Microsoft will release just one more build of Windows Vista for testing before the code goes gold, said Brad Goldberg, the general manager for the Windows client business group. That build will be made available to a limited group of between 50000 and 100000 testers in October, and follows the interim Vista build that Microsoft released on Sept. 22. Elsewhere, people noticed that Java applications use the standard (effect-less) Aero interface, instead of the finacy shiny bling-bling Aero Glass.
For all the hype about security, I still do not trust Windows Vista. I’ll let history prove either way if this is a good OS, regardless of how many “test builds” are made available.
Only 1 more build? I guess that means no interface upgrades or significant performance fixes.
MS is really pushing this too soon, RC1 wasnt on pair with Whistler beta 2 in terms of usability and stability. If they release it like this there will be alot of problems mainly due to bad press.
This can lead to part of loyal Windows users thinking about different platforms.
The sad thing is that MS never worked on performance upgrades through Service Packs so we really can’t expect Vista to be any faster in future….and that is truly bad.
It’s almost hard to believe that that’s it. Five years, and this is what we’re left with. The registry is still there, the broken filesystem layout is still there, the control panel is now a link-spam blog with endless recursive links, the UAC has OCD and the themes are having identity crises.
There’s some nice new things in Vista we can all look forward to, but overal, I feel as if a great opportunity was missed somewhere.
Paraphasing the Joker: “This OS needs an enema.”
once again: what’s so bad about registry and why is file system layout broken?
Switch to another OS and you’ll understand why Windows is so broken. Debating it forever on forums will learn you nothing.
‘eh, Windows isn’t *that* broken
I run various version of windows AS WELL as Mac OSX, debian, other OSes. I left my family with windows 2k pro and xp pro because it works fine for them. Specially once I spend 3 hours ‘fixing’ it. They run perfectly stable, fast and have absolutely NO issues. But I’ll admit that it shouldn’t take 3-4 hours of work to get the system that way.
I let my sister try out ubuntu with crossover office and it was just too much of a hassle. She does a lot of graphics work and the programs she likes using for various things either have no *linux alternative or simply suck if they do.
I have BeOS, debian and XP Pro loaded on my tower and I generally boot into XP. It works and runs fine.
I hate it when people just blindly bash something (not you) and call its users stupid. It really makes you wonder who is actually ‘stupid’…
ok, I’m done.
Edited 2006-09-30 14:51
As long as people keep thing there is no alternative they will, thinking they need Photoshop to draw their stick men.
If you cannot find a alternative for doing graphics in Linux then people need to wonder if they can do graphics at all. People used to do Artwork on the Amiga in the 80’s, are people reallt that stupid that they cannot find something in Linux?. Seriously, if people cannot then they best stay on Windows and miss out.
I don’t disagree with you, but it is long past time that Windows users stand up to MS and demand real fundamental change.
‘eh, Windows isn’t *that* broken
We need to realize that Windows isn’t “fixed”. It is patched and kludged. I have been working with Vista RC1 for the last week, and just removed it from my test machine. If we are truly honest about it, Vista is going to provide some very nice UI features, especially on newer high end machines. RC1 runs fine. I have An Athlon XP 2800+ and Vista is not slow. My video card is a Nvidia 6600 w/ 256mb, and Aero works very well. Drivers are a mixed bag, and my multi-media suites have some issues for now, but that will get resolved. My productivity suites work well, and the only game I play is ‘Warbirds 2006’ offline (I don’t really play, just take an occaisional 10 minute break).
OK, all that is good. Here are the real problems:
Security is the same old problem. Windows “new” UAC is just a rework of the same old stuff. A bit of a new look, and some changed text in the dialogs. Users are not running as Administrator by default now, but to make things work they happily click their way to run applications as Administrator. This is simply a workaround that achieves the same state as previous versions of Windows.
MS blames users for doing things wrong, and developers for not creating good secure software. The problem is that MS created the environment for these problems in the first place. In effect it is MS that calls its users stupid.
We should reflect back on the malware issues we put up with today. Of course criminals are going to do everything they can to further their aims, but looking back at the roots of these problems they came to light because of ‘kiddie-scriptrs’, and the criminals found opportunity. We also find at times there is a fine line between ‘legitimate business’ and ‘criminal activity’, and MS profits from some of this grey area.
Vista should have been an opportunity to make things right, but what we are getting is simply new drapes and blinds.
Edited 2006-09-30 15:46
yeah right. and if microsoft (in your dreams) switches to some xml based system configuration you and your online friends will scream “look!!! look!!! they are copying apple again!!!1”. oh well… imho registry is perfect. it just shouldn’t be so abused by 3rd party developers.
“I feel as if a great opportunity was missed somewhere.”
I agree, and I have an idea of what went wrong. They should have created an OS from scratch with a compatibility layer, as simple as possible, for legacy applications.
If Wine and Crossover can do it, why not Microsoft, with almost unlimited resources and, above all, all the source code?
Sounds like they’re setting the bar pretty low.
Sounds like they’re setting the bar pretty low.
I’m sorry – did I miss something? – sounds like Business As Usual.
I’m sure we’ll see SP1 out within a month or two – followed shortly by a flurry of hotfixes and then SP2.
I’m sure SP2 will contain some new features that make a few more of those who didn’t switch to Vista’s RTM break down and switch.
Then I predict some massive Windows XP security scare that just “happens to be fixed in Vista” will cause another huge chunk of users to switch…
Rinse, repeat…
Edited 2006-09-29 23:26
you forgot to add that, with the massive XP security scare, Microsoft will supply a big tub of vaseline with new purchases of Vista.
Wow, taken the words right out of my mouth. +1 =)
There goes the golden oportunity to clean years of bad reputation.
0ne m0re Release? Vista ain’t even ready let alone Programs like WLM8 isn’t even ready for it, Video Drivers aren’t even ready, looks like Suse/Novel an Redhat/Fedora an or Ubuntu an Apple Mac maybe the biggest Winners,
Pardon? I downloaded and ran Windows Live Messenger without any problems.
I’ve tried the Novell Desktop Linux; its good, but not good enough; for example, why isn’t gnomad2 included with it? considering that MTP is the defacto standard for transferring media to a media device, I would have expected it to be compiled and included with the distribution.
There were also major bugs in the distribution, such as during the installation, at the end when I setup my wireless connection, it failed to connect to my network and access the internet for updates.
Novell also needs to spruce up their website to make accessing registered machines alot quicker; all of this, when logged in, should be accessible via the front page – the fact is, it isn’t.
Also, the I found the quality of some parts rather lacking in regards to polish and focus on making sure things work – just because you’ve shipped a stable version of a piece of software, doesn’t mean that all development ceases, and software isn’t updated as bug fixes are found!
Novell is the closest I’ve seen to far to a viable desktop alternative distribution of Linux; what is require is an improved wine, which should bridge the application gap, and greater focus my developers on improving their applications so that they conform to the HIG standard for their respective desktop.
Also, for the price charged for their distribution, I expect atleast a DVD player included with it, along with a WMA codec licenced from Microsoft, like what TurboLinux provides in their bundles.
Sorry to say this, by Linux vendors need to stop doing things on the cheap, and start providing some real value to their distributions, otherwirse it just looks like a bunch of opensource porjects thrown together, shoved on an iso, and the customers charged for some fictional ‘support’.
you need to paid about 100$, 200$ to get windows and you only have the os…. no application
and you don’t have support
linux, you can get it for free from novell, red hat, mandriva… or if you want support, proprietary application… you need to paid… less than microsoft AND you get support and all standart application for a joe sixpack user….
bureautic, email, messenger, video player, music player, web browerser, game, picture viewer, music editor, image editor, video editor…
Yes, thats very nice, but doesn’t address the original issue; I don’t mind paying a few hundred for a good office suite, which OpenOffice.org isn’t, and a good operating system that supports all my hardware out of the box using the Windows XP restoration cd that was included with my Toshiba Laptop.
Until a Linux distribution gets the kind of smooth, easy to use, consistency that comes with Windows, I’m sorry, it’ll always play second fiddle in the marketplace.
XP is NOT Vista
Vista does not have the same kind of hardware support XP has.
Vista has features your current XP hardware or even in the shops now can use.
Do not confuse the two.
Interesting, I have the latest build, and everything is supported out of the box – baring the ‘Toshiba extra’s’ like the multimedia buttons, everything else works nicely, even the finger print scanner works too.
continue your fud, you just show your ignorance
something not good for you, don’t mean something bad for others
police in europe use OO, same thing for many school, university and goverment in the world
does that mean theses people are idiot?
does the guy who write his thesis of doctorate with oo is a idiot?
does the guy who buy a computer from wallmart with linux is a marron?
it’s not everybody who have a vision late
the problem is not linux, it’s company like hp, dell, compaq… who don’t provide linux easily for the customer
i install linux on many customer since 6 years and i have less problem than windows
often windows ask me disk driver to install soundard, network
with linux, don’t need that, linux distribution do the job
company doe their homework for windows and that begin for linux
your are maybe just too idiot to use linux?
if many children, bank company, school, …… use linux and your are not able…. ask a kid to learn your how to use it….
when i see something like
http://www.laboiteaprog.com/article-kde vs windows-85-5
i see then everybody can use linux
…were you guys expecting that is not in vista?
I hoped for speed improvements. I have Athlon64 3500+, 1GB DDR2 RAM, GeForce 7600GS and Vista RC1 just feels sluggish.
There are many little things that need to be fixed and I don’t think they will hunt them down in such small amount of time. Lots of stuff is broken by design, new Control Panel is the ultimate horror and needs to be redone from scratch. Gadgets are useless, distracting and take too much space. Transparency mixed with black/gray colour combination and removing some icons from Start menu makes my eyes bleed when looking for “Computer” (it’s no longer “My computer”, I guess it belongs to Microsoft now BTW
).
This upgrade will be very painful because of compatibility problems. It seems that a lot of stuff doesn’t play nicely with Vista, for example interface falls back to basic mode when using TV app supplied with my tuner. Vista switch will be more painful than 98->XP was.
I expected Vista to be easy upgrade and it is not.
Edited 2006-09-29 23:56
I have an Athlon XP 2500+, 1GB 266MHz DDR (2x512MB), and an ATI 9800XT 256MB and RC1 just screams for me.
The entire graphics rendering subsystem is all-new; you can’t expect programs that wrote to overlays by default (such as TV tuner apps and VideoLAN Client (VLC)) to automatically work right. Make them fall back to GDI or DirectDraw and they will get accelerated in the new subsystem just fine. Or, wait for <app here> to update to be Vista-compliant. You can’t fault Vista for an app not working. The problem with most releases of Windows is that there are two camps: those who complain when legacy support gets weaker, and those who complain that things are too hacked-together for backward compatibility.
You can’t have both, and Vista has chosen to move forward in some ways, leaving applications behind (the new video subsystem), and stick around in other ways (the registry). It’s just life. Patch your software and move forward, or stay behind. NT 5 was just like this with regard to MS-DOS software. Same crap, different day.
I know plenty of people who are still happy using their Windows 98 computers, and they use software originally written for MS-DOS that they just don’t want to let go of.
In my experience, most TV tuner applications (at least, the ones that come with the card) are pretty disgusting and buggy. You might want to find a new program anyway. It’s not like your card can only be controlled by one program.
Somehow Microsoft managed to get XP to be quite compatible with 98 even though it was entirely different Windows branch. Now, after 5 years of development of Vista it is barely backwards compatible. I know about alternative TV tuner apps (I use Dscaler) but most people will use whatever was supplied by hardware manufacturer. The fallback to basic interface seems to be triggered by anything that uses video in more intense way (accessing overlay/directx) and it is really annoying. I can’t watch TV or play a game and alt-tab out of it without noticing that everything became even more ugly, this will bother people. Even Linux got this sorted out and I can play Neverball or whatever game windowed while using accelerated X server and compositing manager.
Well, that was XP’s motive: to get 9x kernel end-users to use the more stable and proven NT kernel.
Using overlays defeats Vista’s ability to schedule offloading in the new graphics subsystem, and thus Aero has to be disabled (at least, in the current beta builds of Vista). End users with TV tuner cards whose manufacturers haven’t abandoned them will receive updates to their tuner software that enables them to work in conjunction with the accelerated subsystem. Since there are the aforementioned two camps of compatibility, Microsoft has to make some kludges for these die-hard programmers that won’t move forward.
DScaler is basically dead, at any rate.
There are even programs still using the old WinHelp system (which no longer exists in Vista), which was supposed to have died long ago (to be replaced by HxS and CHM) but a lot of programmers aren’t moving to it fast enough. Microsoft is finally forcing them to stop using it, by removing the ancient WinHelp system from Vista. With this, among other changes, Microsoft is hoping to make Vista a lot better than previous versions of Windows, by dropping support for these programmers who continue to do things the ancient way. It’s a trade-off. One camp complains that it’s not compatible enough, while others complain that it’s not moving forward / being rewritten from scratch. Unfortunately, Microsoft has to cater to both camps at the same time. The disabling of Aero is just yet another kludge to prevent legacy programs from tripping out.
I’ll mod you up, however, as you have perfectly valid points as well.
Edited 2006-09-30 04:10
DjLizard is right, Vista RC1 is plenty fast and I find it to be even faster than the XP SP2 that I just did an upgrade from (I wanted to do a clean install and probably will later when I get my drive cleaned up, free space wise). This is on an Athlon 64 3000+, 1GB PC3200 DDR, NVidia GeForce 6600GT. The system rating is 3.7, and the only times I have a slowdown is when a program is doing heavy disk work since I’m dangerously low on space on all my partitions.
Personally I don’t see what the problem is with an application that doesn’t yet support the new graphical interface causing the system to fall back to the compatible interface until the app is closed. Once Vista is officially released hopefully it won’t be a problem for most major applications, and the only one on my system that’s causing the fallback is Trillian. I’m actually glad that Microsoft made it deal with the issue so gracefully.
I hate to admit it because I’m a big fan of Linux and strongly opposed to a lot of the new stuff Microsoft has built into Vista but really, it’s not shabby at all. If you don’t want to do the upgrade, you don’t have to, just like the people who still run Windows 98 or Windows 2000, and there’s even Windows 2k3 which is great as well.
The only application that fails outright is Daemon Tools, which saddens me greatly. I doubt it will go without an update for too long here though.
Oh you’ll have to upgrade, if you want the latest games and Halo2
Those are wants, not needs.
Explain that to the gaming community, they are not just a handful of people ether. How about a proper answer?
A proper answer? DirectX 10 relies on the new driver model that Vista utilizes. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1931918,00.asp
Anyways, if you have complaints about a certain game developer deciding to only support Vista, well, I don’t think I have to elaborate on where to direct your ire. Is Microsoft promoting the idea of Vista-only games? Undoubtedly. Is Microsoft forcing developers to make Vista-only games? No.
Explain that to the gaming community, they are not just a handful of people ether. How about a proper answer?
The serious PC gamer community is actually small compared to that of handhelds and consoles. Casual games make most of the usage on a PC.
That the only two decent Desktop operating systems to choose from are OSX and Windows.
Christ, WE NEED MORE DIVERSITY.
I’m not a Windows, Linux or OSX zealot. I use windows primarily, but I HATE IT, it’s a insecure bloated POS (win XP), which has long passed its used by date.
OSX is stuck to Mac Hardware, and Linux’s desktop still has a long way to go.
If only there was something like OSX but with say the ability to install on anything like windows. I yearn for something like that.
Here’s hoping that Haiku R2 fills that need, and that R1 comes close to it.
Haiku:
– Open-source: it will run on most anything.
– Unfragmented development: unified effort to make a decent desktop OS.
– Born from BeOS: the devs care a great deal about usability and minimalism.
Edited 2006-09-29 23:44
I would love to see Haiku playing in the same field. But think about it. Linux does have a lot of commercial support but it hasn’t been accpeted by Joe Blow. I think it won’t happen anytime soon.
Back to the “Just One More Release Before Vista Goes Gold” announcement. It amazes me. a month ago Microsoft anounced they want to have input on the UI from the gerneral public. Today they are telling us one more build and they will go gold. Microsoft might have an army of programmers but how could they have implemented crititcal UI changes requested by the avarage user. I think it was just some Bull PR saying “See, we do care!”.
After Vista is released I hope people realize the they have alternatives.
Medora Solutions Inc. http://www.medora.ca
Edited 2006-09-30 01:24
Or, some pr shit where they are counting on little complaints and that a lot of people will be impressed!
In which case it’s more of a demon.
After Vista is released I hope people realize the they have alternatives.
Has it occurred to any Linux fan, that Windows might, just might, work for most people?
Rather than praying MS trips up, perhaps you need to look at what is holding Linux adoption back?
Here’s a hint: It is not the ‘stupidity and/or ignorance of Windows users
Has it occurred to any Linux fan, that Windows might, just might, work for most people?
Work? Sure it works … somehow. The question is how well.
I personally blame MS that for most Joe Normalo user computers are difficult to use, insecure and unpredictable in behavior. An OS in its core is not about shiny features like 3D desktop and gadgets. It’s not about next years gaming API. It should not be abused as a promotion vehicle for company departments which operate at a loss. It should enable people to share their ideas by adopting open standards and not reinvent the wheel just because a standard was not patented by MS, etc.
Gosh – I’m really, really glad that I don’t have to bother with Windows …
Edited 2006-09-30 09:24
“Rather than praying MS trips up, perhaps you need to look at what is holding Linux adoption back?
Here’s a hint: It is not the ‘stupidity and/or ignorance of Windows users”
Are you sure? Most people don’t know about Linux. It’s true that a lot of them would migrate to Linux if given the choice, but if you don’t give choice, just preinstall, I’m sure it would work well for a lot of them.
Has it occurred to any Linux fan, that Windows might, just might, work for most people?
Has it occurred to any Windows fan, that MacOS might, just might, work for most people? Better yet…
Has it occurred to any Windows Vista fan, that Windows 3.11 might, just might, work for most people?
The following on a more personal note:
Different people have dirent needs. I for one won’t switch to vista anytime soon.
What does it offer? Eyecandy… that’s about it.
Get real: No WinFX, no Monad, no PC 2 PC sync.
What does it offer? A compiler? Anything like a Visual Studio Beginners Edition, with some tutorials that teach the fundamentals of programing to the engineers of the future instead of just XNA and games?? NO!!
What about MS VektorSketch, the long awaited and never anounced MS Paint replacement?? Or a graphical calculator? With Avalon it should be trivial to generate acurate graphs, but hey, who cares about science when you have see trough window borders?!?!?! Or Word Express, the word processor of choice of the emerging economies and low income families?
What about ditching notepad and word f–kin pad, pay 2$ per license to the creator of Notepad ++ and just use it?!
What about MASSIVE speed improvements, BeOS boots under 10 seconds on p2 300 with sub par HW support, what’s holding Windows back? What about sudo for windows for crying out loud, its just there for the picking, being actively developed by some dude, free of charge, but no… lets just reinvent the f–kin wheel all over again!!
What about WinFX?(when we all have 1TB hard drives filled with random stuff, you will know why i mentioned it twice.)
What about a modular version of Windows, with extended functionality separately sold over the Internet via something like Valve Software STEAM, instead of making user’s pay for unwanted features?!
THIS is was the Windows Vista I wanted, not some half baked, full of crap, eyecandy overdriven version of Windows XP with pretty colors! It’s so easy to point at what’s holding back the competition, but it’s always so god damn hard to be auto critical, isn’t it?! Microsoft had the OBLIGATION of delivering a decent product and it wont! why?! because it has no real competition. That HAS to end, for the good of personal computing it MUST end. Period.
Eyecandy… all just blinding bitter eyecandy.
“Humanity fails when we cease to dream of a better world” – n0xx
Edited 2006-09-30 22:47
You’re a fool if you think Windows Vista is eye-candy, try reading some technical information some time. The article I linked to in my previous comment that was written up by the folks at Extremetech outlines a lot and you can read more elsewhere, if you’d like to actually educate yourself instead of flaming.
1.) Compilers can be had elsewhere and aren’t difficult to obtain, even for free.
2.) Notepad++ included by default would be neat, but come on, that’s a weak point to attack Microsoft on. “Your extremely basic Notepad is so lacking! Save me from having to download a tiny replacement should I find I need more from it!”
3.) BeOS doesn’t support nearly as much hardware as Vista does, get a clue. It also doesn’t have nearly as many features. It’s a cool OS, don’t get me wrong, I love to dabble with it and the boot time is sweet.
4.) WinFX is already here, WTF are you talking about? To quote Wikipedia: “The June CTP is installed by default in Windows Vista build 5456.”
5.) Keep that idea as far away from the OS as possible, not everyone likes it, nobody needs it, and it creates unnecessary hardship for those without an internet connection to their PC. Paying for unwanted features? Maybe you didn’t notice how many flavours of Vista are coming out, SEVEN. There’s plenty of choice for what you want your OS to be capable of.
Do. Your. Research.
1.) Compilers can be had elsewhere and aren’t difficult to obtain, even for free.
Yet they are not included buy default and supported as a fundamental part of Windows. MS-DOS had Q-Basic. You have no argument.
2.) Notepad++ included by default would be neat, but come on, that’s a weak point to attack Microsoft on. “Your extremely basic Notepad is so lacking! Save me from having to download a tiny replacement should I find I need more from it!”
I’m not “attacking” anyone… I’m just being critical. That’s the problem of most people these days regarding your OS of choice, every criticism is interpreted as an attack. I sure hope you won’t get to be world president anytime soon… that kind of an attitude towards criticism has a name: Totalitarianism. And it’s my notepad as well, mind you.
3.) BeOS doesn’t support nearly as much hardware as Vista does, get a clue. It also doesn’t have nearly as many features. It’s a cool OS, don’t get me wrong, I love to dabble with it and the boot time is sweet.
Indeed. However with such outstanding HW support Windows isn’t nearly as responsive, even on much newer hardware. Granted windows has more services loading at startup, but when i mentioned BeOS and it’s boot speed, i meant it more as an iconic concept… probably i didn’t express myself correctly, English is not my native language… However, i still think Windows could benefit from improvements on the performance department, namely, why didn’t they restructured GDI enabling it to offer a Beish like ‘windows open half way through the second click and are RESPONSIVE’ kind of usage experience? I guess delivering a better user experience on older hardware is a bad thing to do! Hell, HW vendors got to make a living.
4.) WinFX is already here, WTF are you talking about? To quote Wikipedia: “The June CTP is installed by default in Windows Vista build 5456.”
Oops !!! Whenever I wrote WinFX i meant WinFS. God, that is embarrassing!!!
But hey… anybody who knows anything about Windows technology and read my post throughly would have figured out it was typo. How come you have not noticed?! It’s not like WinFX has anything to do with one terabyte storage. How come you didn’t figure it out?
5.) Keep that idea as far away from the OS as possible, not everyone likes it, nobody needs it, and it creates unnecessary hardship for those without an Internet connection to their PC. Paying for unwanted features? Maybe you didn’t notice how many flavors of Vista are coming out, SEVEN. There’s plenty of choice for what you want your OS to be capable of.
I Know there are Seven. However, there are hundreds of possible combination of features that a user might want. What if i want a bare boned windows vista with nothing else but eyecandy (not saying that’s the case, it’s just an what if.)? It would be TRIVIAL to keep track of what core technology a user bought. think of MS-Passport logging in to a remote hotmail like server and retrieving information from a cookie through SSL. And if most people don’t care about something like this, it’s probably because most people either use pirated version of windows, use windows because it came pre installed. No corporation with an CTO in they’re right mind would boo something like this, because it would enable massive cost savings in hundreds of situations, and as I’m shure you know, the price of stuff is important when you got to earn a living. if you don’t: Do. Your. Research. (That’s sooo Ronald Reagan :p )
Your compiler argument is stupid and childish because quite frankly it should not be included by default in an end-user oriented OS like Windows. Plenty of end-user oriented Linux distributions do not install a compiler by default as well. Space savings and keeping inexperienced users from messing with something they shouldn’t, just because they found a nifty web page about it, are just a couple of the reasons why. I’m sorry but if you want to do software development you are not limited from doing so currently on any Windows platform, and a compiler is not a necessary component of a consumer and business oriented OS.
The Notepad++ thing I’m just going to simply drop since you seem to want to use it as a vehicle to drop down your thoughts on politics. I used attacking as a word describing your actions and it’s just as valid a word for the situation as criticizing. Your entire post smacks of childish correllations drawn to politics. How old are you (Not that everyone acts their age) when you can’t even keep politics out?
About Windows being more accessible for older hardware, I’m sorry that Microsoft is more interested in taking advantage of advances in technology than they are in making sure antiquated hardware can run their OS fully. You really have no understandings of the technology at work here, and if you really wanted to have something like a fully accellerated 3D desktop that doesn’t require a DirectX 9 compliant card (Due to how Microsoft’s implementation works) you’re more than able to use Linux and XGL or AIGLX, which works just dandy on even on-board video because it takes a different route. General performance itself has more to do with the Windows operating system offering a lot of capability. It’s sad that you seem to take me for a shill when I’m simply stating fact, and have been a Linux enthusiast for a very long time now. You seriously are disregarding a lot of facts to make your argument, and that’s sad and frustrating.
I didn’t figure it out because I give people the benefit of the doubt and figure they mean what they say, even if it sounds quite bizarre. Nice try at a personal attack though, it’s appreciated. I already responded about WinFS, as well, in a response to netpython, and I say again that while this would have been a really neat feature, it’s not a necessity or must-have, at all. You’re really underestimating how much work the WinFS developers have ahead of them to get the product finalized and out the door. It’s a major undertaking, treat it as such. 1TB harddrives? Please, most people don’t have anywhere near that, and most people is the target Windows audience. Be realistic, they had to make a decision between being criticized for delaying a product a great amount (Which it already has been) or dropping it and possibly others in exchange for getting things out the door in a more timely manner. Oh, I can already see the flame about security coming from that statement, but I’ll let it be.
Cute Ronald Reagan reference, really. I’m surprised more people don’t take you seriously. And the fact of the matter is that most people don’t trust online distribution methods, especially once they’ve been burned by them, like I and countless others have been by Steam. Valve doesn’t get any money from me anymore after not doing a thing to get my account restored back to me when it was hijacked suddenly by someone else, nevermind that I had receipts and other proof of purchase. These companies simply don’t care once they have your money, and I’d much rather have hard physical media, thank you! You can whine and clamor all you want for Microsoft to adopt a Steam-like model to distribute a more componentized Windows, but the fact of the matter is that businesses and users by and large don’t want it.
4.) WinFX is already here, WTF are you talking about? To quote Wikipedia: “The June CTP is installed by default in Windows Vista build 5456.”
WinFX as in “the successor of the NT file-system”
Renaming something existing isn’t the same as creating something new.
Call it WinFS as it’s known now then, and that’s a feature that plenty of people can comfortably live without. Would it have been nice? Sure.
Anyways, it’s not the successor of the NT filesystem, it’s built on top of it. “WinFS is not a physical file system; rather, it provides rich data modeling capabilities on top of the NTFS file system. It still uses NTFS to store its data in physical files.”
What makes you think I’m a linux fan? I don’t use Linux at all. Also, nobody mentioned windows users are stupid.
If you would read my post it says “Linux does have a lot of commercial support but it hasn’t been accpeted by Joe Blow.”
It might not be clear to you but I meant., Linux doesn’t have it what it takes. However, we do have alternatives.
@Anon
Christ, WE NEED MORE DIVERSITY.
IBM doesn’t feel that OS/2 will cut it. Even though OS/2 has been everywhere Linux is going (desktop, embedded, server, etc…)
We all know that Windows is bloated and slow. But Windows is all we’ve got. It’s cheap. Pretty stable and secure. Developer tools are the best in the industry. Windows has got the best games. It’s not just the best, it’s the only one out there.
All of MS’ competitors managed to kill themselves off (Acorn, ATARI, Be Inc, CBM, IBM, etc…) Heck, Apple almost died chocking on it’s own pride before Jobs had MS invest in it. The irony in all this: every OS vendors gave up it’s own piece of the pie by shotting themselves in the foot multiples times. In the end, people still, patheticaly, find a way to blame MS. lol
All of MS’ competitors managed to kill themselves off (Acorn, ATARI, Be Inc, CBM, IBM, etc…)
For the record, I would really like to have seen how the “Be, Inc. vs. Microsoft” trial would have played out if Be, Inc. hadn’t settled for the measly $23M instead
Be settled for such a pittance because they knew they had no case. MS paid them to make them go away. If Be actually had a case they would’ve held out for much more.
If you need more diversity, then start by _not_ supporting Microsoft and Windows by running their OS.
A better OS than Mac or Linux will not come along if you keep riding with Microsoft and help define that 95% share.
It’s one thing to bash Windows, another entirely to actually switch. I did and I’m damned glad I chose a good time, not having to run Vista will be such a relief.
OS/2 is fine technically. IBM just isn’t interested in competing in the OS market anymore. It simply isn’t worth it to push their own platform when there’s an entrenched incumbant (Microsoft) that can get away with illegal activities without punishment, and when there’s a free alternative (Linux) that IBM can use without having to incur large development expenses.
Depending on your specific requirements, there ARE several alternatives.
Specialized requirements tend to make them less viable, of course, but the general desktop user usually needs little more than a browser, e-mail, basic business apps, music playing, and image viewing/editing.
I use three desktops at home primarily right now: OS/2, Puppy Linux, and DSL. I’ll use Windows at times to fill in the gaps, but most of the time I only use it to play games.
You have to install the Java 6 beta and it works just fine with Aero.
Yep, both JDK6 (get the latest build from http://jdk6.dev.java.net ), and official 5.0u9 release from http://java.sun.com work fine on Vista, and do not disable the Aero theme.
Swing works well with Aero theme, including the rollover effects (those only in JDK6, though).
http://wiki.netbeans.info/wiki/attach/NewAndNoteWorthy/vista_ide_1….
Dmitri
Bad sides of vista RC1: driver support is still lacking. compatibility for DirectX games is really awful. DOS(NTVDM) functionallity is absymal as DOS games/apps can’t change graphic mode – I’m using nvidia card (it seems that DOS compatibility is on the way out of. Windows)
New engine is nice but still this bling is too much distracting and somehow feels like latency is increased (though it isn’t). I felt same about compiz. They lost this opportunity to revamp the UI, like Apple did with OSX. If there wasn’t directX 10 which by policy will be Vista-only to get gamers to switch, it wouldn’t have anything interesting to attract people, although there are many under-the-hood changes (but those are interesting only to engineers and developers).
and that problem with java is something they probably even could solve withouth any hard work, but probably chose just to ignore it as MS usually has the NIH syndrome.
Re DirectX 10 being Vista-only: it’s probably not a policy to get people to switch. This is the kind of default thinking that keeps trolls coming. Not everything Microsoft does has an agenda behind it. Sure, some of it really may be an agenda, but by default, everyone thinks everything is a conspiracy. You might want to consider that the reason that DirectX 10 will be Vista-only is that it requires the new video subsystem and driver model (for technical and performance reasons).
and that problem with java is something they probably even could solve withouth any hard work, but probably chose just to ignore it as MS usually has the NIH syndrome.
Sun’s Java implementation was just like many other applications, suffering from incompatibilities introduced in Vista, some of the raising from underdocumented Win32/Gdi/DirectX interfaces (people were using them in a way they were not supposed to, and it worked prior to Vista).
MS did solve some problems which were genuine Vista bugs, but most of them had to be worked around in Java implementation.
Dmitri
Having tried the most recent build of Vista, it’s my opinion that the interface needs a great deal of work, which I can’t imagine will be done in time for release. While it has a few interesting features, it’s far too bloated to use as a regular OS. Since I’m about to get a new computer I think I’ll likely go with Linux (far from perfect) or buy a Mac (a bit overpriced). Regardless, we really do need a few more viable competitors in the market. I can only hope that Vista spurs more people to switch to something else, but I’m likely dreaming.
I can’t wait!
I’ve pretty much lost track of Vista, besides the new look and name what are they delivering to the customer? I remember that they have pulled a ton of features out of it which were originally suppose to make it “revolutionary”. What is left from this original goal?
Wikipedia has a decent writeup:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista
I’d love to see Microsoft do its best to deliver a stable operating system with few security flaws. I hope that they really work things out.
No, I haven’t become a Windows fanatic suddenly. I just think that all those sheep deserve something better than they’ve been getting. Anyone who suffered through Windows ME deserves a lot better.
Will it be a shining symbol of excellence? No but it doesn’t have to smell like a cow was just here, either.
Give the people what they need, safe computing.
Here’s to Microsoft being something other than what they’ve been for the past 30 years.
When someone mentions Windows, other people have to mention open source alternatives.
The problem is that those alternatives are not up to Windows Vista’s standards and so they have to use FUD to try to prove their point.
There goes that idea.
No, I am not against Open Source OSes, I am just tired of the Bullcrap and the FUD that people painfully put out.
Clarify.
In what way are they not up to standard.
stability…well no.
hardware support…again no.
backward compatibility…again well it tries.
maybe its POSIX compilment.
This is OS, news but when Vista is supposedly about to launch its first major upgrade in *five* years, you would think that nobody would even talk about alternatives. Unsurprisingly the alternative most often stated against Vista is XP.
It’s pretty much the same stuff that comes around whenever MS comes to release an OS.
‘Windows is unstable’
The Linux crowd can scream this as much as they want, but unless that is what Joe Public sees when he sits down in front of his box, then it’s wishful thinking at best, a desperately dellusional lie at worst.
‘It’s bloated’
Gosh really? Really? Who cares?
Do Linux users really believe that ‘using less disk space’ is a selling point to the average Windows customer?
Even with the trouble MS has in getting this monster out the door, the Linux crowd hasn’t managed to make a significant dent in the desktop. Rather than look at why that might be, they believe a sensible course of action is to call Windows users stupid, and turn up the FUD level on MS.
If as much energy was spent actually promoting Linux advantages as highlighting MS’ shortcomings, then who knows where it would be by now?
LOL another one.
Please do not just do bland rallying cry statements.
“Its pretty much the same every time MS release an OS”
No wait, I can’t help it my sides are splitting, would that be one in 5 years.
“Windows is unstable” I might say “Microsoft consistently produce unstable products” I might even say “XP+Applications from download.com=OMG what the hell is on this machine”
“Its bloated” I personally hate the term bloated because I never understand what it means as it can mean feature bloat, code bloat etc from your comment I would disk space. The Average windows customer will care if he plans to upgrade simply because their hardware is not up to the job. I care because when I install windows I can’t remove IE or WMP and put on applications that I’m prepared to support. Those who get callbacks know what I mean.
And in my honest opinion, I would prefer to see Vista move away from the DOS days of MS computing.
Microsoft might or should develop a WINE environment for Vista to push all the older programs through and leave the OS operating under a modern API.
Then those who want compatability have it but those who move with the times get a lean and mean OS current for the hardware they run it on.
I’m sick of people bitching about not being able to run DOS based programs on Vista. Want to run DOS programs, then load up DOS as an OS. Get over it. Win16 should also be sent to the scrap heap of time as well.
Building a “WINE environment” wouldn’t make sense.
All WINE is, is a re-implementation of the Win32 API. Windows already has that.
Win32 does need to be removed from the main system and then virtualized, though, so as to not effect anything except what is contained in the virtualized environment.
I’ll bet that they can even get this done without having to load up an entire version of Windows and do it much more seamlessly than was done for OSX and classic mode.
I’m sick of people bitching about not being able to run DOS based programs on Vista. Want to run DOS programs, then load up DOS as an OS. Get over it. Win16 should also be sent to the scrap heap of time as well.
Hey, I can use both types of programs under OS/2, which isn’t even a Microsoft OS. IBM was able to create a DOS virtual machine without Microsoft’s help that actually worked without having to sacrifice their OS’s 32-bit architecture, and I still find programs like NeoPaint and Visio 4 to be extremely useful.
I think that it’s sad that MS failed to create a decent VDM for their NT line because it removes some useful options from Windows users that they might otherwise have.
I also think it’s sad that folks like you seem to judge software by the APIs it uses rather than the actual functionality it possesses.
On the other hand, software companies love folks like you — you help to drive the upgrade bandwagon, and that’s what Microsoft’s dropping of DOS support was all about.
Those who believe that the bloat in Windows is somehow related to “backwards compability” are falling for the party line. That isn’t the reason, believe me…
I can understand the position Microsoft is in, at this point if they slip one more time or don’t release or anything gets in the way, I think analysists and investors will not be kind to the company, taking it as a signal that they have completely lost their mojo.
On the flip side, having run Beta 2, RC1 and Build 5728, this operating system *for me* is so aboslutely incompletely and not ready it’s painful. Best of luck to Microsoft with this decision… I can only imagine where Vista would have been had the 80s management mentality of scaring your workers into 20 hour work days and yelling during strategic meetings was not the norm there. Oh well.
What would you say is incomplete? I’m running 5728, and I’m pretty happy with everything except driver support. It is an OS afterall… ultimately, WinXP didn’t do much besides launching programs and keeping them going, so what do you expect out of Vista that’s so different?
Mostly the keeping them running part
much as i want nothing to do with windows and love linux, the future of PC Gaming is on Vista, so there i must follow.
I know it is nonsense to post that, but I’m so happy to use a mac, I don’t want to have this problems…
Yes, because as we all know that Mac OSX is immune to inconsistencies or problems. http://tigerquirks.blog.com/
No OS is perfect.
the OSS fundies are out trolling! Believe in the source. Uphold the crusade! It’s your moral obligation.
HAHAHA
Why didn’t MS buy Be, they were in exactly the same situation as Apple with the abortive Copland when they finished XP.
They needed a new, better OS for the next generation and they had a huge amount of cash and plenty of time to refine an alternative with a compatibilty layer for old wares…………Apple bought NEXT, MS stuck their head in the sand and hoped to deliver – and came up with the Windows equivalent of OS8.
All the best stuff went by the wayside (as did Copland’s) and the rest has been backported to the old system and published under a new name.
Had MS actually bought Be they would now be ahead in the OS game………..