Ballmer Sets Loose Windows 7 Public Beta At CES 672
CWmike writes "The rumors turned out to be true. Microsoft will release a public beta this week of its next desktop operating system, Windows 7, hoping it will
address the problems that have made Windows Vista perhaps the least popular OS in its history. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will launch the beta during his speech at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday. Preston Gralla reviewed Windows 7 beta 1, noting 'Fast and stable, Beta 1 of Windows 7 unveils some intriguing user-interface improvements, including the much-anticipated new task bar.' MSDN and Technet subscribers should be able to get the public data tonight. The general public will have to wait until Friday."
Oh, that's what made Vista fail!? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, Vista failed because they didn't provide a public beta for it?
How about addressing the increasingly long list of features people actually want instead of a resource intensive API to make my windows translucent? Or, making what was arguably Vista's best and at the same time worst feature (UAC) something that works without making itself so intrusive as to be the first time users desire to disable?!
New Task Bar -- wow! (not!) (Score:3, Insightful)
New Task Bar? Do the words "Titanic" and "rearranging the deckchairs" come to mind here?
Least popular?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardly. If anything, it's the *most* popular. Popularity doesn't necessarily mean that something is liked, but having a lot of people dislike something as in the case of Vista means it's pretty damn popular. Just not for the reasons you'd like. It's easy to tell which is the least popular Windows ever: Windows 1.0. (It would be Microsoft Bob, except that's not actually "Windows".)
However, even for the "most hated" award, it's a tight race between ME and Vista. I'd say the hatred of ME is more intense, while the hate for Vista is more widespread.
Discount for after July 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Purchase of Vista?
One of the primary reasons Vista has slow adoption has been the tiers and pricing.
What's it is printed, the development costs are sunk. The need to have one tier of windows 7, and change 99 bucks for it.
It is far better for them to get everybody onboard the new system, then it is dealing with the hassle of corporations ahving so many versions.
It is also in there best interests to set the stage to ditch all legacy 32bit apps they sell.
Hell sell it for 59.99 and they would move 100 million the first year. Everyone on Vista will move over, as would people holding out on XP.
Re:Oh, that's what made Vista fail!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you read two words of the summary to interpret its meaning? They are releasing a public beta AND hoping to address the problems. That's like replying to "Microsoft hired 3 new programmers to work on Windows 7" with "Didn't they hire programmers to work on Vista?"
Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? (Score:5, Insightful)
At that time you could choose Windows ME or Windows 2000.
MS had a hard time to get people off Win9x.
Windows ME fixed that in a jiffy.
Re:Oh, that's what made Vista fail!? (Score:5, Insightful)
I love UAC. On XP, I used to have to de-malware my [anonymized family member]'s computer every couple of months. On Vista, I'm watching them use their machine, and UAC pops up with some spyware wanting to install. Box read, permission declined, no infestation I have to clean up.
Again, it works great for me!
Re:New Task Bar -- wow! (not!) (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, that's what I thought too. Who gives a flying crap (other than Preston Gralla obviously) about a taskbar?
Solve the incompatibility problems between Vista and XP if you want to impress me. Plug security holes. Drop useless bulk. Or at least provide a way to optionally include it at install time. Streamline. Make it run faster than XP. [cnet.com] Vista performance is embarrassingly atrocious. Fix THAT instead.
All these known problems and complaints, and the best thing you decide to do is to tout a new Taskbar? Unreal, MS.
Re:New Task Bar -- wow! (not!) (Score:5, Insightful)
By the look of it, they have fired their entire R&D team and using betas of kde 4.2 instead.
Re:It's okay... (Score:3, Insightful)
See Mark Russinovich Explains MinWin Once and For All [windows-now.com].
MinWin is there.
Re:OS or GUI??? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're confusing issues. They are reviewing the new version of Windows. The specific definition of Operating System is ultimately meaningless in this discussion.
The new taskbar and other UI tweaks are a part of the new version of Windows.
Re:Oh, that's what made Vista fail!? (Score:3, Insightful)
I love UAC. On XP, I used to have to de-malware my [anonymized family member]'s computer every couple of months. On Vista, I'm watching them use their machine, and UAC pops up with some spyware wanting to install. Box read, permission declined, no infestation I have to clean up.
Average users compulsively click "yes" to any nagging dialog box without a second thought. That is what they have been conditioned to do. UAC doesn't change that, it's just one more box to click "yes" to. That's why it sucks.
Re:Least popular?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course to get those 'sales' they had to force vendors to force consumers to 'buy' vista with any new laptop.
And besides, using "well, n n00bs who don't know jack about anything bought our product" as an indicator of success is somewhat flawed.
Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unbelievable but true: I ran WinME on my home machine for quite some time with little ill effects. Apart from some hardware incompatibilities I've read about, what was _so_ bad about it?
Re:Least popular?? (Score:3, Insightful)
In the same lacking sense of logic, you've equated sales to popularity. In today's computer market if you buy a PC it will have Vista, like it or not. You actually have to go out of your way to get something else installed. Sales do not reflect popularity.
Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? (Score:5, Insightful)
It was basically a less-stable version of Win98 with a system restore that solved your problem half the time you got it to work (which was about half the time you tried it), and the other half fucked your system up worse than before. It also included a lot of bloat and new bells and whistles, at a time when apparently most people preferred drums that worked (even if it was just an upside-down bucket) over broken bells and cracked whistles.
Nobody Upgrade During a Depression (Score:3, Insightful)
Because during a recession/depression, people are tightening their belts. Statistics already show that people are not spending and have already done their nesting spending and are putting everything else into the bank in case something terrible happens which is causing the economy even further troubles.
So who is left to buy their OS (which most likely will require a new computer as they always do)? Not consumers as they are hurting. Not businesses as they are cash strapped. Not the government as they are tryiong to make up for a deficit.
I say good luck getting those sales. This one may be a good OS (*cough* recycled VISTA *cough*) but it will most likely fail on release due to the economic collapse.
Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? (Score:5, Insightful)
For me, the biggest problem was the removal of real mode DOS access. For someone moving from Windows 98 and still relying on a lot of DOS programs that didn't always play nice with protected mode. At least with Windows 2000, you didn't have to deal with the 9x series' infamous flakiness and instability nearly as often.
The interface improvements (all of which were shamelessly taken from Windows 2000) were an improvement, sure, but in all other respects, Windows Me was less functional and less reliable than Windows 98SE. It wasn't that you it was so bad as to be unusable, but it was hardly worth the price of the upgrade.
Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? (Score:3, Insightful)
very very true.. sadly i know people that still run 98se.. honestly win2k was extreamly good.. XP was kinda annoying but turned out fine.. server 2003 is perfect in my mind - from a windows stand point.. there are some nice things in vista and server 08.. but server 2003 provides extreamly good reliability and stability compared to all other windows OS's
Re:Nobody Upgrade During a Depression (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows 7 has the same requirements as Vista, and in the real world, runs on the same boxes as XP easily (it IS being designed for netbooks, after all), so I doubt hardware will be an issue.
Keep in mind that many of Microsoft's customers go through subscription-like volume licensing...so they're paying for it recession or not, too. Considering the enthusiasm I see on various forums and community about it...it will do decent. Not a Win95 launch, but no Vista disaster either.
Re:Oh, that's what made Vista fail!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Other operating systems don't need to defrag, this is not a feature.
Hmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
You want an analogy that isn't a car analogy? You've got your "the OS is just a wrapper around the BIOS. Applications should do whatever they want" folk. These are the tech equivalent of "government is the root of all problems, remove it from everything"... call them Regan republicans or perhaps Ron Paul style republicans.
On the other end of the spectrum, you've got the "your OS should do pretty much everything, applications aren't able to making proper decisions without OS intervention". Are these guys the far-left who want government to do everything? Are these guys the tech version of socialists? Dunno.
And if you want my opinion, the OS is more then a shim around the bios. Operating systems (like the government) had to evolve to meet the needs of a growing, more complex set of applications and requirements (ditto with our governments). Going back to a "pure" operating system that just wraps the Bios and presents a green console just wouldn't work, same with going back to a razor thin US federal government. The OS needs to enforce rules and needs to dictate what applications (citizens) can and cannot do or else the whole thing will fail.
On the other hand, if you let the operating system do too much, you will piss off your developers and worse, probably piss off various governments (think anti-trust). Let your government get too big, you'll piss off the citizens and worse, risk bankruptcy.
I'll let somebody else flesh this out.
Re:OS or GUI??? (Score:5, Insightful)
So the bulk of the article gushes all over the taskbar, with a bit of Aero thrown in...
Are the pundits so brain dead that they don't know the difference between an OS and a UI? A taskbar is not an OS.
The koolaid must be good.....
I want to hear what they did with the DRM. I want to hear what they've done to make the system more stable under load. I want to hear that they now have a package manager, instead of DLL hell. I want to hear that drivers now ship with the OS, and I don't have to install 70 MB of bloatware just to "install" a keyboard.
Oh wait, but look at that icon on the taskbar..... Slurp, slurp, damn that koolaid tastes good.
Then you should go read the Engineering Windows 7 blog, not Slashdot. The audience for this review are the general crowd, not Slashdotters. What DRM are you talking about? I keep hearing about it, but no real life examples of how it's hindering ANYONE. DLL hell? When was the last time it affected you? Also, shipping all drivers will make the OS around a few TB. They actually try to include most drivers that are in popular hardware. Are you okay with that?
Train them dude :-) (Score:4, Insightful)
The UAC dialog looks a lot difference then any other dialog that pops up. Train them to be very nervous and apprehensive when they see a UAC dialog. Hopefully they'll start calling you when they pop up so you can talk them out of installing $GOOGLE_YAHOO_TWITTER_TOOLBAR_#23.
Really though, I've been fairly successfull in explaining what UAC is and why they should pay attention to when they pop up. Nobody wants spyware, but most people never see the connection between "I just ran $RANDOM.EXE and now my computer is slow". UAC is an easy sell if you frame it as a barrier between $RANDOM.EXE and spyware-city. In fact, given a willing listener, it isn't too hard to explain "on XP, a program could access any part of your system you want, on Vista, it can only access a couple things like your documents and desktop.. the only way it can access your system and install spyware is through a UAC dialog".
PS: And yeah, I know UAC isn't a foolproof barrier. If UAC is used correctly by a user, the only real way for a program to get root access is the old-fashioned way, privilege elevation exploits. But you don't need to tell them that detail, it isn't relevant to them and will just confuse them. Only nerds like us will appreciate that :-)
Re:Oh, that's what made Vista fail!? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's like living in a house where the driveway is littered with dog poo and adding a detector that, instead of stopping someone with dog poo on their shoes from getting into the house, it merely records the fact for later recall. Ultimately, it doesn't stop you from having to clean dog poo off the carpets.
Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say it was worse than "rushed out before ready." Maybe more like "pushed out even though their was no point." After saying that Win98 would be the last of its line, they turned around and apparently diverted resources to pushing an OS that was basically Win98+bugs. Bugs that would never really be fixed anyway, since they were about to start pushing people to the NT kernel anyway in the form of Windows 2000 and later WindowsXP.
It's like if I were discontinuing a model of car because of several huge design problems, but after releasing the replacement model, suddenly started reselling the discontinued model again-- this time, with a spoiler that somehow made it harder to steer. It doesn't make a lot of sense unless it's a half-assed money-grab.
Re:Windows 7 admin/root accounts and 64-bit (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it is a minor waste if you *don't* need the extra registers and address space? If they're seriously designing this to be more fleet on 1Gb of RAM (and hence possibly older systems as well as the more "netbook" style very low power/slim portables, quite a few of which may not even be x64) why *not* release a 32-bit compilation as well as the 64-bit build for newer systems?
It isn't like everything has to be the One Right Answer, you know.
Hatred for Vista is so over-blown (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, Microsoft is right about one thing: if you set people down in front of Vista and dont' tell them it's Vista, they love it. Tell them it's Vista, and they hate it.
People are PRIMED to hate the OS based on the name and based on really over-blown and inaccurate Apple ads, and really bad experiences SOME users had in the first year (due to the "Vista Capable" debacle mostly).
Since SP1, Vista has been very usable. I've been using it almost since it came out, and it's a perfectly decent OS. In fact, I sorta hate going back to XP now... I miss too many good things about Vista, like the instant search features, new Start menu, and just some of the look and feel.
Nobody seems to remember how much people HATED the old "XP" when it first came out. It didn't really become popular until SP2 was released.
Most of the anti-Vista sentiment is simply irrational and baseless.
Are there some things not to like? Sure. I turn off UAC immediately. There are a few quirks in the new Windows Explorer that I don't like (and which seem to be unchanged in Windows 7). But really, beyond that? It's much more stable, and full featured than XP, and it looks a hell of a lot better. Yeah, it's a memory pig, but I run with plenty of memory for my needs, and have no problems. And after 2 years of use, it's "slowed down" far less than comparable XP machines have (the old "Windows Decay" problem).
Am I looking forward to Windows 7? Definitely. It seems to fix the memory-pig and performance issues that Vista admittedly does have (a bigger issue on laptops than my desktop), but the fact will remain that it's little more than Vista with some spit and polish... and everyone will love it because it's "not Vista".
Vista-hate is getting to be tedious and facile, and it really is more psychological than real.
Re:OS or GUI??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? (Score:3, Insightful)
all of which were shamelessly taken from Windows 2000
I fail to see how taking features from one of their operating systems to another should evoke any shame in the first place.
Re:Hatred for Vista is so over-blown (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to agree... Vista works just fine for my needs and while it's far from "amazing", it works without a hitch and doesn't crash.
Isn't that what folks always tout about Linux? It doesn't crash? Rock solid stability?
I don't get all the brouahaha.
Shipping most drivers are stupid anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
By the time you get the CD they are already out of date. If you assume the end user has an internet connection, you can leave out all but drivers for the IO and the netcard. The rest, like video card drivers can either come off the driver CD that came with the video card (i.e. a non-internet user) or get downloaded off the magical inter-tele-tubes.
Seriously, I'm a nerd so this doesn't count... but isn't the first thing you do with a new piece of hardware is throw away the CD and download the current drivers off the net?
Re:What a moron you are. (Score:3, Insightful)
My guess is that twitter, all his supposed sockpuppets, and all his accusers are in fact the same person with a severe case of multiple personality disorder.
Shhhh. Who cares? If he says something insightful, he'll be modded as such. If he says something, well, kinda meh, like he did above, it'll just settle under the radar of most people, like it has here. That's the brilliance of the Slashcode moderation system. It doesn't matter who you are, it matters what you say.
Everyone who's yelling about twitter this and sockpuppet that needs to learn that simple fact and take a chill pill.
Re:"Least popular"? What about "Bob" (Score:5, Insightful)
In all honesty, I find Windows 1.0 to be the least functional of all of Microsoft's operating systems. But the bar wasn't very high back then
I wouldn't say that. Us Amiga owners were using preemptive multitasking and virtual desktops that year, and Mac guys had a pretty nice system of their own.
Re:Oh, that's what made Vista fail!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless of course the user isn't an admin. In that case they're prevented from opening the door for someone with (or without) dogshit on their boots until an administrator comes along with the key.
Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll agree with you there. I have a Pocket PC that runs WinCE 2002 and it was a total joke. Pocket Word was worse than useless because it would totally lock up opening anything bigger than a tiny document and was absurdly slow when it actually did work. "Closing" a program would actually "minimize" it and switching between open apps meant either launching it again or no fewer than 7 stylus clicks to switch among the open apps. It was like all the bad ideas from the PDA world and none of the good features of the Windows world. Well, at least the thing booted in about 3 seconds.
Still with the Gower reader, a copy of Age of Empires (despite it's totally impotent AI), PocketUFO and that weird Korean WinAmp clone, I've gotten plenty of value out of the thing.
If I had to pick the worst software I've ever used it would be Lotus Notes and a close second would be Microsoft Word. The best would have to be (among many things, 4NT, MS Visual Studio 6, Windows 2000 (if you don't count Explorer) and Firefox).
Re:Oh, that's what made Vista fail!? (Score:3, Insightful)
i'm sure i will be modded troll for this one, but Linux has its fair share of crapware. Case and point, gnome, orbit, kde, you want to talk about crapware that runs at the root level? How about xdm, several generations of sendmail, inetd, and a myrad of ftp daemons. Linux also has an issue where the crapware doesn't always exist in the form of an executable, but a library. Things like oracle more often than not requires you to revert back to a vulnerable version of certain libraries. Oh, and our lovely toolbars also work on linux in firefox. Face it, linux isn't the answer to solve the crapware problem by a long shot.
Re:Oh, that's what made Vista fail!? (Score:4, Insightful)
I for one don't like it thrashing my harddisk all the time. How do I know the Vista defragging is good? I like my O&O Defrag software, it defrags based on times that the files were accessed. How do I turn off this auto-defragging? I have yet to find an option for this. So, instead of bothering to google for how to do it, I just run XP. I have full control that way.
Re:Windows 7 admin/root accounts and 64-bit (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't solve the 32-bit 64-bit dilemma that both Linux and OS X are addressing. It doesn't eliminate the behaviour of configuring user accounts to be admin/root by default.
So, you've never actually used Vista x64 then?
Well, kinda (Score:5, Insightful)
Sudo is a different beast then UAC to some degree. It lets the admin control what programs can get elevated (/etc/sudoers). Ubuntu doesn't tap into all the crap you can do with sudo. It just does what UAC does... pop up a dialog to confirm privilege escalation, then run said program under the requested privileges. Well, only kinda.
Windows (.NET anyway) lets the program specify what privileges it needs to run under and which privileges are merely a luxury. .NET will run the program under only the privileges the application has asked for. I've yet to actually need this kind of stuff so I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, but it is my understanding the application has to request UAC, Vista doesn't just monitor the programs interaction and go "hey, this guy wants to write to a protected file, lets pop up a UAC and ask". Any program that doesn't request a UAC dialog and tries to write to a protected file will get a permission error.
What is my point? You are incorrect saying "not because I visited a website, or because I connected a photo frame to my PC. It also doesn't happen every time that I need those privileges". Vista will not pop up a UAC dialog in any of those cases (have you used it?). If it does, some software you have installed is trying to pull some seriously fucked up shit and obviously you should "cancel".
Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? (Score:5, Insightful)
That may be so, but I'd take the review here with a grain of salt.
Preston Gralla is pretty much the epitome of a breathless Windows fanboi. Try reading some of his articles about Vista...
To anyone who has been sitting on the fence over whether to upgrade to Microsoft's new operating system, I'll say it loud and clear: It's time to make the jump. There are plenty of reasons to leave Windows XP and install Vista.
Windows Vista: 15 Reasons to Switch [pcworld.com]
The conventional wisdom, that Mac's OS X is superior to Windows Vista, is flat-out wrong. In fact, despite much belief to the contrary, Vista is a superior operating system.
Five reasons why Vista beats Mac OS X [computerworld.com]
Re:"Least popular"? What about Windows ME? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, because Win ME was a last minute (OMG it's a Y2K OS!!) cash-grab they threw together after they realized the NT kernel wasn't quite ready for prime-time as a home user OS with Win2K. GP point still stands.
Re:Hatred for Vista Is Justified (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista is actually better for developers... it upgrades versions of built in services to something that doesn't suck and is more in line with the Windows Server line, it has a lot of new APIs that do a lot of work, .NET is built in so you don't have to expect your users to install it unless you need the very very latest version, stuff like roaming profiles are much easier to manage and access... Service control didn't change as far as I know, unless you're meaning something else than what I'm thinking off... my installers and integration apps that require it didn't need to change at all.
Re:Hatred for Vista is so over-blown (Score:1, Insightful)
You continue to say "have no problems" while continuously listing problems you're having. It's quite amazing as well as amusing reading through your post and watching your self delusion as I read along.
Re:Windows vs Apple 64-bit on the desktop (Score:3, Insightful)
You can still see a remnant of the close AMD relationship on 64-bit Windows by opening a shell and typing "echo %processor_architecture%". Hint: it doesn't say X64.
IIRC, uname -m on a "x64" linux machine says "amd64". I think that the OS vendors are calling it that 'cause AMD was first to market, not cause they were all up in each other's private members.
Re:I care. I'm surprised to say that I actually do (Score:3, Insightful)
Disagree again. I'm tired of seeing people claiming that everything Microsoft does is inspired by Apple.
Aero was not inspired by Aqua. UAC is not inspired by... uh, Mac OS X doesn't even have anything like it, does it?
(Also, how does NeXT = Apple by any stretch? At that time, Jobs was nowhere near Apple, and you can't count a NeXT product as an Apple one. Fanboi indeed).
Re:Windows 7 admin/root accounts and 64-bit (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really disgusting that you got modded to +5, given that Vista and XP64 (and probably Win 7's) 32-bit emulation facilities have almost the same capabilities as the ones on Linux.
You're why Slashdot is disgusting to read every time Microsoft products come up. Meaningless trolls that won't discuss real merits and problems of different technologies but instead regurgitate some ridiculous bullshit.
Resource Allocation (Score:2, Insightful)
But, using hardware that would otherwise be idle is "resource intensive." It's a matter of perspective.
The problem is that this only works if the OS eventually gives the resources back. If it doesn't the resources are still gone for a comparatively minor benefit.