Windows Vista: Enjoy the View
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Microsoft has announced the official name and the beta for the operating system formerly known as Longhorn: Windows Vista. Now it’s time to have our questions answered! What new functionality will Vista provide? Will it run on my machine? And of course, what kind of name is Vista?
Well, Microsoft has finally done it (sort of). They’ve announced the official moniker of the vaporware operating system formerly known as “Longhorn,” as well as given an official beta release date. If you’re reading this article, I needn’t tell you that the new name is “Windows Vista.” The beta is due August 3rd, but it probably won’t prove exceedingly difficult to obtain it in advance of that date. We can finally have some questions answered and maybe conjure up a few new ones.
The New Functionality, or Lack ThereofWhen Microsoft first announced their plans for the revolutionary new operating system, there were some heavy promises attached. We heard names tossed like WinFS, a completely revamped file-system. Indigo and Avalon heralded forth as a complete web services architecture and an amazing new underlying graphical architecture respectively.
Looking back, I feel like I was pawn to a cheesy political campaign: “read my lips, no more NTFS.” Well, time, resources, and reality have taken their toll on the feature list. WinFS has been altogether removed, while Indigo and Avalon have both been seriously revised. (not to mention boring new names: WCF – Windows Communication Foundation, and WPF – Windows Presentation Foundation).
In what I would call a pathetic attempt to lessen the loss of WinFS, Microsoft has tapped into some of the extensive “metadata” capabilities that are already available in NTFS, but have been merely underused. This move is a little less than disappointing. One preview mentioned that now Windows Explorer will surface more information about each file. For example, we’ll even see the model of the digital camera used to take my pictures. How excited does this make me? Well for one thing, experienced XP users could already see this information if they wanted. And secondly, I doubt that more than ten people on this planet even care to see the exact model of the camera that was used on their last vacation! Besides, everyone I know has only one digital camera.
OK, enough with WinFS. There's no revolutionary new file system, but I’ll get over it. What I really want to know is what new features and functionality will actually be provided, and what the tradeoff will be in new hardware costs.
Next: Hardware and the Beta >>
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