Microsoft Vista Discussion

[WarmFluffyUK]

I think they need to completely flatten the existing firmware and start from scratch. There's just too much shit to fix from Dignsys' disaster. At the very least the gp2xmenu should be completely redone, along with all of the media player applications. Only then would it warrant a number like '3.0.0'. Right now it's as deceptive as Microsoft calling XP with a new skin and some DRM 'Vista' (oh yes, I went there.)

Actually Vista is a complete rewrite, they did try to build on XP technology but dropped that as it was too buggy. Vista is a totally new beasty!

 

[Epicenter]

It's pretty easy to get it to boot faster, but gph won't change the boot script... or the file system.

Oh my god. There are no words for how retarded this is.
Are you telling me they aren't even using YafFS anymore? Holy shit.

Actually Vista is a complete rewrite, they did try to build on XP technology but dropped that as it was too buggy. Vista is a totally new beasty!

Um, no. You've got it completely backwards. They had all kinds of lofty ideas like WinFS that were scrapped because of time constraints. They've just stripped away feature after feature. So Vista is mostly XP with a new graphical interface and some other minor improvements. Hardly the revolutionary new design MS proposed originally.

'Complete rewrite' my ass. It's still based on old Windows NT code, just like XP is. You don't rewrite an enormously bloated and complex OS like XP in such a short period of time as this. That's why Vista is just an incremental upgrade.

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

Um, no. You've got it completely backwards. They had all kinds of lofty ideas like WinFS that were scrapped because of time constraints. They've just stripped away feature after feature. So Vista is mostly XP with a new graphical interface and some other minor improvements. Hardly the revolutionary new design MS proposed originally.

'Complete rewrite' my ass. It's still based on old Windows NT code, just like XP is. You don't rewrite an enormously bloated and complex OS like XP in such a short period of time as this. That's why Vista is just an incremental upgrade.

Actually if you want to be pedantic, it was originally called "Longhorn" and its development basically started afresh, building on the Windows Server 2003 codebase, taking only the bits that is intended for the actual OS release. So they didn't take XP and update it calling it Vista.
It's file system is no longer NTFS but now WinFS, which is more like a data storage system based on relational databases, so vista has a much better idea what's on your volumes.

So why did they keep the XP Start button and general look? Well they did intend to completely redesign the GUI, but it was decided to keep a basic similarity to XP so not to completely confuse and scare off their present user base, Crazy innit, but not all people are as computer literate as us you know. I know one person who places her icons on the desktop in specific places, and if something rearranges them sher is completely lost!
The visual similarity is why a lot of people keep saying Vista is just XP+, but it really is a completely different OS. It's a considerable leap in tech.

You may from the above think I am an MS fan girl, but I'm not, one of my servers run Ubuntu! It's just that I'm a tech in our University and as a result MS OS's are a huge part of my job, we get it all first hand. I don't think Vista is the best OS around, and I have a lot of gripes about it, one of them is the activation side of it, for us in the past we had a general blanket licence for all our XP systems, now we have to have a specific licence server which apparently keeps track of all our systems and licences. Not good for our staff who possibly do not connect to work via VPN etc. I'm not looking forward to doing the Vista MCDST though, SIGH.

 

[sehs33]

Um, no. You've got it completely backwards. They had all kinds of lofty ideas like WinFS that were scrapped because of time constraints. They've just stripped away feature after feature. So Vista is mostly XP with a new graphical interface and some other minor improvements. Hardly the revolutionary new design MS proposed originally.

'Complete rewrite' my ass. It's still based on old Windows NT code, just like XP is. You don't rewrite an enormously bloated and complex OS like XP in such a short period of time as this. That's why Vista is just an incremental upgrade.

Actually if you want to be pedantic, it was originally called "Longhorn" and its development basically started afresh, building on the Windows Server 2003 codebase, taking only the bits that is intended for the actual OS release. So they didn't take XP and update it calling it Vista.
It's file system is no longer NTFS but now WinFS, which is more like a data storage system based on relational databases, so vista has a much better idea what's on your volumes.

So why did they keep the XP Start button and general look? Well they did intend to completely redesign the GUI, but it was decided to keep a basic similarity to XP so not to completely confuse and scare off their present user base, Crazy innit, but not all people are as computer literate as us you know. I know one person who places her icons on the desktop in specific places, and if something rearranges them sher is completely lost!
The visual similarity is why a lot of people keep saying Vista is just XP+, but it really is a completely different OS. It's a considerable leap in tech.

You may from the above think I am an MS fan girl, but I'm not, one of my servers run Ubuntu! It's just that I'm a tech in our University and as a result MS OS's are a huge part of my job, we get it all first hand. I don't think Vista is the best OS around, and I have a lot of gripes about it, one of them is the activation side of it, for us in the past we had a general blanket licence for all our XP systems, now we have to have a specific licence server which apparently keeps track of all our systems and licences. Not good for our staff who possibly do not connect to work via VPN etc. I'm not looking forward to doing the Vista MCDST though, SIGH.

As far as i know, the main advantage of Vista is to integrate the .NET framework 3.0 more into the OS, which makes .NET applications much faster then they already are now (no Java fan boys please, Java is the slowest thing used for serious applications, but its rich library and being the first language that is environment independent made it as popular as it is today).

 

[krosfyah]

I gave Vista a try a while back and it was a royal pain in the bum to get even the simplest tasks done. I did like the sidebar though, although I'd been using codename dashboard with XP for years so it wasn't anything new.

 

[Epicenter]

I didn't say you were an "MS Fan Girl". I contested your false statement that Vista was "from scratch". That was, and still is, complete bullshit.

 

[Thecko]

I didn't say you were an "MS Fan Girl". I contested your false statement that Vista was "from scratch". That was, and still is, complete bullshit.

I'd have to agree with that but without the crude language

Vista will have certain elements rewritten but a large amount of the code will be re-used from previous releases, as Epicenter said you don't write something as huge and complex like Vista completely from scratch in such a short time period.

All MS OS' are an evolution from the previous one - and if Vista took from Server 2003, then while it's not an XP upgrade, it's certainly an NT/2K/2K3 upgrade.

 

[epitaph]

Actually if you want to be pedantic, it was originally called "Longhorn" and its development basically started afresh, building on the Windows Server 2003 codebase, taking only the bits that is intended for the actual OS release. So they didn't take XP and update it calling it Vista.

... what the hell. XP and 2003 server are branches of the same code base (XP identifies itself as NT 5.1 while 2003's NT 5.2, but I guess that's nothing new). It's not like they differ a whole lot.

It's file system is no longer NTFS but now WinFS, which is more like a data storage system based on relational databases, so vista has a much better idea what's on your volumes.

It's still NTFS. WinFS was taken out due to time constraints or something along the lines of that.

 

[saboteur]

Vista - it's crap. No I take that back, its expensive crap that requires you to :

a. spend a fortune buying it
b. spend a fortune buying the hardware to run it
c. sell your soul and basic human rights to the devil.

Stick with Linux or BSD you'll sleep better.

Now getting back to the topic in hand, Craig any chance of heads up on what's afoot in the future firmware that you alluded to ??

Cheers

 

[reaper79]

All MS OS' are an evolution from the previous one - and if Vista took from Server 2003, then while it's not an XP upgrade, it's certainly an NT/2K/2K3 upgrade.

Certainly... but can't we take this a step further and say that Vista is just a highly redone version of Win95? I'm sure some of 95's code is still floating around in there somewhere

 

[Epicenter]

Certainly... but can't we take this a step further and say that Vista is just a highly redone version of Win95? I'm sure some of 95's code is still floating around in there somewhere

Windows OS'es based on NT are dramatically different from 3.1/95/98/ME. These were just shells on top of DOS, plus some hardware abstraction, handling of drivers, a standard API and GUI, et cetera. NT is based on an IBM-written kernel that lends it its greater stability and also its independence from DOS-- DOS exists now only as an emulator of sorts. The things that are common are the things added on top of that kernel; Explorer and IE, most notably. (It's interestingly also these components that lend instability and bloat to the rather well-written core components of the OS IBM developed..)

 

[epitaph]

The visual similarity is why a lot of people keep saying Vista is just XP+, but it really is a completely different OS. It's a considerable leap in tech.

Indeed it is... it's a considerable leap in tech - at least regarding DRM and related aspects. http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt.

 

[Hooka]

Sorry to encourage the off topic part of this thread, but...

Any Micro$oft product will never be 100% original, in fact DOS was a rip off of CP/M and NCSA Docs. That and nobody wants to reinvent the wheel which is why HalfLife 2 even had some chunks of wolf3d in it. So stop arguing about it and just accept it for what it is, the greedy rich getting richer off the same old thing.

 

[Epicenter]

Any Micro$oft product will never be 100% original, in fact DOS was a rip off of CP/M and NCSA Docs.

You do know MS didn't make DOS, right? They bought it.

That and nobody wants to reinvent the wheel which is why HalfLife 2 even had some chunks of wolf3d in it. So stop arguing about it and just accept it for what it is, the greedy rich getting richer off the same old thing.

I can't imagine what of Wolf3D would be in Half-Life 2. Wolf didn't even render a scene with polygons-- it worked on the principle of raycasting and drawing of textures scaled and resized in arbitrary space. Half-Life 2 at its core has an engine built on the original Quake which is entirely based on a polygonal world. In fact, the game 'rules' code follows the structure of Quake 1's 'Progs.dat', with .qc (Quake C) files still in use.

 

[rokdcasbah]

Any Micro$oft product will never be 100% original

I don't think that's damning of Microsoft but just the entire computing industry, in that the focus moved away from innovating a long time ago, now whenever you hear the word innovate it's just some hype at a speech or in a press release. Unix: huge. Plan 9? Well, we got unicode at least.

As far as ripping ideas off, Apple does the same shit. The only OS out there that is really original is UNIX, and even then, they took plenty of stuff from previous OSes, but the difference was that the Bell guys were paid to innovate and invent rather than find ways to charge people twice for the same software.

Claire, as another IT person I have to agree with you...Vista is different than XP. And they couldn't have started with XP and made changes, because XP itself is basically an extension of Server 2000, and I'd imagine that Vista is meant to be the "real" client solution for Server 2003.

There's a whole 'nother to side windows that you "users" don't need to look at every day, and believe it or not, it's pretty nice. It's this side (the Windows Server codebase & design) that XP is based on. The dialogs, wizards, pack-in software, all of it is just frosting on the Active Directory cake.

 

[Javacat]

Vista is just a stop gap anyway, much like 98 and ME. Windows Vienna is going to be where the big changes come in.

 

[Thecko]

There's a whole 'nother to side windows that you "users" don't need to look at every day, and believe it or not, it's pretty nice.

It's stable at least. Win2k and onwards are stable as they can be, unfortunately it's buggy and exploit ridden rubbish such as explorer that let's MS down in a huge way.

As far as AD is concerned, I'm glad I don't have to use it - as a programmer the interface is horrible and convoluted to use (not that stuff on UNIX is any better mind you, nis+ and ldap aren't nice to code against either), and the less said about the IIS metabase the better (null separated strings, with no (well, not documented anyway) helper function to find the true length of them, I ended up having to write my own and look for the double null terminator).

I'm afraid MS have blown it with me with Vista - I absolutely refuse to buy what is currently a high end gaming PC in order to simply run an OS - since my PC has pretty much packed up these days (locks up randomly, and I've no inclination to fix it anymore) I've ordered a mac mini instead.

 

[rokdcasbah]

i'm probably not going to buy vista either. i don't really need it. it'd be nice to see the improvements, especially the glass effects and *especially* dynamic folders but i missed out on the beta and i'm not going to spend that much money on an upgrade that doesn't provide me with any huge benefits.

explorer (both internet and plain flavor) needs better security. but apparently vista changes a lot of stuff with root/kernel level access to the system. the 3rd party software guys are pissed. i think it's great. and security is the same, regardless of OS. you need to know what you're doing, and you need to want it. a system that has bad defaults is different than a system that's *impossible* to secure.

i don't know what it's like to code & script for AD, but i believe you. the internals of it look pretty messy. but the granularity of it is amazing...being able to control individual features of programs on a networked workstation computer like it was a terminal. from the admin end, it's great...internet explorer acting up? shut it off! adware changing people's start page? lock down the start page! and so on. it's just as easy to do for 1 person as it is for 1000, and there's so much automation.

learning to use windows server is what made me realize all the people who blindly bash microsoft are silly. there's a lot of good people at that company, and they have a lot of huge issues to deal with (backwards compatibility with "windows" software, which is so varied that i can't even begin to think about it). they guys at the top don't "get" it, but when do they ever? look at apple. look at adobe. just sayin'.

phew! sorry bout that.

 

[TelcoLou]

I've been using Win2K Pro since it came out, installed it on ~a dozen machines for us, friends and family. No complaints, no hassles, no problems.

... and er, I use Gmenu2X, so I don't give a rat's ass about any new FW's 'cool interface'.

 

[kardasan]

Any Micro$oft product will never be 100% original, in fact DOS was a rip off of CP/M and NCSA Docs.

You do know MS didn't make DOS, right? They bought it.

According to what I know (from my OS teacher) DOS is 100% Microsoft's product.
Once uppon a time when 16bit Microcomputers came in, IBM made a competition to make 16bit version of CP/M. Microsoft applied...well their MSDOS didn't quite make the requirements (none of the competitors has) but it was accepted by IBM. In fact there was some shortcuts that Microsoft made in DOS but for the time when DOS was released, it was a piece of a good work.