Microsoft Vista, Beta 1 .. AKA Longhorn

[Don Edwards]

Microsoft is testing their next version of their always updatable OS, this time it is called Vista,



Best of Luck Bill. how much more money do you need to make?









http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1840867,00.asp

 

[Dale Carter]

Let me start by saying, I understand the initial reaction you have to Bill Gates.



For background, in 1988, I started with MS-DOS 2.0 and Novell Netware. Every major release of Microsoft products was an improvement over the previous one. Win 2.0 begat Win 3.0 which begat 3.11, then Win 95. Win2000 is better than 95 and XP is better than 2000 for MOST uses. Microsoft beat back competition from IBM's OS/2, a MUCH bigger company at that time facing the same carping we hear about Gates today. I remember bumper stickers which said, "Stop The Borg, make it run OS/2". They also defeated other GUI systems from other companies, larger and smaller than Microsoft at the time.



I am not including niche products like WinME, I am talking major releases.



Bill Gates and his company have made my life easier and more productive. He has made our country vastly wealthier. How much is that worth?



As far as "how much money do you need"??? As much as he can get us to GIVE him in exchange for his work product. Every dollar he makes is an indicator of the strength of our technology sector, so I hope he triples his fortune in a few years.



BTW, did you know that he has set up his estate to send the vast majority of his fortune to charity when he dies? He has set up enough to keep his family comfortable (probably a measly few billion :lol and the rest goes to a wide variety of charities, most of which he is funding heavily already. Check out his charity and tell me how much he needs.

 

[Thomas Rogers]

I worked for IBM on OS/2 (not using, I mean actually worked to help develop the OS/2 product) when IBM and Microsoft were still married and happy. I left shortly after the divorce and after IBM pulled the plug on OS/2. I considered going to Redmond, but I am an East coast, Northeast boy born and bred and just couldn't see moving to the West coast. However, I did the next best thing...started consulting and development on Microsoft products, and it has MORE than paid the bills since.



I have a lot of respect for Bill. Sure, there have been some missteps along the way (ActiveX, Browser Helper Objects, and their coupling to browser client-side Javascript the most glaring as they are the toehold for virus, malware, spyware and trojans), but for the most part, Microsoft HAS paved the way for computing as we know it today...often by beg, borrow and steal from others like Xerox Parc, but nonetheless, they have lead with real products where others have been research and niche.



TJR

 

[Deleted deleted]

Wish more CEO's were as charitable as Bill Gates has proven to be.

 

[Dale Carter]

TJR - hope I didn't step on your toes with that Borg comment



Hey, even Apple stole from Xerox. I used PARC as the subject of a paper in b-school regarding people who don't invent, but apply someone elses creation more effectively than they did. Apple did it with the GUI that Xerox developed and then Microsoft did it with Windows. I also used the Skunk Works application of Soviet math discoveries to refine our stealth aircraft technology. Imagine that, Soviet mathmeticians developed equations that explain the previously observed stealth characteristics of certain planes and those hacks at Lockheed Martin rip them off. :lol:

 

[Thomas Rogers]

No offense taken Dale.



TJR

 

[Shawn Hennessy]

There would be no Linux had there not been Bill Gates. Mac wouldn't have been nearly as innovative had microsoft not existed.



I agree with Dale's comments. Microsoft has provided me with steady, good employment since I left the Navy in '94 (allthough I have never worked for MS).

 

[TomT]

Go to pcmag.com and you can see a lot of screen shots and get a lot more info about Vista. I like the looks of it.

 

[Shawn Hennessy]

Looks like IE is getting tabbed browsing (a la Mozilla)

 

[Mark S 3]

They could of done with a better name. Vista just brings on images of a credit card.



Plus I've heard loads of people say VISTA stands for Virus, Infections, Spyware, Trojans and Adware. Not good marketing imho



I make a lot of money from supporting microsoft, so have no complaints when they release a new OS. At home though? Not a chance! I run Linux and Mac OSX.

 

[steve twyver]

I'd like to point to Gates Law which Longhorn/Vista is specifically designed to achieve:

The speed of software halves every 18 months.

This is in lockstep to the corollary of Moore's law which basically says the speed of hardware doubles every 18 months.

 

[Tom Schindler]

I would love to be able to try OS/2. I have tried Apple PC's (What a waste of time), Linux (If you want to learn commands and decide which distribution you want to use), and Microsoft.





Tom

 

[Jim Johnson]

Caymen said:



<I>"I would love to be able to try OS/2. "</I>



I believe that OS/2 -- or major parts of it -- became WinNT (which has sort of turned into XP).





<I>"I have tried Apple PC's (What a waste of time), Linux (If you want to learn commands"</I>



Surely, you've heard of xwindow. There are plenty of GUIs for Linux, such as KDE (probably the most Windows-like), Gnome, Windowmaker, etc. I use KDE (using it right now, in fact) and almost never use the command line, except perhaps to kill a hanging application (which is extremely rare, but try doing that in Windows, where it's much less rare).





<i>" and decide which distribution you want to use) . . ."</I>



Choice is good, IMHO, and it's something you don't get much of with MS and Apple.



Hey, to each his own. I dual boot Windoze & Linux, but if it weren't for a couple older Win-based MIDI/audio apps that I still use, I'd ditch Windoze in a heartbeat.

 

[Ryan Schaecher]

I've been using windows since the initial release. I've used Mac's and Unix Sun systems, SGI systems, Amiga, OS/2, MD-DOS (from version 3.0), DR-DOS, etc. Windows is the easiest to find software on, but ever since they went to Plug-And-Pray architectures, it has made things a bit more complicated. However, when I build systems now I don't haveto worry about brand incompatibility...

 

[Thomas Rogers]

OS/2 is dead. If you have an older 386 computer with limited memory and speed and relatively straightforward hardware (nothing exotic), and want to PLAY, then hunting down an old copy of "OS/2 Warp" (the last version name) can give you some enjoyment. It had a lot of nice features: Workplace Shell, which was an object oriented desktop; an advanced file system supporting long file names; DOS and Windows 3.11 program support; a scripting language called REXX...all of which were state of the art, circa 1994.



I wrote a very well received library for OS/2 REXX called RxUtils that gave a script writer a ton of useful little functions. It kicked the crap out of batch file authoring. All said, I probably wrote two dozen or more OS/2 applications, several of which were included in the base OS/2 product or OS/2 products for IBM.



Agh, the good old days.



TJR

 

[Tom Schindler]

Jim,



On one PC of mine, I am tri-booting SuSE Linux, Windows XP, and Windows ME. Linux is nice, unfortunatly, not everything works like it should. Some programs install flawlessly while others just refuse to work.



I tried SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, and Caldera. Something would install with Red Hat, but refuse in Mandrake.



So far, IMO, SuSE is by far the best.





Tom

 

[Ryan Schaecher]

One question....





WHY THE HELL WOULD ANYONE PURPOSELY USE WINME????!!!



That was the biggest mistake of Microsoft.... A POS hybrid of Win98 and WinNT. Even Win2K was better and that's not saying much.

 

[Tom Schindler]

Win98 crashed more often on my PC's then WinME did.



The same went for Win2K. Win2K would crash on me on a daily basis. More then Win95 or Win98 ever would.



WinXP, on the other hannd, is one fine OS.





Tom

 

[Jonathon Lee]

microsofts flaws pay for my lifestyle so I've got no problem with them. been servicing x86 platform computers for a decade and I still run windows on my own machines, after all its easier to fix something that goes horribly wrong on a clients machine if you just got to enjoy it failing a few weeks before that.