Microsoft proud to hand over Vista 'features' early

[Steve]

Microsoft will include most of the "final" features in pre-release editions of its next Windows client for early evaluation to help produce a more stable product.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=4016

[TheAnimus]

Vista I really don't know wether to be excited about, when i first got my hands on NT4 i fell in love. It was years ahead of the other OS's (to be fair my favourate at the time was RISC OS, because it was so damn snappy, having most of it in ROM).

When linux came out, it always made me shudder, as you get silly sugestions like "if we had decent HAL then device driver writing would be easy, so quality would fall" and a massive loss of product. It feals like your walking on a million different monkies, most of which have eaten baked beens for supper. XP didn't excite me at all. Instead it left me fealing empty.

What i mean is, when XP came out people are like "oooooh themes".

I played with litestep in the windows 98 days on my games partition. Themeing was nothing new, and like I'd got bored of litestep after a month, i knew it wasn't really going to mean anything to me.

What i failed to take into account as the arogant 16 year old who was getting his grubby mits on beta's of XP was how much easyer my mother would find it. Heck this box i'm on runs 2k3, i turned themes on! Fancy new start menu. All there.

Vista has some very intresting APIs. Now i know that dosen't excite non-programmers, but for us, its like been handed a bigger canvas, with more colours, and told we can use our penis as brush or any of the other things Tate Modern has taught me. We've been given more tools to let us do more stuff quicker.

I won't bore people with that any more, lets talk buisness, your staff will eventually prefer this. Its also got some really clever patching. You can patch a driver without rebooting. If its as good as the plays on the beta I've had the number of re-starts once people get used to writing for it, should be none. Thats good for uptime.

However it has a lot of disapointments, not as much is managed as had once hoped (managed code is better, its just often impractical, but .net has proved that not to be true (sorry java fan boys!)). WinFS turns out to be a pile of poo. And its going to be sold in the most confusing manner known to man. Granted they've "pulled an apple" in how to get people to pay for the OS (little & often) but its bad enough with home and pro of XP having to say, no, you can't use your home laptop at work because you need Pro. Idoits just don't understand the differnce, they think that its just a con by the IT department to get more overtime.

rant over.