What file systems do the betas currently support? I understand NTFS was to be superseded by WinFS (which would not have drive letters and would be more *nix-ish in style and operation)
Hmm…I could try dual-booting it. I’m running a 64-bit CPU with a 32-bit OS so my computer’s not quite running up to its full potential. However, I’m willing to bet that some of my added PCI cards won’t have driver support, mostly my sound card (5 years old) and TV card (4 years old) but perhaps also my FireWire card. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t gone up to WinXP 64–lack of driver support–not so much that Vista is coming out sometime before Duke Nukem Forever. Heck, I’ve already got a partition that’s not doing anything at the moment (it’s partitioned for Win98SE but I had to reinstall XP a couple times since and so now it’s not dual-booting) that might be big enough, at least for the OS. Will 10 gigs give it enough breathing room?
Last I heard, WinFS wasn’t going to be ready in time for Vista’s release.
In fairness, if you have enough rights to let your script edit arbitrary files on the target machine, there are nastier ways to mess with it than to replace those links.
Thanks for your thoughts, Seven. The more I hear about Vista, the more I think that my next major OS upgrade is going to be to Fedora (I am presently running XP, and am very happy there).
On preview: Yeah, they cut WinFS so as to not miss their ship date. By as much.
I’m running the 32 bit beta and it is NTFS. That said, things are different.
I used IE to download Opera and crating a new directory called “download” to drop Opera in was a bit of a chore. MS is really pushing towards the new file system and how it’s going to work and how you WILL do things their way.
Once I got Opera in and went to download something else, Opera uses the familier file system format.
Tomorrow at work I’m going to grab the 64bit beta. Perhaps things are a bit different on that. We’ll see.
I don’t know if this is as done a deal as you might think.
Last year, MS presented Vista to the software developers who were going to have to tweak their big-sellers to run on it. They were monumentally unimpressed, with some predicting only a 30% market penetration, maximum. Witness how long a lot of people hung onto and still hang onto Windows 2000.
A few months ago, Windows did a demo for the hardcore PC magazines. They declared the UI for the new Office nearly unusable. The feature bloat apparently has reached epic proportions.
The blinky-box makers and sellers have suffered drops in sales, with no new OS to attract buyers in the last four years. They are starting to look around at alternatives.
Now Symantec has sued Microsoft for overstepping the bounds of a licensing agreement on Symantec technology used in MS Anti-Virus, and the release date has slipped again.
When XP appeared, PC users encountered the phenomenon that Mac users had put up with for years - their old software didn’t work on their new computer. So now they’re going to be presented with a new OS that Microsoft couldn’t get out the door for four years and has a lot of bad buzz in the industry.
I think 30% market penetration for Vista is optimistic, especially with XP Service Pack 2 being the most stable OS Microsoft has ever released, particularly if you avoid the use of Internet Explorer.
I can see this being pretty accurate. XP SP2 is both Microsoft’s blessing and its curse. On the one hand, as you said, XP SP2 is Microsoft’s most stable OS since … well, DOS. We won’t speak of its security, but it’s gotten better. It is reliable, and it runs everything everyone needs. As a result it has been Microsoft’s biggest seller. And that is also the same reason people won’t be compelled to switch to Vista. Without a significantly compelling reason to upgrade – Aero doesn’t count – few but the early adopters will take to it straight away. And right now it seems like Vista doesn’t even begin to touch on most of the reasons people would want to switch. It’s bloated, it’s slower, and it has fairly steep system requirements in order for it to run at anything approaching a respectable speed. If its security ends up being everything it’s cracked up to be, then that would be Microsoft’s biggest advantage. Unfortunately, I doubt it’s going to be anywhere near enough to convince people they need Vista. There’s still a lot of work ahead for Microsoft.
[YODA] ‘Flying a Kite’ you are, hmmm? [/YODA]
I’m running the same emulator on my notebook, and I love it. I’m kinda looking forward to Vista, since my laptop has hardware for it (64 bit processor, 1 gig of DDR2 RAM, and a sexy CrystalBrite 15.4" widescreen).
In the meanwhile, FlyaKiteOSX does just fine, thanks.
Nope. I’m using Windows XP Tablet Edition SP2 for the OS, StyleXP for the enviroment and ObjectDock for the dock.
I started using this layout on my tablet laptop because it was easier to launch things with the pen. I got used to it so I’ve installed this layout on my work and home workstations and about half of my virtual XP sandbox installs.
I mean to edit the little blue apple in the top left corner (perhaps just a blue circle) but I’ve been too lazy.
Hee. My company gives a reseller conference every year (just finished it this weekend) and we had several computers running Vista. Here’s what I found out:
–It’s going to require hella RAM. They say 2G, just to be safe. I know we’ve got lots of techie dopers here that build their own computers and trick them out fully, but I certainly don’t have a system like that. Hell, I just bought a new laptop and I only got 1 Gig with it, figuring it’d be plenty for my needs. Our tests showed the OS using 700ish MBs alone.
–It’s not as pretty if you don’t have a good graphics card. We ran Vista on two computers, one with a hefty graphics card and one with something much more basic. Vista didn’t look so good on the basic card - the glass stuff didn’t work. And whatever we were using was a bad choice as it was hard to tell which window had focus.
–They’ve been dropping features from the list left and right - seems they’ve chosen to stop moving the release date, meaning that to make that date more and more features are dropped. According to a manager, so much has been dropped that it’s going to be much less enticing for the market.
–We also had a beta of Office 2007, and I find it hard to navigate, especially Word (which is what I’d use most often in my job). I don’t care for the relocating of things I use often. It’s also pretty unfinished - one of our apps runs on top of Access, and full 70% of our functions wouldn’t even open in 2007 because it was so incomplete.
Count me unimpressed. Sure, it’s shiny, but if it’s unusable, who cares what it looks like? And if it requires too much $$ in hardware just to run, it’s certainly not going to make any inroads any time soon.
The problem comes when it becomes an enforced install, and they stop selling XP at Dell. This is going to bloat hardware so much. Two gig minimum seems accurate… I’ve got two gig, but this is going to be one of those ‘as they sell new computers’ upgrades.
I can’t reccomend this for the office, though. And Word looks worse, I’ve seen the dynamic menus, and people have enough trouble with static ones.
I wouldn’t expect Vista to work with Boot Camp, and I have no idea why they did. Boot Camp is tooled to work exclusively with XP Home or Pro, SR2. SR2 is mandatory. Their expectation to have Boot Camp work with it makes as much sense as thinking they could get it to run OS/2.
As for the horsepower to run it on a normal PC, yep, give it gobs of RAM, both on the motherboard and on the video card. IIRC, 256 meg on the video card is the minimum to run Glass properly - this translates essentially into needing a “gaming” video card, rather than the typical corporate-level card. On-board video? Heh. Forget it.
WinFS was dropped months ago, so they wouldn’t be as late as they will be. Any bets on whatever else will fall off as they attempt to hit the current target of first quarter, 2007?
PS: that new release date has frustrated computer manufacturers. Who’s going to want a new PC for Christmas if it doesn’t have the shiny new OS that will be coming out in two months?
Well, hackers managed to get XP to run on Intel Macs before Apple released Boot Camp, and apparently, Linux runs just fine using Boot Camp (though, admittedly, Linux isn’t all that different than OSX).
I wonder if the “multi-threading schmulti-threading! we’ll just lock up the entire file explorer when trying to access a network resource in the background” attitude still prevails? I cannot believe this had been around for so long.
So what you’re saying is that MS is officially buying into the old game-developer paradigm. Namely, release a buggy, awful piece of shit, and patch the living fuck out of it as they go along, and not just for security issues, but for additional features and capabilities.
Great. :dubious:
Who do you think the game developers learned it from? 
You need a 128mb video card to get the glass effects. Which means that pretty soon every video card and laptop on the market will have at least 128mb. Remember, Microsoft is aiming Vista for release in a year or so, and it will be their mainstream OS for at least five years. It makes sense to aim a little high at the hardware level, given Moore’s law and all that.
I’ve been playing around with XAML and Microsoft Expressions, and I really, really like it. You’re going to see some amazing user interfaces in the future. Of course, you’ll see a lot of junk that over-uses every new fancy feature, but once people figure out what works, you’ll see some radical changes in the way we interact with our PCs.
Vista has a lot of bumps up ahead. The security features suck. Way too many security popups. From what I understand, Microsoft knows this and they’re working on it. But overall, it’s going to be at least as good an upgrade as XP was from 2000. And people said the same thing about XP - why upgrade from 2000? They even had a good point. XP isn’t THAT different. But it still became the standard, because Microsoft makes sure that it’s shipped with new PC’s, and over time added enough features to make it compelling to upgrade.
Well, really if you try running a *nix machine as a personal computer and aren’t running as root, every three seconds you have to su/sudo to get your new system setup. People are just used to that paradigm on that platform.
Haven’t seen Vista of course, so maybe it really is impressively worse.
just runs as root
Vista is already running using BootCamp.
Try three months, for the corporate version. Six-seven for consumer.