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Windows Vista & IE7 Beta 1 Released
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Jul 28, 2005 07:49 AM
from the and-so-it-begins dept.
from the and-so-it-begins dept.
gdsotirov writes "Today on the IE blog the availability of two new beta tests - Windows Vista Beta 1 and Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 - was announced. These tests are mainly targeted to developers and IT professionals. Thus the betas are only available to MSDN subscribers. Tom's Hardware has details as well." From the article: "While the code also includes an early look at the new user-interface design, the majority of end-user features in Windows Vista will not be included until Beta 2. In addition to these fundamentals, Windows Vista Beta 1 also includes the Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1 built into the platform. The technical Beta of Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP2 also is available today." Any early thoughts, MSDN subscribers?
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Windows Vista & IE7 Beta 1 Released
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Early Thoughts (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.danhendricks.com/)
Nothing to see here, please move along.
Re:Early Thoughts (Score:4, Informative)
For reference, on my PII-400 I'd say firefox takes about 2-3x as long to start up, and frequently suffers long delays in various actions. Particularly grievous is the long (~200ms) pause that frequently occurs after typing the second letter of a URL in the address box while it looks up history items starting with those two letters. This pause is also noticeable on a Celeron 1.3GHz laptop, although nothing like as annoying.
Firefox also seems to use about 50% more memory on average for the same operation. It is also noticeable that it only uses single threads for many things where IE uses multiple: if one window starts a plugin, for example, all the others freeze until after the plugin has finished initialising.
Thunderbird is worst -- my entire machine grinds to a halt while it displays the new message notification window.
Even if you do notice a difference, any semi-intelligent human being knows that a 10% increase in speed isn't everything. Firefox has so much more to offer.
True, and that's why I continue to use it, despite the inconvenience. I wouldn't give up tabbed browsing for anything, for instance.
I'll be giving IE7 a try once it comes out of beta.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://asdasd/)
Just because you can't afford it doesn't mean you are entitled to a copy of it.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://asdasd/)
Get a clue!
Your logic is severely, SEVERELY flawed.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @05:12PM)
The mechanic looks at the car for a few seconds, rummages around in his tool box, pulls out a nut and a washer, crawls under the car with a wrench, and comes out a minute later without the nut and washer.
Then he leans in and starts the car, which runs perfectly.
Then he goes into his office and returns with a bill for 500 dollars. The customer goes nuts, screams rants yells, "You just put on ONE nut! And you're going to charge me 500 dollars for ONE NUT?"
The mechanic shrugs, goes back into his office, and returns with a new bill.
It reads:
Nut: 50 cents.
Knowing where to put the nut: 499.50
Total: 500.00
There are many things that you can't hold in your hand that have intrinsic value, moron.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
It is simply my position that knowlege has, or rather, ought to have, no monetary value since it takes nearly zero effort to reproduce.
Forgetting about the huge costs of education, be that University fees, exam fees or even just books or Internet access, is not the time spent learning worth anything? If I spent 5 years of my life learning how to fix your problem, is that nearly zero effort? I think you are getting confused with the copyright infridgement isn't stealing diatribe!
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:4, Insightful)
I can only conclude that you have almost zero education, because I seem to remember that my degree took significantly more effort than "nearly zero" to obtain.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday May 30 2005, @01:21PM)
Knowledge is power. They teach this even in first grade. In my school, they taught it in kindergarten.
Your comments show why you are not a mechanic. Its actually a simple idea. If the mechanic "price gouges" you on your car, you simply do it back when he walks in to get his computer fixed.
I feel appalled at how much I get paid for doing things that seem simple, like changing a registry key, and etc. That kind of work *doesn't even involve changing a nut and washer*, but do I think I should be compensated for it? Certainly!
$500 is a bit excessive for knowledge and labor, but if a mechanic charged me a hundred for fixing one thing with a simple nut and explained what to watch out for in the future so it didn't happen again, I'd gladly hand it over to him and thank him for not dragging out the work over the next two days.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @05:12PM)
Lets turn it around. Say the mechanic doesn't know where to put the nut, and it takes him 20 hours to figure that out, which isn't unreasonable if experience and knowledge count for nothing.
Hell, the mechanic is probably a former fry cook who thought, "What the hell, I'll be a mechanic from now on" and the guy who owns the auto shop also thought that was a good idea, because, like you, he doesn't value knowledge or experience.
So, in that case, at 50.00 an hour, which seems to be the figure you're using, that mechanic would give a bill for 1000.00.
Down the street, the first mechanic, the skilled one, would be billing people a dollar to fix problems the guy up the street is charging a thousand dollars to fix. He would have to fix one...thousand...cars...to make the same as the unskilled mechanic made fixing one car.
Take an example shamelessly cribbed from a book I'm sure a lot of people here have read...
Take the raw materials for an apple pie. Flour eggs, apples, butter, sugar, etc. These things are intrinsically valuable. No one would disagree with that.
Now a skilled chef could take those ingredients, and, in a short time, produce a superiour pie.
A less skilled chef could take those ingredients, and, in a longer time, produce an acceptable pie.
An unskilled chef, could take those ingredients, and, in a still longer time, make an inedible mess.
By your standards, the last chef would be the one that produced the most valuable product, because he put the most immediate work into it, followed by the second chef, with the skilled chef coming in last.
The problem is clear; the value of the object produced is not dependent on the amount of work put into producing it. The unskilled chef produced something of value zero, or even negative value because he destroyed something of intrinsic value to make something of no value. Conversely, the skilled chef produced something of higher value, because, with his skill, he produced a superior product.
That is why, here in the real world, people are rewarded based on their skill, and not based on their effort. Life is not a gimpy little league game where everybody gets a trophy, and out here, if you don't get results, you don't get paid. But if you get more and better results than someone else who is doing the same thing you get paid more than they do, even if it took you less time.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday August 01 2005, @10:26PM)
We better get rid of the FSCKing stock market too, then. Not a lot of TANGIBLE stuff gets traded there. Maybe all the STOCKs should be free too.
You'd expect the price of the service to be proportional to how much work it takes to render the service.
Uh, hundreds of programmers * several years == a lot of work. When you buy software, you are paying just a small part of the total cost of producing the software. THE COST OF PRODUCING THE SOFTWARE IS MUCH GREATER THAN THE COST OF COPYING THE CD. YOU ARE PAYING PART OF THE AMORTIZED COST OF THE ENTIRE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS.
Stop making pathetic excuses for your behavior. If you're going to steal, say, "I'm stealing." If not, then don't, but don't try to delude yourself and especially the rest of us into thinking that you have some kind of moral justification for what you are doing.
Assertions like yours just make me ill.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://suppafly.livejournal.com/)
Either mac osx and linux are viable desktop os's or they aren't but you can't pretend they are half the time and then pretend ms has no competition the rest of the time.
Re:The Pirate Bay (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday June 11 2004, @10:46AM)
THis again (Score:5, Funny)
So they're trying this again are they?
Re:THis again (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think anyone can actually suggest that Microsoft throw it out, having a good rendering engine of type in the platform SDK is pretty much a requirement these days. The OSS desktops all leveraging HTML engines is just one example, check out Apple who are relly going at it building applications based on WebCore. It just so happens that Microsoft got into the game early (one could in fact use the word "innovation" here, but I guess that would be a bit too flamebaity on Slashdot).
Re:THis again (Score:4, Informative)
How often do we have to go through this?
Obviously a few more times.
IE is integral to the platform in the same way Konqueror/KHTML is to KDE. It is part of the standard libraries/components and applications can expect it to be available to view richly formatted data.
This is not true. Applications don't give a damn if Internet Explorer is installed. Applications depend on Trident. Trident is the rendering engine that transforms web pages into something you can see and interact with.
Internet Explorer is nothing but a (pretty poor) shell around Trident. Internet Explorer is simply not necessary for the correct operation of Windows or Windows applications. Trident is. Internet Explorer is an application bundled with Windows.
As an MSDN Subscriber... (Score:5, Funny)
HELO
MAIL FROM: aspammer@zombiesareus.biz
RCPT TO: billg@microsoft.com
DATA
First Post? (Score:3, Informative)
(http://quillem.com/)
Anyways, both these betas are already available everywhere.
The Vista Beta comes with a WPA bypasser.
IE7 beta requires online activation.
Anyone see any bit torrents yet? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Anyone see any bit torrents yet? (Score:5, Informative)
MSDN subscribers? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.linksdaily.com/)
"Any early thoughts, MSDN subscribers?"
Do those actually read Slashdot?
Re:MSDN subscribers? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.robert.to/)
I have an MSDN Universal Subscription! And I read /.! I guess that makes me a masochist or something, but I like seeing how misinformed, short sighted, and downright stupid some people are.
Re:MSDN subscribers? (Score:4, Funny)
I have an MSDN Universal Subscription! And I read /.! I guess that makes me a masochist or something, but I like seeing how misinformed, short sighted, and downright stupid some people are.
So that was why you got the MSDN subscription? ;-)
For the first time I agree with John C Dvorak. (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Saturday August 28 2004, @02:35PM)
For the first time I agree with John C Dvorak.
pcmag [pcmag.com]
"Vista? As in "Hasta la Vista, baby?" That name might be appropriate as a symbolic goodbye since it might be the end of the line for Microsoft's dominance in the OS business."
"The new OS is getting zero buzz. Zero. now the name Vista, along with the new Microsoft Vista logo, has made it worse. Could anything be less exciting?"
"THE FUTURE OF DESKTOP COMPUTING: Apple. Vista will open the door to what I believe will be a radical change in the computing landscape. The trends are clear. Once the new Mac OS appears next year it will gravitate toward the existing x86 community much more rapidly than anticipated..."
"Right now, and as much as x86 users do not want to admit it, the Mac OS is already better than Windows in its modern look and feel as well as its functionality. I see too many smart people with Mac laptops nowadays."
"...it is always possible that Apple doesn't understand the power play position it's in and might actually believe that it's better off somehow keeping its OS in a small niche rather than the big market. If the world changed tomorrow to 85 percent Mac "OS x86" its laptop sales alone would triple overnight. Apple didn't put together what many consider the finest in-house industrial design teams in the world to fool around with piddly sales and more redesigns of the iPod."
"That said, how much more of Steve Jobs can we handle? Do we really want to hear him say "I told you so?" If it gets some excitement back into desktop computing, yes, we do. I think we can take it."
Uhhh... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday May 31 2004, @07:30AM)
A Slashdotter agreeing with John C. Dvorak, who is saying nice things about Apple?
Quick, can someone post a current weather report for Hell, please?
Re:Uhhh... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.hylobatidae.org/minerva/)
Here you go [bbc.co.uk] - apparently it's cold and rainy there today, but improving by next week.
Oh, hang on, you said Hell? Surely the two are synonymous?
Or, Michigan, better yet (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~abh2n | Last Journal: Wednesday October 31, @11:57AM)
Re:Uhhh... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://thepreacher.cac2.net/)
It's windy here right now, Craig, but as you can see on the horizon, the storm clouds are gathering. As we go to the satellite, you can see in the southern region of Hell, Dvorak's comments have unleashed a massive cold front, which is quite different from the hot air that we're used to from him. That by itself wouldn't be a huge problem, but to the North, in Gehenna, we've got the fallout caused by the Slashdotter agreeing with Dvorak. We've never seen that before, and Craig, I don't have to tell you, nobody knows what these two systems will do when they get together. In the mean time I'll be here. Back to you, Craig.
Seriously... (Score:5, Insightful)
The privacy statement for Internet Explorer 7.0 beta lists a "phishing filter," which is said to be capable of warning users about the possibility that the Web site currently being visited is impersonating a trusted Web site. This feature is turned off by default
Why bother creating a feature like this and having it turned off by default. The people most likely to be taken in by a phishing scam seem to me to be the same people who won't know enough about a computer to turn this feature on to protect themselves. The more tech and internet savvy people could turn this off if it annoys them.
but in order for it to be used properly, the Web site's address and other information about the user's computer, are sent to Microsoft for automatic evaluation.
Then again it does scare me a little that MS would be taking a peek at my browsing habits. Hopefully it just asks a big database full of bad websites whether or not this one is good. I'd like to think that MS wouldn't be keeping tabs on my online activity. Makes me wonder if this is why that bought Gator... I mean Claria.
At last ! Revenge on Mac ! (Score:5, Funny)
Wine (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.slashdot.org/)
Cool. IE7 has priveledge seperation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cool. IE7 has priveledge seperation (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cool. IE7 has priveledge seperation (Score:5, Funny)
Woops (Score:3, Informative)
OS redundancy? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.stevenvansickle.com/)
So in other words, beta 1 is just XP with RSS? They already yanked everything else out of the system as is. The reason they call it Vista is because that's all that's left of the OS; a view.
Re:OS redundancy? (Score:5, Informative)
If they were to release the OS as-is, it would not create any particular buzz among consumers, since for the most part it still feels and drives like XP/win2k3. But it would be huge in the corporate market. Remote management capabilities have been expanded significantly (and they are pretty good already in xp/win2k3), but more importantly are the security revamp of the core OS. While you currently can have your employees on XP workstations run as non-admin, it is very difficult to give them freedoms to modify the system without giving them full admin access (aka - install a new printer). Now, there is a more robust priviledge system, where (1) even if you are full admin most applications start in lower priviledges, and (2) you can give more granular admin perms on a user-to-user basis. So, employees will have more freedom to customize/configure their system, while the admins can still protect the core OS image from rootkits or the machine in general from spyware.
Additionally, governments are interested in the platform as well. Apart from the security features above, there are content protection schemes on the platform, and features like secure boot (sounds ridiculous for a consumer, but appealing to, say, someone like the CIA).
Will Vista RTM be compelling enough that consumers will fly it off the shelves? I can't really say, to be honest my experience is with the core (which I am impressed with). But lets be honest, MS doesn't make its income through selling software boxes of XP. Vista will follow the same adoption of XP -- corporate/government contracts and OEM bundles will make the first surge of adoptions. But, with things like Avalon and Indigo (actually implemented, believe it or not
Windows Vista is visually intuitive! (Score:5, Interesting)
- Glass and new Window animation. The Windows Vista desktop experience will deliver a new visual identity -- translucent glass with more animation. Because it is visually intuitive, the glass helps users focus on the task at hand, whether reading a document, viewing a Web page or editing a photo.
Apparently the best way to develop a "visually intuitive" user interface is glass and more animation!
Screenshot! (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.brastensager.com/images/WindowsVista.p
Re:Windows Vista is visually intuitive! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/)
Damn right! Just think how intuitively people interpet somebody gesturing at them with a broken bottle :)
IE7 _built in_ ? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.lenticularshareware.com/)
Wouldn't this fly in the face of the US DOJ ruling that they had to separate it from the OS?
MadCow.
Paul Thurrott Review (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.markwheeler.net/)
It goes through the vast majority of new features, although doesn't go into a great deal of depth at this early stage. Seems there are no great surprises here - Vista is still very much watered down from initial promises - but apparently things are at least moving along noticably now.
-----------
www.markwheeler.net [markwheeler.net]
Re:some FFT [food for thought] (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh let's return to the good old days where programmers had two big keys with 0 and 1 written on them and programmed opcodes like playing bongos..
Firefox's feature list? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://trog.qgl.org)
So far so good (Score:5, Informative)
(http://blogs.yale.edu/roller/page/kjh27)
If I feel brave enough (and our webmasters think they can survive a potential Slashdotting ;-) ) I'll put up some blog entries about my experiences over the next few days.
Availability (Score:4, Funny)
(http://wod.home.dyndns.org/)
And to anyone with a P2P client, probably...
More info (Score:3, Informative)
"Get home earlier with Windows Vista" (Score:5, Funny)
(http://chads.homelinux.org/blog/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 20 2005, @09:33PM)
Thank you Windows Vista!
Paul Thurrott has a pretty good review (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Monday February 13 2006, @07:11PM)
It clarified a lot I didn't know about Vista, and it's *gasp* even a critical review, but still not one written by an anti-Microsoft zealot, but trying to keep a pretty open mind about it.
IE7 stuff (Score:5, Informative)
(http://verens.com/)
I'm writing this post in IE7.
To tell the truth, the only "improvement" I've noticed is the tabs, but tabs have been available as extensions for quite some time.
I was hoping for some CSS improvements. When I first installed it, I immediately went to a few of the more difficult CSS sites, to see if they'd render correctly. Nope - no such luck. See http://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/ [meyerweb.com] for example.
The toolbar has been moved around. In my copy of it, at least, the URL bar is just below the titlebar, then there are the tabs, then another bar with text buttons on the left, and some icons on the right for home, favourites, history, rss, and print.
A search bar has been integrated into the same bar as the URL entry box. I expected it to use MSN by default, but it's set to Google. Or maybe that's just on mine?
As a web developer, I was hoping for better CSS support and better debugging tools.
According to their documentation, they've addressed at least two CSS bugs. I haven't seen any improvements at all yet. I will be using Dean Edwards' script for some time yet, it seems...
On the JavaScript end, there does not seem to have been any work done on the debug tools there at all - still the old crappy "error on line X" (of what file? a bit more detail please?).
The RSS doesn't seem as good as Firefox's.
In Firefox, an icon appears on the bottom of the page you're on. You click the icon, then add the feed with another click. Immediately, you have Live Feeds, where you can open your bookmarks, scroll to the feed you want, and a list of the article headlines is immediately available.
In IE7, however, an icon highlights on the top of the page. You click the icon, which opens up the RSS and renders it (nyeh - whatever). Then you click add to favourites. Then you click to confirm that. Now, when you want to view the feeds, you open your favourites from the text toolbar, scroll down and click on the feed.
The main difference is that in IE7, you must click each feed that you want to view, whereas in Firefox, you get a preview of the new items.
Overall, I am not impressed in the slightest. Nothing innovative at all, and their CSS is still nowhere near as good as Firefox, Opera, KDE or Safari's (I know the latter two are basically the same engine...).
Microsoft continues to make Windows worse... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/ | Last Journal: Monday September 26 2005, @06:53PM)
For me, the user interface of Windows peaked with Windows 3.11 and NT 3.51. In these systems, virtually every control in every program could be easily navigated to using only the keyboard, with consistent shortcuts everywhere. This was a significantly better environment than Apple has managed to provide even now, and probably the best feature of the Windows UI. In 95/NT4 the Start Menu and Task Bar required new shortcuts. Then companies started shipping keyboards with extra keys (making the spacebar shorter and a harder target to hit, and not really solving the problem for people who have to work on multiple computers with a variety of keyboards). Newer versions of Office applications removed the ability to keyboard-navigate through toolbars (with or without he new keyboards). What's next?
Virtual Folders (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Thursday October 31 2002, @12:26PM)
Isn't this just a fancy way to say playlist? I fail to see the usefullness of adding yet another layer of confusion to getting to a users files. Not to mention, this ought to make user migration a joy for enterprise users.
GUI. (Score:3, Insightful)
I am shocked that a company like Microsoft can actually fuck up every GUI best practice rule out there.
IMO they spent a ton of time trying to rip of OS X and Aqua, but then change it enough so it has a look and feel as if it had Win XP roots. But it's a total mess. Scroll bars do not look like scroll bars, and are extremely faded. THERE IS DEAD SPACE EVERYWHERE!!! Six inch by one inch desk space areas just to show a word or two off text. Some buttons look like buttons, others look like internet links that are underlined, others only have an underline when you roll-over! I could go on and on, but I am seriously shocked. I know it's beta, but the UI will not change much, you are pretty much looking at the final product from a UI standpoint.
This is bad enough to make me leave the last Windows machine I have, and deal with windows just within a virtual environment on OS X. I "HAVE" to leave now, it's that bad a GUI. Shameful.
After much research, I found a way to have perfect CRM and financials for the small businesses out there that need to leave but can't because of those two reasons, those two kind of apps that DO run well on Windows.
Look at Salesforce.com, it works great in Safari (HTML and JavaScript, nothing else) and it misses nothing. And look at QuickBooks PRO for Mac OS X. You can only get Pro, not Premium for the Mac, but the few differences there will not be missed by most other than advanced accountants. And go with Apples Pages and Keynote or go with Open Office for the office work. Even MS Office for Mac if you need to, it's actually ok. That Salesforce.com + QuickBooks for Mac is what will help me live without Windows.
Bill G deserves a bitch smack for pushing such a counter-productive OS onto the world for the next several years. he will be wasting many decades worth of man hours for doing so. Criminal.
"Technical Overview" (Score:3, Funny)
Dismayed! (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.gadgetoid.com/)
Improved CSS support? Yeah. Right.
This is IE6 with tabs and a "phishing filter". Nothing new here. The RSS reader is abysmal, not even comparing to that of Safari 2.0.. not to mention I couldn't find a visible button to access the feeds on a website and had to dig in the tools menu for it.
CSS support has some minor improvements, but nothing groundbreaking. IE7 fails the Acid2 test miserably, which is tough luck because we're probably not going to see IE8 for 5 years now.
Microsoft have the future of SVG and CSS3 in the palms of their hands and they are content to toss it aside so they can implement a couple of silly superficial features to keep the monkey-brained masses happy and try to pass us developers off with "immproved CSS support" and a PNG transparent support which is nice, but frankly I'm having none of it. Microsoft have officially torn the final straw from my clutches and chewed it into a pulp before my very eyes.
As for Windows Vista.. whoopety-fucking-doo
And to think... how long has IE7 been in the works before it took them to come out with this shitty beta? In 10 minutes they could have handed the Mozilla group seven figures to use Gecko in their commercial crap-pile which would have made everyone happy. But nooooo, they can't even do the sensible thing.
Money grubbing idiots.
A few CSS tests (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.lysergic.org.nz/)
All are still just as broken as in IE6. It looks like VERY little effort has been put into the rendering engine so far. Absolutely pathetic.
http://www.lysergic.org.nz/testcss/divhover.html [lysergic.org.nz]
http://www.lysergic.org.nz/testcss/selectheight.h
http://www.lysergic.org.nz/testcss/selectzindex.h
Re:Majority of end-user features not included... (Score:5, Informative)
Also includes some kind of "phishing site checker", RSS support (picks them out from page and can display from a single button), pop-up blocking, easy history deletion.
Seems pretty stable and not too memory hungry... so far