Posted on 12/13/2006 8:22:40 PM PST by Zakeet
After five years of starts, stops, executive shuffling, feature rethinks and delays, Windows Vista is finally complete. It’s available to corporations already, and starting Jan. 30, it’s what you’ll get on any new PC. Its programmers, who probably haven’t seen their families in months, will have an especially merry Christmas this year.
So after five years, how is Windows Vista? Microsoft’s description, which you’ll soon be seeing in millions of dollars’ worth of advertising, is “Clear, Confident, Connected.” But a more truthful motto would be “Looks, Locks, Lacks.”
Looks
Windows Vista is beautiful. Microsoft has never taken elegance so seriously before.
Discreet eye candy is partly responsible. Windows and menus cast subtle shadows. A new typeface gives the whole affair a fresh, modern feeling. Subtle animations liven up the proceedings.
If the description so far makes Vista sound a lot like the Macintosh, well, you’re right. You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.”
Here are some of the grace notes that will remind you of similar ones on the Mac: A list of favorite PC locations appears at the left side of every Explorer window, which you can customize just by dragging folders in or out. You now expand or collapse lists of folders by clicking little flippy triangles. When you’re dragging icons to copy them, a cursor “badge” appears that indicates how many you’re moving. The Minimize, Maximize and Close buttons glow when your cursor passes over them. There’s now a keystroke (Alt+up arrow) to open the current folder’s parent window, the one that contains it.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
it's getting late. microsoft bashers and conspiracy theorists should be waking up...
yep, its a solid product(sure it will need updates and patches just like OSX does AND ALL OTHER software, but it is better than WinXP and will be out shortly)
Right. We are all to believe that the NYT is suddenly a paragon of objectivity.
On the other hand, I have always said the Mac interface is made for the 'touchy, feely' types. It's very earthy. Well, very slick might be a better way of putting it. It's Starbucks Extreme Hoity-Toity Latte on a screen.
I haven't seen Vista, but there's more to "elegance" than "pretty." An elegant machine isn't just one that looks pretty; in engineering terms, an elegant machine is one that has no unnecessary parts, and in which no task requires any unnecessary effort.
You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.”
Well, it only seems that way because that's what they did. And what they've done with every Mac OS revision since 1984.
Now, before the hate-mail tsunami begins, it’s important to note that Apple has itself borrowed feature ideas on occasion, even from Windows. But never this broadly, boldly or blatantly. There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives’ ears to power the Polar Express.
There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives’ ears to power the Polar Express.
Aw, hell. If they aren't used to it by now, they will never be. That's the root of Apple's obsession with secrecy on upcoming products; Microsoft can't steal what they don't know about yet.
If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost.
You can use a flash drive for swap space? That might be a little faster than using a hard drive, but overall it strikes me as about as useful as teats on a boar hog.
Does Web-based software make operating systems obsolete?
Only the ones that suck.
whatever they are totally different, and as far as flash goes wait till Robson and Snowgrass comes out, I believe mid-'07 then we will start seeing some neat stuff with Vista.
What do you know? Could you enlighten me?
At the Intel developer forum this past spring, Intel announced that the company would include 1GB of flash memory integrated into its upcoming mobile chipsets. The technology, dubbed Robson, is part of the Santa Rosa Centrino platform, expected to launch in the second quarter of 2007.
This inclusion of 1GB of NAND memory is actually the first phase of Robson. Soon after launch, vendors will also have the option to include 512MB instead of 1GB modules, as a cost-down alternative. Both the 1GB and 512MB modules are integrated into the Crestline chipset that makes up the core of the Santa Rosa platform.
Windows Vista is heavily reliant on the ability to use flash memory to cache files with Superfetch. Rather than reading files off the hard drive, Superfetch occasionally writes the files to an available NAND device. Vista will then pool the NAND device for the files, rather than power-up the hard drive. Since the flash memory is integrated right onto the motherboard, the system can read the memory considerably faster than the hard drive while getting a nice power-saving benefit as well.
Intel is also planning a desktop version of Robson, currently dubbed Snowgrass. NAND and hybrid technology are currently slated as a requirement for Windows Vista Premium logo certification in 2007. This NAND requirement can be fullfilled by hybrid solid state storage drives, but technologies like Robson will also fullfill the requirement.
lol ;)
If Microsoft projects an '07 ship, I'll start looking in '09. Remember Windows 92? Of course not. Because by the time it shipped it was Windows 95.
Vista's RTM is ALREADY OUT!
WOW. That's a lot of jargon to pack into one short press release. And I elided most of the other incredibly dense jargon. My read is that they're combining some of the features of a L2 processor cache, some parts of a drive cache, and some VM/swap functions into a new bank of flash ram soldered to the motherboard. Well, whoop-ti-freaking-do.
Actually, it's pretty nice if you have to look at a computer screen all day, and it's nice to have the location and functions of features such as back buttons, links, menu bars, etc. standardized (which the article stated Vista neglected.)
My office has run on Macs for more than a decade, and our current computers are at least 4 years old. One of our 5 computers crashed once, but someone from IT came and got it back and running with no data loss in about 5 minutes. So we (or our computer interface) may be "touchy-feely", but when we can run a busy office for years with no downtime on our computers, that's an accomplishment.
RTM is a relative term. Microsoft's 1.0 is another company's -- almost any company's -- beta.
its the major bottleneck of ALL current computers(data access), processors and video cards are no longer the bottleneck, our old "mechanical" hard drive technology is the problem. This is a nice way to close the "gap" until we can get to solid state drives(at a decent price)
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