of that company was mostly full of yes/no questions. "Do you know technology XYZ?" "Are you comfortable in working in ABC environment?" And having talked with him, he would never say he didn't know something, even when it was the case. All that in addition to these silly personality tests.
So these tests that "reward cheaters", they're a corporate culture more than anything. Avoid companies who use them at all cost.
Thats what the previous poster was saying. He said that companies can't be bothered with a process, instead relying entirely on the skill of individual developers... and since individual skill vary widely (and often time constraints prevent a company from hiring only "top tier" devs), they end up totally screwed. Without a proper process, junior programmers can take a good codebase and ruin it within days or weeks.
A lot of companies (the majority by far from my experience) don't even know what processes are available to them. Not even Agile or Scrum, never heard of CMM, nothing, zero. So they just code away and everything falls in the hand of a project manager... and when he invariably fail (without process, even the best will screw up), they push all the blame on said PM. Its awful.
At the very least, the free Word document viewer is free and runs in Wine. Its still silly though, since its from a web page (which I figured was your point)
If you REALLY want to turn it off, there's 3 KBs that can be uninstalled, and then the stuff that worked pre-SP1 will work again.
Driver signing is tied to DRM, but it is also tied to the kernel protection, which is pretty flipping important for security.
No it doesn't. You can install from scratch too.
It will run fine on much lower than that even. 256 megs of RAM is enough (though not officially supported, it works on my side) to boot without hitting swap file (barely mind you), and if all goes well with WARP10, even Aero will work on a 800 mhz CPU regardless of videocard (though it doesn't right now, its not done yet).
1 ghz with 1gb of ram is not low end when talking Windows 7.
Thats the bullshit of drivers looking directly at the OS version... No different from web developers doing shit like "IF IE7 -> work, else -> break" or some crap.
Windows 7 driver system is fully backward compatible with Vista, so its basically the only way for a Vista driver to not work in Win7... Then again, Nvidia is known for their epic fail.
No, you wouldn't. The minimum requirements for Vista are pretty darn close to what you need to get work done in the first place. And while Windows 7's requirements are the same as Windows Vista, it actually runs fine on a 256 megs machine...with Aero turned off, I'd dare say it runs faster than XP (the OS is a decent bit leaner). I'm watching it go as I'm typing this.
If you have 100 machines, you have an image that you can push to all the desktops, and the data is on servers. You don't let all the important data locally on desktop, do you? Thats insane. If you did anyway, there's a wizard to transfer the data. And if you do it the hard way and upgrade the machines one by one, they keep the old data even if you do a clean install (the data will be in a folder on the C drive)
By allowing much, MUCH more applications to run without needing to be administrator...
That said, its the same thing for every new Windows (or OS in general, for that matter...) releases. Companies upgrade once their OS isn't supported anymore and thats basically it. Where you work is all XP. Why did they upgrade to XP (assuming the company is more than a few years old)? WinNT and Win2k were just fine back then, no? Same reason.
That said, beyond the security implication, the real reason (and the same damn reason to upgrade from Win2k to XP) is that Vista and Win7 introduce APIs and integration features that aren't available in XP. So sooner or later, apps will start popping up requiring it. When you find out your vendor doesn't support XP anymore, you'll have to either switch or suffer the loss of productivity, and it is going to be a bit late by then.
But if its like basically all other company's, you're going to skip every other release (because upgrading every 3 years is a bit much...), and not even consider it until around SP2 of the second release... so its normal that your company isn't thinking about it right now. At least, until the server gets upgraded to Win2008, and the sysadmin looks at the new management and integration features and start pushing, that is...
Oh yeah, 900 mhz is more than enough. WARP10 (the DirectX10 software renderer...so you can use Aero without a good videocard...not in the beta yet as far as I can tell, I'm just using it as an example) needs 800 mhz... so without that, you're well beyond what it will need, especially with 1.2gb of RAM.
Then I need to still give full disclosure: I -am- a senior .NET software developer for a close Microsoft partner (though its a company that does NOT operate directly in the IT/Software field). So I am potentially still biaised. If it helps, I used to hate Microsoft like the plague and ran Linux only for years, long before Ubuntu and other friendly distros were out, so its not like I'm COMPLETELY clueless :)
Anyway, since my install is in a VM, I just tried simply reducing RAM to 256 megs. So it isn't completly representative since I do have a Core 2 Duo 3ghz and the VM is runnning with hardware virtualization enabled, so its not really a low end system, but people always complained about RAM bottleneck in Vista, never CPU, so it should still be interesting. Also on a VM I can't use Aero, but 1) Win7's Aero uses about half the memory of Vista's, and 2) you wouldn't use Aero anyway on such a limited system.
End result: the system does NOT swap on a clean boot, though with superfetch and other stuff enabled it does use up almost all of the RAM. Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Media player, are very responsive. It is most definately usuable, and I'd dare say its running "great".
By the way, if you use it on a tablet PC, they vastly improved the touchscreen support (not all of the new stuff is in, and without a multi touch screen you wouldn't be able to use it all anyway, but its still pretty cool). The writing recognition is better (the examples they give you to test it is with mathematical equations, and its as close to perfect as one could expect with today's technology).
If your tablet PC has 128 megs, I'm sure it will "Work", but that won't be comfy...well, let me try it i guess!