Hands-On With Windows 7's New Features 662
Barence writes "Microsoft has released the first pre-beta code of Windows 7, and PC Pro has a series of in-depth, hands-on examinations of all the new features. The revamped user interface has clearly gleaned more than a little inspiration from the Mac OS X Dock, but it goes further than the Apple concept with 'jumplists,' new gadgets and an updated system tray. The much-vaunted multi-touch controls were there to play with, and it seemed to work well. Networking has been given the full treatment, with new features HomeGroup and Libraries. Windows 7 debuts a new feature called Device Stage that has the potential to be unbelievably handy ... or a complete disaster. Finally, several new features could make PCs easier to manage and secure for IT departments, such as BitLocker To Go and Branch Cache." All in all, these features together lead some people to the conclusion that Windows 7 will "suck less than Vista" — that last link from reader ThinSkin, who also points to a related sampling of screenshots from the current iteration of Windows 7.
Not Again! (Score:3, Insightful)
wait, you mean _THIS_ is Windows Vista? Not again...I fell for this same trick in the last "experiment"
New features are irrelivant... (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it out perform XP?
I didn't put Vista on my machine because every benchmark said it was slower than XP. Can I assume that 7 is going to be even slower?
Re:handy disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
If I read TFA correctly, what Microsoft does with this "Device Stage" [pcpro.co.uk] thingie is not much at issue. What the hardware manufacturers do is critical.
I'm betting the latter. Do I have any takers?
Audio/Visuals (Score:3, Insightful)
"And don't get me started on the ridiculous transparency + airbrush titlebars. The first thing they should have done was to accept that the translucent window experiment failed (or at least to boost the opacity to ~90% like another company addicted to transparency learned to do), but the Windows UI team doesn't seem to have realized it yet."
The more important question is, can we change it? I'd be more worried about an interface I couldn't change than an interface that pleases everyone.
Re:BSD Network Stack (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they did that in vista. That was the problem.
If they are smart, they will go back to the BSD TCP stack.
Cheap Hack (Score:5, Insightful)
I took a look at some of the screen shots, and quite honestly I get the feeling unpaid open source developers could have done a better job. It doesn't feel like a qualified UI expert sat down to really improve thing. If they don't put a proper effort into the UI design, then Ubuntu is going to be the better OS.
"/."BS Stack (Score:5, Insightful)
And lets pretend that one can steal ideas just to score a slashpoint.
Bloat... (Score:5, Insightful)
Virtual Desktops? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do they have virtual desktops that actually work yet?
Device staging = Marketing TOOLS (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
A printer manufacturer, for example, might include a direct link to buy new ink cartridges for that specific printer from their website
The purpose of an OS is to provide a stable, secure framework for which to run applications.
The purpose of a device driver is to provide stable, and secure interface between hardware and the OS.
Marketing fluff does not belong in an OS, or a device driver. I surely hope there is an opt-out for this tripe.
Well, if Apple is any indication... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I know, trollish subject... but let's face it - what vendor *wouldn't* love to lock their users into *their* online services and *their* software to manage content on their portable devices and the like - all the while being able to advertise their other services, products, etc.
The biggest reason most don't do so right now is not because they listen to the geeks ( like myself - who would much rather just access the darn thing as if it were a portable HDD, copying/deleting/editing files like I would on any drive and only using a proprietary bit of software if needed - e.g. to flash firmware or something ), but because they then have to include the software, the user has to install that software, configure the software, etc.
It's a huge hassle and the only reason Apple gets away with it is because their solution, iTunes, is actually pretty darn good.. and it helps to have a previous technology to launch it with (QuickTime) and additional services that tie into it (iTunes Store).
SONY, Creative, Kowon, iRiver, etc. simply aren't in a position to even launch such an initiative, let alone make it successful enough that if I were to take their device to a random newish computer, that odds are I could use it with their software/services right away (the odds for that being the case with iPods and iPhones is already good - and growing).
But Microsoft *is* in the position to launch such a platform, and if all those manufacturers need to do is make their devices compatible - for free or against a small fee (?) - then there's very little reason not to do it.
Whether it would leave other platforms (specifically non-OS X) out in the cold / you can't circumvent it, though...
Re:Look familliar... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
I use Vista on my main machine(s). Updates don't take longer than XP, IE never locked up on me, and my programs are just as reliable as they were when I was using XP.
Re:Look familliar... (Score:2, Insightful)
Look, the Microsoft crowd accuses the OSS of lacking innovation, but instead copying the best from Microsoft. I'm just trying to show that this isn't exactly a one-way street here.
Re:Vista is still better (Score:5, Insightful)
FYI the XP licence for 2 CPU is 2 physical sockets (that's how MS defines it for XP) if you where to install it on a dual quad core box it would see all 8 usable cores and would run them perfectly fine
Re:New features are irrelivant... (Score:5, Insightful)
IIRC
Windows 2000 actually is faster on Pentium class computers than Windows 98... but after that, Microsoft started to add more and more bloat.
On a side note,
Each interation of OSX seems to add performance instead of taking it. Also true for some Linux distros... Why Windows realeases can't behave the same way?
Re:No more registry? (Score:3, Insightful)
I dunno about you, but most everything in my /etc directory is chmod 644 with root as the owner. If a program or user has the ability to write to /etc, there's generally very little to stop that program from ballocksing up the entire system.
Re:New features are irrelivant... (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, that says you're used to using crappy operating systems. Each version of FreeBSD is faster than the one before it because of things like improved schedulers, better memory allocators and more fine-grained SMP locking. If you expect new OS releases to be slower than its predecessor, then you need to start demanding more from your vendor. Seriously, this "newer is slower" meme is stupidly niche and not at all universally true.
Re:New features are irrelivant... (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't stand all this "will it be EVEN SLOWER" crap. Of course it will, but who gives a shit? Computers are getting faster MUCH MUCH more quickly than operating systems are getting slower.
My question in response is why don't more people seem to care that everything is getting slower? It's just wasteful, pure and simple. The software isn't getting slower because it's getting better. It's getting slower because it's getting sloppier, programmers no longer care about efficiency, and feature creep is given high priority.
The very thinking that computers are faster with more memory therefore we can be sloppy is a very bad attitude for engineers to have. We should be able to have modern operating systems that look and feel like Vista but be as fast as Windows 3.1.
Stop believing the myth that software has to be slower if it's going to be better.
Re:New features are irrelivant... (Score:4, Insightful)
Several versions of OSX have been faster than their predecessors. There is absolutely no reason why an new OS should be slower than a previous one -- other than pandering to a misguided marketing dept. For the corporate user there is a significant cost in both hardware and productivity by having a slower OS. It is completely reasonable to assume that a new OS should be faster and more efficient than its predecessor. People have become used to Windows being increasingly heavier and slower, however there is absolutely no need for this to be the case. There is no reason whatsoever to accept this paradigm.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
You joke, but what good is the desktop environment to me when I'm playing a game? I liked the days of DOS games much better.
How fast they forget...
Remember the joys of setting up your hardware in every single game? Running GAMECONFIG.EXE to say yes, my SoundBlaster is on IRQ 7, my display can handle 1024x769 in 256 colours, and no, I don't have an AdLib card.
Having a real OS might shave off a few fps, but it allows you to set up your hardware just the once, and have it work in all of your software.
Re:Look familliar... (Score:4, Insightful)
Get the fuck over it, they all draw influence and ideas from each other, in all directions. If Jazz wasn't founded on "stealing," as you put it, then it wouldn't be the foundation of modern music, and in the same way it's a good thing for good ideas to be implemented across multiple platforms.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:the best taskbar i could think of... (Score:2, Insightful)
It gives you a preview before switching. Works pretty well. Cheers.
Re:Well, if Apple is any indication... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which online services are Apple owners locked into?
Did you mean iPod owners? You know, iPods can play non-DRM tracks in mp3 and aac formats. iTunes, Amazon, eMusic and basically any other store front that isn't DRMed is really locked into Apple's online services.
If you can't understand the advantages to not having the player do all the work of cataloging all your music and its metadata I'm surprised you figured out how to operate a web browser. You can take care of all your obsessive compulsive urges for organizing your music with playlists. The days of mp3/artist/album/Artist_Album_TrackNumber_Song.mp3 are thankfully over.
Also, in less time that it took to type up your diatribe you could have found programs like Senuti. Or one of the many third party iPod interfaces. But just bash Apple and get your free karma instead.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, moderation abuse for the win. It's obviously trolling to state my own personal experience, am I right?
I know the moderation system gets abused all the time, and I shouldn't be surprised any more, but it really bugs me sometimes that people don't have the integrity to not abuse even this small amount of power.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:1, Insightful)
Exactly. I built my Vista Rig with Vista in mind. 64 bit with 4 gigs of ram, dual core CPU and all Sata drives for both HD and DVD burner. Plays every game I have thrown at it without a hiccup. Once you get the desktop set to your liking you won't ever want to go back to XP. I wish my office machine (I am at now) was Vista 64 bit instead of tired old 32 bit XP.
Those that bad mouth Vista these days are either people who just hate anything that M$ puts out or haven't really given Vista a good run now that it has some patches applied.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember the joys of setting up your hardware in every single game? Running GAMECONFIG.EXE to say yes, my SoundBlaster is on IRQ 7, my display can handle 1024x769 in 256 colours, and no, I don't have an AdLib card.
Youngster. I wish we had GAMECONFIG.EXE. In my day we had boot into DOS because WinDOS wasn't good enough. Then we had to edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys and enable HIMEM for our games to run. Those were the days...
Re:No more registry? (Score:1, Insightful)
Has anybody actually encountered a corrupt registry when using NTFS? It is supposed to be impossible (by using NTFS recovery logs), and I have never had a registry hive become corrupt in 10 years of using NT. I don't think the concept of the registry itself is necessarily flawed (possible corruption notwithstanding); I think the blame lies more with developers. Microsoft provides a service; people abuse it by not cleaning up after themselves. How is this any different than people who shove all kinds of worthless crap in the system tray or install all these useless update services?
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, the only people claiming vista is fine with no performance problems are the people who don't use vista as their main machine. Try spending a day at work on a Vista machine. You'll see what we're talking about.
Wrong.
I use Vista as my main machine. All the time. I develop on it, game on it, whatever. It works fine (I'd venture "great" but I don't want the wrath of /.ers).
1. Internet Explorer != Vista. IE sucks. Get Firefox. You'll be happier.
2. Latest Updates install quick. Plus, if you're spending a "day at work" then someone is pushing those updates at night for you. You don't see it.
3. Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V is fine for me. Maybe not for you, but you haven't given system specs or anything.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:3, Insightful)
XP had 2000, and didn't just work (remember Blaster, or some of the Win9x only stuff that wasn't compatible?).
W7:Vista::XP:2000
What's Up with those GUI's? (Score:2, Insightful)
Could they jam ANY more information into the start menu? The ribbons pose similar problems. Too much information and no priorities. Which, is worse than their old menus that simply lacked priorities.
I have window previews in KDE4 right now running nicely on old hardware too. (T41 thinkpad!) Most of the other features look like what I've got now, except complicated with either too much information or none at all.
I'm happy supporting it at work, but I'm glad my family is off Microsoft for good.
It takes 15 minutes to setup wireless? (Score:2, Insightful)
It takes 15 minutes to setup wireless on XP or Ubuntu?
I'm sure glad I have a MacBook...
Re:Capabilities (Score:2, Insightful)
But how will "the move from XP to Windows 7 be"?
Since I didn't "make the move" from XP to Vista, I could give a rat's ass about "making the move" from Vista to anything.
From what I can see in this article, this should at most be a $25 update from XP Pro SP3. Considering it'll probably require a Core2Duo E8400 with 8 gig of RAM to run properly, I don't know if I'm willing to spend more than that.
I've also read that Microsoft is going to include some new DRM scheme, and they're calling it "Superstream" or "UltraStream" or "Streams4Sure" or something with the word "stream" in it. I don't remember exactly because as soon as I saw that there was going to be DRM built into the operating system, I stopped reading and went back to praying for some well-financed new player to enter the OS market.
If there was ever a time for a new company to put out a pro operating system that was based on the crazy notion that an operating system should run programs, now is that time.
emm386 EMS, NOEMS, etc. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ugh, ugh! I remember I made multi-configurations menus too for specific setups since not all gmaes like EMS, XMS, want most conventional memory, etc.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:2, Insightful)
Nine times out of ten this is due to a crappy vendor driver and has nothing to do with the OS. You can crash XP and panic Ubuntu just as quickly (if not quicker) with dodgy drivers. Anything that directly involved with the kernel can take down any OS pretty fast. There are ways to prevent this by not letting the driver have such deep hooks into the kernel, but this usually comes at the cost of performance.
Ironically, I've seen people try to load XP drivers onto Vista. The drivers might load but stability is a crapshoot. But when it barfs, people blame Microsoft instead of the vendor or their own ineptitude for loading the wrong driver.
I get frustrated at this stuff, too, but it's worthless to blame someone (Microsoft) who has no control over the situation. Blame the vendor and maybe they'll clean up their act.
Re:Capabilities (Score:5, Insightful)
then you could always excercise your right as a consumer to not upgrade and keep what you have.
same as if you wanted to keep driving your old 1998 Olds cutless.
no one is making you move.
Re:New features are irrelivant... (Score:3, Insightful)
.
The "high performance" OS - or distro, if you want to be pedantic about it, supports a small subset of hardware and software.
The Windows PC can be found pretty much everywhere, doing pretty much everything, on hardware that has no standard configuration.
Re:It takes 15 minutes to setup wireless? (Score:2, Insightful)
in ubuntu it takes 15 minutes to decide if you want to spend the next three weeks fucking around with wireless.....
Re:Capabilities (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, they're making me move all right.
To Linux or OSX.
I'll say this much, it says a lot about Microsoft as a company that they can't, or refuse to, put out an operating system that fills the needs of so many of us. Except for their singular monopolistic status, and their new success with a gaming console, they would have gone the way of Amiga or OS/2 "Warp", without having put out a decent operating system, like those Commodore or IBM did.
I have a huge investment in the Windows platform because of the work I do (audio and video production). With the economic downturn, I'm not interested in the >$12,000 investment it would take for me to move to Mac software (and in several cases, there is no Mac equivalent at all).
I've been very happy with the XP platform, but it's closer to the end of its lifespan than the beginning (although moving to the 64-bit version has helped). If I sound bitter about Microsoft, it's because so far this century they have let me down. And I doubt very much I am extraordinary in this regard. I'm betting that there are lots of professionals who use Windows to make a living, and people who support computers for a living, and people who sell computers for a living, that feel similarly disappointed in Microsoft's inability to fill what is clearly a large market demand. If Microsoft put out an efficient, powerful, well-designed operating system that didn't have DRM and ran well on the average platform, I would run out and buy it today, and I bet a lot of other consumers would, too.
Maybe if Microsoft had been broken up years ago, and there was now a "Baby Microsoft" whose business it was to make a really good operating system that people wanted, things would be different. But as long as they can squeeze institutional customers for license money, and generate some profits from the Xbox and Zune, they don't really seem motivated to do so. And as long as they put the demands of their "strategic partners" who insist on DRM ahead of their customers, who demand no DRM, there's going to be a lot of disappointed Windows users who don't really have a viable option.
I'm sorry that you think there is something wrong with consumers expecting quality from the companies that they buy from. I don't know how (or if) you make a living, but most of us seem to understand that it's appropriate for the people who give us money to expect value in exchange.
Re:No, Windows 7 really is Mojave. (Score:5, Insightful)
the convoluted menu system
How exactly is the menu-system "convoluted"? Well, Microsoft added a bunch of complications to THEIR menus over the years, but that's not an inherent part of the menu interface. Comparing Microsoft's menus against the ribbon is like comparing a sick racehorse against a sloth. The sloth may win the race, but that doesn't mean you should go out and harness one up to your buggy.
So...what's wrong with the ribbon?
It's an awkward compromise between Xerox' context-sensitive menus and Apple's menu bar.
It abandons the tight state-sensitive behavior of contextual menus because it's continually displayed and so can't restrict itself to only providing options for specific objects, but retains much of the clutter of menus because it has to display actions associated with multiple objects.
It abandons the scannability and location-sensitive behavior of menus because you only see actions related to the high-level of the window. You can't scan it to learn the range of actions available from the program.
Re:Why the fuck does the UI have to get glitzier? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are they just catering to the small percentage of people who sit and tweak their desktops and widget layouts all day long and are constantly looking for something with more of "teh shiny!!1"?
I think they're focusing on the initial in-store impression. It's Joe the College Student walking through Best Buy with his parents trying to decide on a laptop to take to school. If the Macs have "teh shiny!!1" and PCs don't, Joe is going to spend all his time at the Mac station. It doesn't matter that Joe will end up turning off all of "teh shiny!!1" once he brings the laptop home as long as he brings it home at all.
Corporate customers on the other hand are going to be turned off by shiny bits. I think that probably has a lot to do with the lackluster response to Vista.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
If a "crappy vendor driver" is able to bring the whole machine down, it is very much an OS issue.
Re:BSD Network Stack (Score:3, Insightful)
They didn't use the BSD stack. [kuro5hin.org] The UNIX utilities like ftp came from BSD because those utilities came from licensed networking code from Spider Systems that was based on BSD. The licensed stack was intended as a stopgap until Microsoft wrote their own stack for NT 3.5. For whatever reason, the UNIX utilities weren't rewritten, and people saw the BSD copyrights and assumed Microsoft used BSD's stack.
Re:What's a gamer to do? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, the good old days of QEMM386 and TSR applications. I miss them not.
Re:Capabilities (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes but "upgrade" is in the eye of the beholder. Win7 is still Vista is XP SP2. Gradual rewrites of small portions of core parts of code. 2000 was the last significant upgrade since 98 and NT4. Everyone saw what a night and day difference a total rewrite of an operating system did for performance and usability with OSX - and it still kept backwards compatibility with decade old OS 8/9 programs! People keep waiting for that total rewrite, and microsoft keeps delivering warmed over XP2 code, which is, in turn, which is in turn... Until my games stop running on XP (and I see no slowdown of XP support for Steam based games, up until last october they still supported Win98-Currently it's WinMe).
Until that total rewrite happens, I'll stick with XP for games and OSX/Linux for my daily workhorse. Not upgrading from XP SP2 is more like deciding to hold onto your 1995 air cooled porsche because it's fast and simple(ish) and gets you from point a to b without crashing and still looks halfway decent whild doing it. Not upgrading from win98 is more like hanging on to the buick.
Re:Capabilities (Score:1, Insightful)
You think that's funny? Laugh at this: Windows 7 is coming and there is nothing you can do about it.
Re:Capabilities (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'm sorry, but I've never, ever met a professional audio or video producer who used anything but the Mac. And, being an artsy fartsy type, I've met a lot. "
!?
Avid once announced that they were effectively going to discontinue their Mac support. They never followed through but most Avid DS and Media Composer systems run on Windows.
Mac support for Maya is still a little bit dodgy. It's largely Linux or Windows.
Shake used to run dramatically better on Intel/Windows but then Apple killed the Windows version. The Intel/Linux version was still astronomically faster than the G4 OSX version. Until Apple released Intel hardware the OSX version of Shake was noticeably slower than any other build of Shake.
3DsMAX only runs on Windows. If you took Maya, XSI and Houdini and combined all of their sales they still wouldn't even sell as many copies as 3DsMax.
Lustre is Windows XP only.
Assimilate Scratch is Windows only.
Flame, Flint and Inferno until very recently were Solaris only. Now linux.
ZBrush only this month got an OSX build.
TV stations run almost exclusively on windows based Avid solutions.
If by 'professional video producer' you mean those guys with DVXs and iphones shooting indie films. Then I'll agree with you. But people who actually work in high-end professional film and video post production mostly use Linux or Windows.
OSX does not support 64 bit applications yet. Our last project required 64 bit rendering. We literally could not have completed it on schedule with OSX.
Re:Capabilities (Score:4, Insightful)
That's something I don't understand. Why is it necessary to have all these memory-hogging "pretty" windows. I prefer to go with a clean interface. As one girl said after looking at my laptop "That looks boring". Yes true, but it runs like a speed demon and only uses 1/4 gig of RAM.
>>>user interface has clearly gleaned more than a little inspiration from the Mac OS X Dock
No surprise. Microsoft doesn't innovate; they let OTHER companies innovate and then copy the ideas. MS copied preemptive multitasking from the 1985 Commodore Amiga. They tried to do cooperative tasking but quickly realized that wouldn't work, so they switched to the preemptive model that Amiga used so expertly (and with only 256k of RAM).
Then they copied Windows 95 from the Classic Macintosh interface, including the dropdown Finder menu (relabeled Start) and the Trashbin (relabeled Recycle Bin).
They cloned the Netscape Browser, and stole market share by giving it away for free until Netscape was driven into near-bankruptcy.
And now, faced with diminishing interest in Vista, MS is once again pulling their bacon out of the frying pan by using that favorite schoolboy strategy - copy your neighbor. This time its Mac OS X.
Re:Capabilities (Score:3, Insightful)
But the GUI came from Xerox. And by Windows 95, the elements in the GUI had been developed by many other platforms too (I'd say the OS had more elements borrowed from AmigaOS if anything - e.g., a combined GUI and command line, pre-emptive multitasking).
I don't see a huge problem here. Apple didn't invent the Dock; lots of platforms had one before OS X came along. Apple may have added some new things to the idea - just as Microsoft are now doing themselves.
When Apple copies an idea and adds something, it's "innovation" or "doing something that no one did before", or even "Apple invented it".
When Microsoft copies and idea and adds something, it's "stealing Apple's ideas".