First Look At Windows 7 Beta 1 898
The other A. N. Other writes "It seems that Microsoft couldn't keep the lid on Windows 7 beta 1 until the new year. By now, several news outlets have their hands on the beta 1 code and have posted screenshots and information about this build. ZDNet's Hardware 2.0 column says: 'This beta is of excellent quality. This is the kind of code that you could roll out and live with. Even the pre-betas were solid, but finally this beta feels like it's "done." This beta exceeds the quality of any other Microsoft OS beta that I've handled.' ITWire points out that this copy has landed on various torrent sites, and while it appears to be genuine, there are no guarantees. Neowin has a post confirming that it's the real thing, and saying Microsoft will be announcing the build's official availability at CES in January."
Links to the torrent (for Google impaired folks) (Score:5, Informative)
Size: 2,618,793,984 bytes (2.44 GB)
http://www.mininova.org/tor/2123650 [mininova.org]
Re:Shill me one more time!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Excuse me for being cynical but I will take this review with a pinch of salt as other reports show that, at least benchmark wise, there is absolutely no difference between Vista and Windows 7.
There was one set of benchmarks that showed no improvement: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/10/46TC-windows-7_1.html/ [infoworld.com]. There was another set of benchmarks done on a later build that showed improvements: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3182&page=1/ [zdnet.com].
As for Windows 7 feeling "so much more responsive".. well, depends who is paying you to write that review innit?
Cynicism, conspiracy and an ad hominem attacks all in one. You're going all the way to +5 insightful!
Re:List of changes between it and Vista plz. (Score:5, Informative)
Heh, WinFS... It's such an easy troll target... ;)
The storage system (not its own file system) called "WinFS" was released as Beta 1, but later cancelled, with components of it ending up in SQL Server 2008. It was later assumed to be dead for good, but Ballmer said in late 2006 that it was still being worked on, although he was not clear on in which products it would end up in. For all we know, the team could be working with the SQL Server team now.
This is among the last pieces of good actual info on this project:
http://blogs.msdn.com/winfs/archive/2006/06/23/644706.aspx [msdn.com]
Windows 7 will not include WinFS, and it was never announced for it.
Re:Do these get better just because of time? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:why is this surprising? (Score:5, Informative)
1) It won't be named Vista.
2) Supposedly, UAC is much more configurable, especially from the group policy angle.
3) Not as much bloat is supposed to be bundled. If you want all the default MS software, you'll go to Windows Live to grab it. Bloat being: Media Player, the Movie Maker, Picture Gallery, etc. You'll get IE (cause you'll need something provided to go grab the stuff) and you'll get a pretty plain OS otherwise. I'm a huge fan of that.
Other than that, I'm not sure if anything else has changed... But I expect that they've also worked on handling "very large files" and other stability stuff.
Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:3, Informative)
I'll tell you right now. the speedy feel of the XP days will never EVER come back
They never left. I use Vista, and it's as snappy as XP ever was.
Sounds to me like a pebkac (Score:3, Informative)
A female kind. Probably underage.
Those are hard to get rid off. It usually takes years before you get the ship em off to college or marry em off.
Re:No Idea what the techspecs are on this but (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Did you turn off Aero? (Score:5, Informative)
Non-aero window drawing is also hardware-accelerated, just not 3D hardware accelerated. And it has been like that since Windows 9x or something.
Your computer isn't going to be more responsive by adding extra load on the GPU, only (possibly) prettier. Which is kind of subjective, I for one think Vista looks like multi-colored poo that gets in the way of working with the computer.
Ask and ye shall receive (Score:3, Informative)
What you ask exists. Vista Virtual Store [microsoft.com]. Basically, if your crappy app writes to "C:\program files" in vista and you are running as a standard user, Vista will do exactly what you describe... it will redirect the file IO to a place owned by the user, not the system.
Re:World domination 201 (Score:5, Informative)
Features New to Windows 7 (Score:5, Informative)
Over 100 comments and we still don't have a concise list of substantial features Windows 7 offers over Vista?
Features New to Windows 7 [wikipedia.org].
Enjoy!
Re:I think modern window systems (Score:3, Informative)
Ask and ye shall receive:
Source: Optimizing Performance: Taking Advantage of Hardware [microsoft.com]
Source: Graphics Rendering Tiers [microsoft.com].
Source: ClearType Overview [microsoft.com]
See also: Typography in Windows Presentation Foundation [microsoft.com]
Re:Ask and ye shall receive (Score:2, Informative)
1. It's a hassle to find the files. They're hidden away in a bunch of sub-directories I had to drill down to get to. Even then, I couldn't find all of the stuff I was looking for when I needed to back my Vista system up manually.
2. It doesn't work all the time, it works for some apps, but seems to fail for others.
What you are "aware" of is a lie. (Score:5, Informative)
Windows Vista's performance "problems" have nothing to do with DRM. If you aren't playing back a DRM'd file, then there is no DRM-specific code running, and no penalty of any kind. The idea that Vista had any more DRM code running than Windows XP was a myth propogated mostly buy people who knew it wasn't true, and others who were gullible and believed anything that sounded bad about Vista.
If you don't want DRM, don't buy any DRM'd media. Having support for DRM'd media in the OS (like BluRay / HDCP / etc) has absolutely ZERO impact on people who don't use DRM'd media.
Vista had its issues and they are well understood, there is no reason to make up myths to blame them on.
Re:Task Bar?! (Score:3, Informative)
Win7 is supposedly designed to run on netbooks (I'm guessing that the current trend of netbooks that can only run either Linux or some eight-year-old version of Windows that Microsoft desperately wants to kill off kind of scared them a little) so system requirements should be lower than for Vista, which is a bit of a relief.
Re:Doesn't look finished to me (Score:2, Informative)
Ahh yes, typical Mac fanboi "They copied Mac" reaction.
This funcionality hasn't changed since Windows 98. Before the Dock existed. It just looks different because of the theming. It's just the same old standard quicklaunch bar.
Re:Linux has UAC too (Score:5, Informative)
UAC pops up asking you to elevate to delete a shortcut on the desktop, and then annoys you a SECOND time, asking if you're really sure you want to delete it. In Linux, you don't need root to delete a shortcut from your desktop.
You misunderstand why the UAC dialog pops up. It's not the act of deleting the icon from your desktop. That doesn't require admin privs. What you fail to realize is that is a side effect of a feature of Windows called a "common desktop". Icons in the common desktop are shared with all accounts, they are meged with the icons in the users profile to create a single view.
If you delete an icon from only your set of icons, no elevation is required. If you delete an icon from the shared desktop elevation is required because it affects multiple user accounts. The same feature exists for the start menu, in which you can have "shared" and "non-shared" shortcuts. You can delete the non-shared ones without elevation, but you can't delete the shared ones.
I find the majority of people are like you. They simply don't understand why the UAC prompt is coming up. Perhaps that's a failure of Microsoft's, but one user should not be able to affect other users without elevating privilegs. It's working the way it's supposed to.
Re:Did you turn off Aero? (Score:2, Informative)
You are incorrect in numerous ways.
First, Windows Vista does not support 2D acceleration, as the new WDDM 1.0 driver model doesn't allow it. That means all the GDI acceleration in Windows XP is gone. However, for the desktop and window manager this is offset by the fact that the new window manager makes use of 3D acceleration, which is very richly supported by the new driver model.
Second, many tasks will feel faster with composition enabled. For instance, dragging a window around the screen on Windows XP will cause a great deal of CPU usage. On Windows Vista with the DWM running, there is virtually none.
Finally, since the desktop is composited, it allows for a higher quality and more robust user experience. When a window is hung, the window manager can continue to show the last state of the window (and can even "frost" it over to show that it is not responding), and can still allow it to be dragged around even though the window itself has stopped pumping messages.
Note that Windows 7's new WDDM 1.1 driver model brings back a lot of the 2D GDI acceleration that was missing in Vista.
Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Viruses and Trojans Still a Problem (Score:3, Informative)
To disable Kaspersky & Defender, any trojan would need full admin privileges. If UAC is enabled, this means an elevation request dialog. If your friend opened what she thought was a picture, and then clicked "yes" on an elevation request, then there really isn't much more to be done there except educating her. It would go precisely the same on Linux if she had that.
And if she runs Vista with UAC disabled (which means that she had purposedly disabled it, as it's enabled by default) - well, what did people say for years about always running as root?..
Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:3, Informative)
There's also Executor [lifehacker.com] too.
Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:2, Informative)
I gave Vista a fair chance, honestly. It is adequate, but pretty lousy given the resources MS had to make it not suck... and it sucks. They've gone nowhere in the past 8 years.
Re:Features New to Windows 7 (Score:3, Informative)
The only "features" that I see of interest are:
* Solid state disk handling improvements.
* Multi-touch support.
* "Library" (AKA virtual folder [wikipedia.org]) support.
* A redesigned task bar [wikipedia.org] that looks like a carbon copy of the Mac OS X Dock [wikipedia.org].
* A "redesigned" start menu [wikipedia.org] with more visual effects and no classic (i.e. Windows 2000) mode.
* More DRM.
Other than the above mentioned features, Windows 7 looks like Windows Vista/Mojave [wikipedia.org] with a new UI theme.
DirectX 11 was left off the list because it will most likely be available for Windows Vista as well.
Your assumption is incorrect. (Score:2, Informative)
The OS does no checking on files you work with. Windows Media Player will of course check media files you play to see if they are DRM'd, just as every media player does. This is part of the process by which it determines the media format type, i.e. is it an MP3? A WMA? A DRM'd WMA? This works exactly the same on Vista as on XP, and is the same sort of check iTunes and other apps do. There is no overhead here beyond that required to determine the difference between an MP3 and a WMA, and it only occurs at the time a file is loaded.
What Vista provides above and beyond XP is something called Protected Media Path. This is similar to Windows XP's Certified Output Protection Protocol, but more sophisticated.
Protected Media Path allows for a great many possible restrictions on both audio and video output, including those defined by HDCP. And since it is a protected process, it allows decoders to be run in a context that prevents them from being manipulated or attacked (i.e. having their memory scanned for secret keys and such). Whether there is any overhead for using PMP to host your decoder is debateable, if there is any it should be negligible at worst. It's the same code running, whether it runs in your app's process or in mfpmp.exe instead. Yes there's IPC overhead, but lots of media player do out-of-proc hosting anyway so that a bad decoder won't crash the media player and to dodge certain security issues like heap spraying attacks.
What's important, though, is that this is an API that applications *CAN* use, not something that is imposed on applications or users. The Protected Media Path code will only get loaded and used if an application specifically calls MFCreatePMPMediaSession [microsoft.com]. It will cause the application-provided code to be hosted inside the protected process (mfpmp.exe). You won't see mfpmp.exe running unless an application has specifically invoked it via that API call - which would most likely happen because you are playing a BluRay disc with a player that has decided to make use of PMP.
Windows Media Player on Vista does use PMP for all media decoding, and suffers no ill effects from it. However, you do have a problem with it, just use Winamp or some other player that doesn't invoke PMP.
Like I said, having the support for DRM or output protections like HDCP won't affect you at all if you don't use media (or applications) that request or require that support. It just allows developers to run their code in a protected space and place what restrictions they want on their content. It make no determination about whether such restrictions are necessary, wise, or just. It's just an API. APIs can be used for good or for evil, if you have a problem with how a BluRay app uses the PMP API, then complain to Sony or the app developer =)
Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:3, Informative)
UAC prompt appears when something requests a privileged operation. It's left to the user to determine if it's supposed to be valid or not, and user usually has no idea how to determine that.
sudo/gksudo prompt appears when one application/script intends to run another one as root. It does not wait for any particular "privileged" action, so user only has to check if executable name matches. He also can configure sudoers file to not ask him for password for some or all applications. The only problem is, currently sudo is often configured to cover way too much (often everything) for the user created by default, so prompt is not shown if another application is started within the timeout, however this is the problem with configuration.
PolicyKit usually doesn't ask the user at all because permissions are in its configuration.
What this means is that, on this axis, I would say it's actually rather more convenient than sudo, because you don't have to restart the program to give it root permissions. There's none of the "crap, I needed to run this with sudo" that you get when working from the Linux command line.
In Unix-like systems you never run administrative utilities as a non-root user. The only three things you may want to run as both root and regular user are:
1. network analyzer
2. shell
3. text editor
All three should better be difficult to start in privileged mode because of serious security implications of what they can do.
Re:why aRe:They're glowing! (Score:3, Informative)
The question I'm interested in through, is not why Microsoft are late to the party, but whether this search facility works without grinding the disk constantly 24/7 to build its index like Vista does. I'm not familar with the KDE version, but I doubt it has this problem, and I know for a fact that Mac OS X doesn't do it either.