“It’s unusual for a Beta 1 version of Windows to have both the final shipping name of the product and as many new features as this build shows. And that’s a strong sign of two things. Firstly: Windows Vista remains an ambitious release of Windows, despite some of the features that Microsoft has pushed off the side of the boat. Secondly: Microsoft is trying to get serious, both internally and externally, about this development program. Windows Vista is now the company’s top priority.” Read on, ten pages, here.
which would you prefer?
I’ll take the Win32 ‘Classic’ look over either of these, and any other theme on any OS I’ve seen up to this point – been using that for about 11 years and haven’t gotten tired of it yet.
“I’ll take the Win32 ‘Classic’ look over either of these, and any other theme on any OS I’ve seen up to this point – been using that for about 11 years and haven’t gotten tired of it yet.”
And I will agree with you 100%. Even as old as the interface might be…. It simply works.
Windows needs to seperate the users from the system imn more than name only…
It is not the graphic part of the interface that sets the Mac apart. It is the fact that my small shareware apps do not need i have the security features or frameworks turned on to work as security. If I have a widget, or a shareware app that I need to install then I need to know the admin password. So my wife who has Physical access to the Server. (OSX server 10.4) but no passwords can add stuff to her <my node(the server)>/users/%home%/library like screensavers and fluff and ~/applications for her apps like Office, and I can add libraries and ‘mutations’ to ~/Developer and have them exist in my namespacepath, and my son by use of server ACLs will not be able to mount our “adult” content or media drives
In Linux this sort of capacity take a while and in the Mac it takes minutes and works the first time… If Microsoft chooses to lift design from the Mac it will always be late. ‘longhornvista’ will be emulating 2004-5 MacOS in q3-2006 and Macos 10.5 [i]will <i/> be released q2-2006 then Microsoft will again be the last one to the watering hole of what we all want.
Outside of x86 support MacTel what do we know about 10.5? Cupertino has 2 commodities the first being happy users, and the second being the dark horse that SAdmins use at home A.K.A. the Alpha Geek factor. I just bought an ibook 1.25 and it smokes the Dell inspiron that work gave me. The Gov’t ITSO (IT Security Officer) was amazed at the things I can do and the weight penalty v. the insprion is 2 iPods and my toshiba PDA
Nobody has seen aero yet, except some MS-employees. Aero will be shipped with beta 2. It’s not in beta1 yet.
While on the subject, why do they call it a beta? A beta is a program which has all the features but needs bugfixing. This Vista beta has only 60% of the features and lots more will be added in beta2. They should have called beta1 a pre-alpha or something.
it is available to msdn subscribers. msdn subscription doesn’t mean your an ms employee. aero is already included, just not with the final theme.
of course it is still too early to compare anyway.
personally (and please don’t take that as trolling, it is just a matter of personal preference which is of course very subjective) i would prefer pretty much everything over os x, since i realy didn’t like it at all when i tried it.
eg. I don’t work for MS and I am burning it now. It sound cool.
Yea. Either, development, pre-alpha, or preview. But hey, the released Windows 98 and then 2000
.
Well, in all the reviews and things like this thus far, I am yet to see ONE nw idea that Microsoftt haven’t simply lifted from someone else.
The closest things I have found is the backup utility, and the ability to see all the different authors on your system. The latter is something I’d actually rather like on OS X. It would be cool that rather than having to search for documents by ‘Bob’ or whatever, I could just see a layout of all the different authors available.
Where are all you “MS makes nothing new” people when the Linux articles come up explaining some new feature that has been in every single other major OS for years.
Or how about the compositing engine being worked on for Linux. Everyone says it’s sooo cool, even though it is nothing new as compared to Quartz Extreme, and certainly doesn’t even come to what Vista’s DCE does.
Or Glitz, or anything.
“Or how about the compositing engine being worked on for Linux. Everyone says it’s sooo cool, even though it is nothing new as compared to Quartz Extreme, and certainly doesn’t even come to what Vista’s DCE does.
Or Glitz, or anything.”
http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg/2005-August/009168.html
Seems to be on the rocks.
That’s not the point at all. The developers who work on Linux and its OS addons don’t try to make this stuff sound like its brand new and inovative. MS does. And a lot of the time MS is 30 years behind, much worse than Linux just now getting a composite engine. Also, the things I’ve used with Linux’s new graphics display engines (Luminocity and the such) seems to be more inovative then what I’ve heard of MS’s. They are doing things on integrated intel i810 graphics cards while Longhorn will need high end hardware for its complete graphics package of eye candy.
Microsoft, at least the programmers (not talking about Balmer or other corporate shillings), is not saying that everything is completely new either. While, some of their stuff is completely new, they are not claiming everything to be.
Of course people like Alchin and Balmer are going to say that everything is new and innovative, it is their job. But if you read any of the programmers blogs, you’d see that they are really quite to the point about what they are doing.
Of course people like Alchin and Balmer are going to say that everything is new and innovative, it is their job. But if you read any of the programmers blogs, you’d see that they are really quite to the point about what they are doing.
But at the end of the day, does it actually matter whether it is a new thing or not? if the end user can get their job done – does it actually matter whether or not its a completely new idea?
Hell, things we’re using today, are merely mutations and slight variations on concepts drempt up in the 1970s/1980s and early 1990s during the early days of the ‘computer boom’.
Microsoft is just like any other company, take a good idea, and integrate it into their product – thats nothing new; where companies compete is how well those ideas are integrated in the product and how well they work with each other.
But like I said, does it matter whether or not something is a new or inovative idea? I sure as heck don’t purchase something just because its ‘innovative’, I purchase something because it does something I want.
I can’t see many existing PC users upgrading, but it will be successful as most new PCs will ship with it installed by default.
that would be ok,,,,, but look at how many pc manufacturers who offer linux as a choice these days, imagine how many more by the time vista is released ?
Thats the way it has always been; as long as there are some killer applications out there, along with it being made available via the Microsoft Select licencing package, coupled with the annnual upgrade, WIndows Vista is assured of moderate success.
With that being said, its success isn’t so much derived from the product quality or features, but whether there are applications out there that customers want, and the only way they can run them is if they install Vista or that a new technology comes around and that Vista is the only vesion of Windows that properly exploits all the benefits of that technology.
OS X all the way. Not because im a mac user…
the reason being apple have had a few years of gui effects to work out how it can assist the user. Microsoft have finally catched up and now are creating all this stuff that is just gonna confuse people.
Also you never know in OS 10.5 apple may revamp the gui a tab thanks to tiger’s core graphics technology which is sitting nice and quietly under the hood. Either way on my mac i find the gui actually enchances my working its not just eye candy it allows me to get things done.
It may take up to SP1 on vista for m$ to realise what they can do with it.
i’m never installing another ms operating system again
forget these guys, please.
I do think this will confuse standard windows user (could take years before the population understands what this is… and how it differs from standard folders..
if at all
😉
i cannot imagine sumone WANTING to use vista on there computer. the sheer amount of crap is enuf to drive me away. not to mention that by the time u do away with all the added garbage your still left with a windows 2000 experience made worse by annoying wizards and thoutless option placement.
“Secondly: Microsoft is trying to get serious, both internally and externally, about this development program. Windows Vista is now the company’s top priority.”
I seem to remember when something similiar was being said about Windows 2000.
The day of reckoning is coming ever closer for Microsoft and their rampant IP theft.
I am curious how far the virtual folders idiom can go. With virtual folders, can you combine metadata? For example, can you say “show me all the documents where author = jack AND keyword = programming”? If so, how?
AFAIU, you enter the virtual folder “author”, then you see all the authors and you click “jack”. And then?
Check out BeOS and queries for virtual folders: there’s no appreciable difference between what BeOS has had via Tracker and Virtual Folders under Windows Explorer. If you delete things in a query in BeOS, it is deleted in actuality from the filesystem.
> If you delete things in a query in BeOS, it is deleted
> in actuality from the filesystem.
What happens if you copy a file into a virtual folder or move it outside it? Are these things allowed?
If not, then isn’t having delete be the only operation on virtual folder items dangerously inconsistent?
If so, then the virtual folder query must be implicitly be updated to specifically mention the item. I’d imagine that moving things in and out of virtual folders could really mess up the query over time. Also, how would moving something from a nonlocal device to a virtual folder be handled?
It’s horrible. Who would want to use that kiddie crap? Productive people will use Vista.
The review isn’t all that interesting but anyway…
Ok, so now users’ stuff is not in C:Documents and Settings but you still preserve that directory for the “All Users” settings. User’s settings are now in C:Users
When you go and install program X you’ll have the following options, depending on how the author made the install:
– It correctly installs in C:Users your settings and in C:Documents and Settings the general settings.
– It doesn’t, it goes for C:Documents and Settings
– It goes for C:Users but unfortunately your Vista is in spanish and it should have gone into C:Usuarios
– Any combination you can think of. Oh, and please consider also “My Documents” vs the new “Documents”… vs “Documentos” and vs “Mis Documentos”.
So, after installing some dozen applications they may be anywhere. Why on earth don’t MS make up their minds with a standard naming scheme and stick to it, please?
But of course… that’s what all the effort in making searches and virtual folders about, isn’t it?
Any program that can’t handle the new structure is broken even by today’s standards. In XP, My Documents, and other folders can be renamed and/or redirected now. APIs and environment variables have always been provided for accessing those paths correctly.
The structure likely changed in part due to feedback from those who don’t use tab completion and always complained about typing paths like Documents and Settings (or whatever other reason they had for disliking the arrangement).
This is actually one advantage to having 300 odd distributions. Most people think “oh that’s a support nightmare.” And it is, that’s what keeps developers on their toes and always looking for standards instead of easy workarounds.
Sometimes making life more difficult for developers does them some good…
LOL you really think programs use hard coded paths like that?
It really doesn’t matter what MS go with, there will always be those who just don’t get it. The type who read the N00b to expert in 21 days book and earn the right to criticize.
I have seen several bad examples of software installations that ignore the functions that Microsoft provides. It’s extremely irritating having two versions of every folder (one in the language of Windows and one in English).
Examples:
Program Files + Programfiler
Start Menu + Startmeny
My Documents + Mine Dokumenter
etc.
The only blessing is that “Documents and Settings” has the same name as the international version.
Note to programmers: Windows has an API to return the correct path – USE IT!
I know, and I never said otherwise, that those paths are not hard coded, thank you.
But you can say what you want. It is a reality today, that a lot of programs will install in different places because of this. Sure, the application is responsible for where it installs itself. I didn’t say MS was.
What I said is just that there’s more posibilities for applications to do it wrong. And that it would be appreciated if they wouldn’t change those names so often.
If you have any more problems comprehending what you read, do not hesitate to ask.
it does not matter how bad the next versions of windows will be, it will still be a best seller
windows will still be the major player in the desktop market..
why ?
because decision makers for businesses know no better.. the CEO knows how to type a letter in Word, therefore because Word is a microsoft product, then they need all their software to be microsoft etc etc
and that includes the spyware/virus/trojans that this entails.
I am a avid windows user that is having a hard time getting excited about Vista. I have heard some of the planned technology updates but i haven’t heard anything yet that motivates me to want to stand in line when vista is released. Am i the only one?(excluding zealots) I think once it is apparent that Mac X86 is actively supported by game writers i will probably retire my Windows PC and switch to Apple.
My fastest Pc runs @ 1.8GHZ.
Though that might be cool to run Vista; when it actually ships, I dont think I will have the full functionality if I do decide to buy and try.
However,the de facto linux distro or Bsd release at that time will hum along just fine.Full throttle.That I am sure of.Not trolling or flaming but when Vista is released and you dont have a new pc and since its not a new paradigm in that it will have full backward compatibility;which screws things a bit, then whats the use of getting Vista if you have a bunch of old pcs like me in full working order?
I know I am not alone in that.I am not an expert.Learning like the average joe public.
But Windows actually works.
and Linux and BSD don’t work? BTW I am posting this from my *working* gnu/linux boxen.
You beat me to it.
and Linux and BSD don’t work? BTW I am posting this from my *working* Ubuntu gnu/linux boxen.
it does not matter how bad the next versions of windows “will be, it will still be a best seller
windows will still be the major player in the desktop market..
why ?
because decision makers for businesses know no better.. the CEO knows how to type a letter in Word, therefore because Word is a microsoft product, then they need all their software to be microsoft etc etc
and that includes the spyware/virus/trojans that this entails.”
It might not be that they don’t know any better. It might actually be that they’re planning it out right. Think about it this way…. 99% of PC users are retarded. They have no idea how to do anything technical and they certainly don’t want to learn. Windows is the only viable solution because people are idiots. I use linux, FreeBSD, and Windows all for different things myself but I will never expect people to just suddenly learn a new OS that requires actual thinking and problem solving skills to use.
… as buggy or as feature lacking as windows is … it is good in it’s own ways.
Dear Anonymous,
I will tell you something that may shock you. 99% aren’t retarded. Yes, that’s right. They’re not retarded at all. Here’s the kicker: Those 99% of PC users don’t see computers as a religion/cult/movement. They see it as a tool or for entertainment purpose. Can you imagine that?
I thought this was OSnews and not MSnews. Lately there have been overproportionally many Vista posts and things have become a bit bias.
Could have something to do with the fact that Vista is what’s in the news right now?
Oh no!!! That could never be it.
There is ONE vista artcile ont he front page right now. Just ONE. Oh yeah, I really see the bias there.
Since Vista requires pretty stiff hardware requirement, MS is in no rush to release Vista until faster PCs become mainstream…. Then they will have wider potential than they do now.
Just my thought.
If the only change in Vista was the removal of the “My” prefix from every damn folder in windows, I’d buy it.
Or I would if I haddn’t just gotten a powerbook.
Seriously though, I’m sure I’m not the only person who felt like he was being talked down to with the insistance on “My” this and “My” that.
YES!! Dude I totally concur. The “My” prefix is annoying and, well…. kinda neurotic. I can’t stand it. I think it’s one of the reasons I started using linux.
I have two XP machines here at home. I’m not a fan of XP at all, it does the job, but you have to fight with it every so often and give it a good shake to get things done. Why do I have XP? I’m a programmer, I need to write code for it.
I love OS X, some things XP/NT have (such as completion ports) that I wish OS X had, but there is plenty of stuff OS X has which I don’t find as nicely done in XP. I also like the dev enviroment on the Mac, I prefer Cocoa/Obj-C to C++ and even C#, but that is purely a personal taste. I do wish Delphi existed on the Mac 🙂
Having said all this, I am now a little hopeful tht Vista will make my PC life a little better. From this article it does look good compared to XP, which is probably what we should be comparing against, not OS X or Linux.
“Windows Vista is now the company’s top priority”
Isn’t making more money their #1 priority? So my response to the above quote is, “Duh!”
Security and cleaning up their image should be their #1 priority IMO. “The more things change the more things stay the same”
“Secondly: Microsoft is trying to get serious, both internally and externally, about this development program”
Erm… *trying* to get serious?
…is in response to Al2001 and n4cer.
Microsoft is also working on data security by instituting a new policies-based rights management facility
Where is it?
When the prime is security is it wrong to assume the looks of the GUI come after all what’s really important?
re: anonymouse-virtual folders – who said that new users will have a hard time understanding virtual folders / stacks, etc I have 1 word – itunes. (For the record Real Jukebox and WMP had it before itunes along with a few other jukebox apps). People understand smart playlists and static playlists. I show people their itunes/ WMP and how to sort and few people have asked me again. They may not understand all the power with these very simple, GUI’d up boolian searches but they understand enough to make it worthwhile.
g2devi – here’s how I see it – copy/ move an item into a virtual folder and it takes on that attribute. ie move an item from 1 author to another it changes authors. Copy and it assigns both authors. I can see many instances where the paradigm would fail, but hopefully they’ve thought of that.
I think most OSes will move to a Virtual Folders paradigm as the default view for the user space and leave the hard physical search for power users. We had a shift from spatial to explorer/browser and next we’ll have a similar evolution to virtualized filing system. It’ll have spatial/ browser roots, but it’ll be the next shift. Tiger (Smart Folders) already has its feet in it, if only a bit.
This is a minor complaint and I know aero isn’t out and blah blah – but why the vertically oriented folders? I just don’t get it. I don’t leave folders laying on their side with contents spilling out. It seems they could have come up with a better “container” item.
I don’t like OS X’s way of doing it with an icon for each container-type (the Sidebar) – music, movies, etc – (is this item a container, an application, or a file?) It is inconsistent – e.g. an icon in the sidebar but a filmstrip image on a folder on the right side. And Windows’ & OS X’s way of slapping a new image on top of/ inside a folder is irritating and the analogy fails (music in a folder, movies in a folder?).
Just someone please come up with a consistent container image. It doesn’t have to be so literally rooted in the physical world.
Start Menu – unimpressive.
Breadcrumbs – nice
Clock – Why is the clock so critical that a regular user cannot correct it? Why do you need admin privs to change the time? Why has this been here since the NT days. Sometimes you want to check another time zone and this is a quickn dirty way of doing so without downloading some widget.
Nagware – seems like a lot of the security and system features are designed from the nag perspective (security, admin/ UAP, networking, etc). A lot of that needs to be ironed out.
And why is it so hard to network 2 Windows machines in a simple home setup now? Used to be so easy. This isn’t an optional feature you can drop due to security. Active X and Java are expendable. But home networking? OS X is easier to network to an XP box than XP to XP or 2K to XP. This author says that Vista to XP is easier than Vista to Vista. I know a lot of people will say lalalala 2 minutes XP-to-XP lalalala. But try talking OTHER people through it and it becomes a whole new world of hurt.
How about a simple handshake required on each computer with an admin password. The old way under Waste or any similar P2P or buddylist handshake mechanism is easy enough to implement. It’s good enough for home setups. Why does it have to be difficult?
Its sad how people are bashing Vista without even looking on the Microsoft development site; the sexy parts are those that are under the hood, and how those advancements in the backend will eventually trickle down to the end user.
As most of you know, I’m a Mac user, but at the same time, to blindly push any alternative to the side without even reading the material available, is pretty short sighted.
I would also hope that ppl would stop stating that the avg PC is retarded. Remember the computer is just a tool. It’s ok that we all look under the hood, but for the majority of ppl it’s just a tool which they can use to print a letter, surf the web and write an email.
In the same way that just because i don’t know the in’s and out’s of how my car works, doesn’t make me retarded.
To the topic of Windows Vista, i am like a lot of other ppl still unimpressed with what i have seen. I switched to Mac in May and it has been the best thing ive ever done, apple is creating the excitement i expected from Vista.
However it is early days, so fingers crossed for Beta 2, as i like using Mac OS X, Windows and FreeBSD, as they all have their uses.
Its not about learning the ‘ins and outs’ its learning about the basics; learning how to defragment, install updates, learn how to nativate the GUI and so forth – something I would hardly call rocket science material.
The scattered toolbar in IE7 confuses me. What is the point of splitting the toolbar up in to three parts? First you have the Back/Forward buttons next to the address field, which in turn is merged with the Refresh/Stop button. Finally, the rest of the toolbar buttons are placed below the tab bar along with the menu. I simply don’t understand the rationale behind these significant UI changes. Where are the studies that prove this is more user friendly?
Funny how everyone extols the benefits of a new OS with all these glitzy features, yet when you look at what’s really important, like good security, true multi-usability, it’s not there.
It’s still the same old single-user OS claiming to be ready for today’s modern and demanding multi-user environments.
Pathetic really…
indeed, but it will sell by the bucketloads
Windows Vista is now the company’s top priority.”
Isn’t that a bit to late?
When I tried OSX (Jag)I thought it was very cool, but slow? Of course you’ll ask what hardware I was using, I don’t know. Our graphics department had them and needed help getting SMB working. I remember thinking, “This system is slick…but slow as hell.”
Is this a result of the PowerPC?
When I tried OSX (Jag)I thought it was very cool, but slow? Of course you’ll
ask what hardware I was using, I don’t know. Our graphics department had them and needed help getting SMB working. I remember thinking, “This system is slick…but slow as hell.”
Is this a result of the PowerPC?
No, it’s the resulting of the CPU doing almost all the work composing the 2D-screen since the display, called Quartz, on OS X is basically textured planes rendered with OpenGL. The way it worked on Jaguar needed a lot more CPU intervention than with Tiger. If you had a old/slow graphics card (basically anything slower/less memory than a 16 MB ATi Rage Pro) it was a lot worse. It’s basically the windows vista full aero mode but with the slower cpus and graphic cards of it’s day it wasn’t a very enjoyable experience. It would have been equally slow on a same generation x86 machine.
I’ve seen OS X on non accelerated machines and it’s really not very funny. On a newish machine running Tiger you’ll notice very little lag. One thing that’s only really enjoyable on the fastest G5 PowerMacs though is the window resizing, but on the other hand, there’s no tearing as on current Windows.
I try hard but I can’t get excited about Vista at all. Beta 1 is so bad you can hardly call it a “beta” version. I don’t see Vista ready for the desktop anytime within the next 2-3 years. By then most of us have switched to Linux.
It might not be that they don’t know any better. It might actually be that they’re planning it out right. Think about it this way…. 99% of PC users are retarded. They have no idea how to do anything technical and they certainly don’t want to learn. Windows is the only viable solution because people are idiots. I use linux, FreeBSD, and Windows all for different things myself but I will never expect people to just suddenly learn a new OS that requires actual thinking and problem solving skills to use.
1. The same people have no problem using the variety of interfaces introduced on countless web sites.
2. The skills needed to deal with any OS at a low level will require quite a bit of thinking and problem solving. That includes most definately Windows in all the versions that have shipped.
3. Anyone who can use Windows for regular work can use Linux for regular work. The learning curve is not at all a problem. Yes, people freak out if you change the color of anything, let alone the design of the widgets, though that level of distress is similar regardless of the OS or OS revision. See #1 for the noted exceptions.
That said, I could not convince my older sister to even look at non-IE browsers till IE was so encrusted with dreck that it no longer ran.
“”Well, in all the reviews and things like this thus far, I am yet to see ONE nw idea that Microsoftt haven’t simply lifted from someone else.
The closest things I have found is the backup utility, and the ability to see all the different authors on your system. The latter is something I’d actually rather like on OS X. It would be cool that rather than having to search for documents by ‘Bob’ or whatever, I could just see a layout of all the different authors available.””
while that sounds nifty, why not simply save all of one users stuff in the sasme folder? and if it is a public computer, say, at a library, and you allow people to save stuff on the computer, then you are not paying enough attention to security…
I was wating when the switch came from Win 3.11 to 98. And 98 to ME – XP. But this, naah I’m better off with XP for now, I think Microsoft would have been better off consolidating the security fixes on Windows XP.
Needless to say, its following the Linux madness of releasing a new version every 2 milli second.
Except it’s been 4 years thus far since any desktop/WS Windows release.
Not to mention the fact that Apple and the various Linux distros took the idea of releasing new versions often from Microsoft, only just after critcizing them for making frequent releases (and less frequent than what is current in said markets!)
would smell as sweet …
In short, Microsoft Windows Vista is not only a rebranding, changing horses in midstream because the last set of horses – Win 3.x, Win9x, WinNT, WinME, Win2k, WinXP and Win2k3 – got lamed in the middle of the stream, Microsoft Windows Vista is also an attempt to pass off common Unix and Linux standards as Microsoft innovations.
I don’t know about you, but skinning a horse in midstream and wrapping him in pig-skin or bear-skin or potato-skin or tomato-skin – because you don’t like the brand he’s wearing on his hide -, while imagining you’re riding him, sounds a little tricky to me.
Ummm, what sort of branding iron works best with potato-skin?
any experienced potato-rustlers here able to help Microsoft out?
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