[WIN7] Dedicated Windows 7 Discussion

[Elyzion]

Originally Posted by FLB

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/win7_6519.asp

That shows what Windows 7 really looks like currently. Build 6519.

Haha, Awesome.

http://community.winsupersite.com/bl...ger-crowd.aspx

[yoink]

Originally Posted by devteam

This is the new interface.<snip>

What exactly is that?

[-=N0N@ME420=-]

Originally Posted by yoink

What exactly is that?

It's a fake. Every alpha build or really any build of windows should be 6000+

The troubling thing about it is that I actually think it looks good.

[yoink]

Originally Posted by -=N0N@ME420=-

It's a fake. Every alpha build or really any build of windows should be 6000+

The troubling thing about it is that I actually think it looks good.

What I'm more interested in is: how would it work?

[Rabid_Monkey]

The way Windows is likely to go in the future is to follow in the footsteps of OS-X, although probably somewhat divergent. To quote someone who's already done the work:

This is going to sound crazy, but bear me out. So here's what Microsoft does. They take the OS and develop a Windows GUI for it. They pour a billion dollars or so into WINE development and research (while providing WINE's coders with full access to existing Windows APIs) and they bring WINE's performance and compatibility to dizzying heights. And then they sell it. Call it Windows, sell it as Windows and do what Apple's done with Darwin. Keep the proprietary stuff proprietary and the OSS stuff OSS. You'd wind up with a rock-solid OS, and your users could run their old software until their apps received an update to the new system. Eventually WINE would no longer be needed.

Link

Not as far fetched when you consider that Google will probably become the next dominant corporate entity causing OS's do be relegated into becoming launchpads rather than dedicated platforms that decide things.

Don't get me wrong, the above is still pie-in-the-sky as the architectures are very different and a lot of the decisions are made by marketing and corporate types without technical knowledge, but it is one possible although perhaps improbable outcome. Then again, they've already started scripting Server 2008 and brought the command line / terminal back to being a very prominent system, so who knows.


Considering the launching of Google Gears, as well as the porting of Office to Office Online, and Adobe releasing Photoshop and soon another assortment of tools onto online applications, I can see operating systems becoming largely irrelevant in the future (as in the choice of which OS to use won't be as prominent as it is now). The only exception to this that I can think of is games...

To quote someone else:

I definitely bet on Google.

See everytime the previous evil empire falls and a new one emerge, we all see a shift in the paradigms f evil empires. It's not a coincidence that an "Evil" empire has become evil. It's because it has become quite efficient at the kind of abuse that are necessary to secure a position, in the "Evil Corp" world. And it won't be easy for a concurrent to replace it in the exact same position. Usually the concurrent replace them by making them irrelevant.

Usually, Evil Corps die in the way of obsolescence. Take the previous old evil empire : IBM.
IBM has achieved a huge monopoly in the market place based on the hardware they were selling.
And they got replaced by Microsoft, which is basically a software company (or an abuse company occasionally selling software as pointed by some /.ers higher in the thread). All this switch happened, because computer got commoditised. During the IBM era, you had to go to IBM to buy specific mainframes. At the end of IBM's kingship you could buy a PC from them, but also buy a PC-compatible from any other nameless vendor from around the world. Wherever you bought your hardware from, you could install your OS (...DOS from Microsoft...) on it. The fact that the hardware was from IBM became irrelevant, hardware didnt' matter anymore.

The current evil empire(tm) is a software empire. And they have built their empire on a ground of software monopoly. You have to buy your OS from them, there are the only one selling Windows. What makes Google the best candidate to be the "Next Evil Empire", is that there a good potential to shift paradigm and make the current software-based busyness model obsolete. Microsoft has a solid ground for a software monopoly, only as long as people need to buy their specific software.
Google isn't a company based around software. It's a company which uses standards instead. What they provide are information services : searches, mails, maps, whatever. And they are bloody good at it because they can leverage a decade long experience in data processing/clustering, a decade worth of data mining, tons of different kind of database that they can cross-reference, etc.
But also, all their application are built around standards : most of their service are web applications built around pretty plain standard-compliant HTML.
Whichever software you have installed on you PC doesn't matter anymore. It could be Windows, it could be Mac OS X, it could be one of the dozen nameless Linux-based distribution. As long as it can display HTML properly, it can work.

The same way Microsoft replaced IBM once the PC became a commodity, the same way Google and similar service providers will replace Microsoft once the OS becomes a commodity.

Also, what make specifically Google a potential Evil Corp among other factor, is that once in place they will be hard to compete against.
IBM secured their position because it was hard at that time for another company to come up with competing hardware.
Microsoft secured its position, because of vendor lock-in, no standard-compliance, being the target of most 3rd party applications, etc. : In the beginning some competitors could pull a competing OS, but it won't see adoption because it wouldn't be compatible with all the applications that the Microsoft users already had.

Google will probably secure its position because of the massive amount of experience and data they can leverage. To be performant as a service providing company, a company will probably need very efficient algorithms to process their data, and massive amount of data to process to provide services from. To take the example of websearches, Google have an important head start, because they have had 10 years to perfect their algos, they had 10 years to collect massive amount of data about all pages available on the web, and more importantly - as was featured several time on /. - their scoring systems works well but work in an iterative fashion. Each time using the already known score of previous page to score the new entries and the refine the old scoring. A google-rating isn't just computed as-is out of the blue, it is computed based on the ratings of other pages related to the given one.
Thus, it will be hard for a new company to arrive on the market and suddenly create a service that can compete with google-search.

The next Evil Empire won't be another software company.
It will be surely a company whose busyness model made the whole "which software are you using" story irrelevant by using standards, and service providing web company are good candidate for it.

The good thing will be, that perhaps the next Evil Empire will be a corporation with "Do No Evil" as it motto, and which hasn't had (yet) a history of illegal and malevolent proceedings for the whole goal of securing its monopoly.

So maybe that will be an evil corporation which will be a little be easier to live under.

Link

[Zerosignal]

Looks to be a beat up by the media.

[SenorGrande]

Originally Posted by Zerosignal

Looks to be a beat up by the media.

It might be. But one only needs to look at historical fact to see that its entirely plausible and possible.

Windows 98 came out in 98 (or late 97, I can't remember). Then Second Edition came out around 99 and finally in 2000, Windows ME came out. ME disappeared when XP came out in 2001.

So given past history, its possible that Vista will, thankfully, be left to die a natural death (we can only hope). I am just hoping its sooner rather than later and that we avoid deploying any Vista machines at work (its going to be a fucking support nightmare ).

[ReP0]

Originally Posted by Zerosignal

Looks to be a beat up by the media.

Yeh 3 years to release for a major release of an OS is not really realistic. AT least not with anything significant done.

Back in the ME days it happened because they had various strains of MS OS running, NT (corporate) , w2k (home) etc so it happened because they probably couldn't be arsed handholding mutliple variants and so moved to one, XP. With Vista there is no alternative/variants available. 3 years sounds bogus to me. It wouldn't of been worth the effort of releasing Vista nor the marketing costs let alone the commitment to maintenance for such a short period. I think someone is just stirring the pot.

Originally Posted by SenorGrande

So given past history, its possible that Vista will, thankfully, be left to die a natural death (we can only hope). I am just hoping its sooner rather than later and that we avoid deploying any Vista machines at work (its going to be a fucking support nightmare ).

Doubt it. Not sure why you have a problem with Vista. It's been rock solid for me. I think you just don't like change since like most support staff you'd rather sit on your arse doing minimal training and verification of apps for migration

[Hohne]

Originally Posted by ReP0

Back in the ME days it happened because they had various strains of MS OS running, NT (corporate) , w2k (home) etc so it happened because they probably couldn't be arsed handholding mutliple variants and so moved to one, XP. With Vista there is no alternative/variants available.

NT (corporate) w2K was also (corporate), Windows ME was the home version, but 2k was very good at doubling as a home version for the first time (NT was horrible as a home OS). So most ME users went to w2k instead, as it was stable, compatible, probably the first time MS had realeased a REAL stand alone OS that was GOOD. XP was the first time they 'offically' moved both home and corporate users to the one OS. Windows ME was crap by all accounts, but myself I went from 98 right to w2k.

Vista by my accounts is at least as good as XP except for one nagging bug I have. There seems to be a window limit, the number of tabs/windows/dialogs or some such is capped, maybe at 20 or 30 or something, maybe even it's 50, but it seems to forget I've closed the windows and eventually stops letting me open new ones at all, without closing others. It is very very annoying.

Basically it gets to a stage where at times, with half a dozen windows open, you simply cannot open any more, or use right click menus, dialog boxes without closing a window or two.

[DiGiTaL MoNkEY]

So keep dreaming...

Windows 7 Still Slated for 2010

Last week we reported that Windows 7 was slated for 2010. Then we had Bill gates come out this weekend and say Microsoft’s next OS would be coming out “sometime next year.” Less than 48 hours later, we are back to a 2010 release date.

Sure, Bill Gates just happened to mention that we'd see a new version of the OS "Sometime in the next year or so," but it's looking like that "or so" makes a world of difference. Microsoft wants to chill everyone out with the somber news that its got no plans to introduce Windows 7 any earlier than January 2010 (three years from the launch of Vista), and reassure us that crazy old Gates may have just been talkin' developer speak. "

http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/07/w...ll-gates-just/

[the scotsman]

Yep....you're all dreaming if you think 2009 is gonna happen. you REALLY think after all the time/money/development spent on vista, that they will just forget it and birng out Windows 7 next year? I don't think so...

[Zerosignal]

Originally Posted by ReP0

Doubt it. Not sure why you have a problem with Vista. It's been rock solid for me. I think you just don't like change since like most support staff you'd rather sit on your arse doing minimal training and verification of apps for migration

Amen this whole hate Vista push has been due to lazy software developers and support staff.

We recently told our document manager software developers that unless they develop fully Windows Vista and Office 2007 versions of their software we will be looking elsewhere for software.

Vista and Office 2007 have been out for 1.5 years IT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH ANYMORE.

[the scotsman]

That's quite true...it's been out long enough for software vendors to adjust/create software to run on Vista...

[DiGiTaL MoNkEY]

Windows XP was out too long, people got too attached to it. Hopefully they will make Windows 7 even better

[mrants]

Watched an interesting doc on TV the other week (yes I actually still watch TV occasionally).

Apparently, the next desktop pc will be a thing of the past and we will all have virtual computers that we rent online through your TV set (similar to cable TV).

So if you want to play a game or type a document, or anything that you can do with your desktop pc you will be able to do with your virtual pc

The technology is currently being tested some were in the UK.
The virtual pc is extremely fast and will run just about any game/application you can throe at it.

You will never need to update your pc again in order to play the latest game/application.

All you need to do is pay a rental each month like cable TV, and everything else is taken care of for you.
This will be the end of pirated software, and operating system selection.


This will also unfortunately! mean the end of overclocking, so enjoy it why you can!