After losing their legal case with Sun Microsystems, it's highly doubtful they will ever do that. Microsoft is moving towards C# and Silverlight as a replacement of Java.

Despite my love for the Java language and the excellent Javadoc documentation system (beats MSDN, no doubt about it), it's all too obvious that Microsoft never wants to get involved with Java again . Sorry.

Agreed. New windows should not be able to steal focus.

I'd rather they don't. I'm sure the command line and *nix people love it, but that's not really their core audience.

How is it confusing?

I don't know how well you know Mac OS X but I find it extremely confusing.

The 32 bit kernel starts up, checks whether Long Mode is available and if so switches to Long Mode, running itself in Compatibility Mode. Each process can then be 32 bit or 64 bit, with 32 bit processes having 4 GB of virtual memory each (2 GB system, 2 GB user) and 64 bit processes having 8GB+ of virtual memory each (4 GB system, as much as currently supported user).

There are 32 bit and 64 bit libraries and due to the Mach-O binary format that part is a lot easier than the Windows equivalent (System32 for 64 bit and SysWow64 for 32 bit).

Due to this architecture Mac OS X cannot use 64 bit drivers. That is an advantage now, no doubt.

An update on the topic at hand...

ARS just published a hands-on review of the new GUI. You read more about it here.

Well, I still don't  see any reason to go to this new platform. The new explorer is nice, but Total commaner is Total Commander.

No doubt. I'll likely hang with Vista64 if they dont remove the DRM crap to be honest.

It's really weird for me. For so many years I didn't go to Linux because, although I could handle the interface, it was at best clunky, it wasn't advancing fast enough to be worth it to me, and I didn't want to mess with it.

And now I'm on Ubuntu and looking at the "New and Improved" Windows going "But, I already *have* that and that and that".

There's just nothing going on with Windows 7 that I would consider better than Ubuntu. Well - no, I do have to manually restart my wireless connection occasionally, which the XP install has no issues with.

But, that's it.

Umm, would you write Galciv III to have a Ubuntu/Debian version please? We'll just setup a synaptic server and go?

Jonnan

Vista has that same DRM so does it really matter?

I agree. I don't know the number of allowed activations of Windows, but I had never any problem with it. If the number is reasonable, I can live with it. However below 10 it may have been a problem.

Unlimited on the same hardware, as far as I know you can change the processor/memory/videocard and harddrives without wasting another reactivation, and yes I am speaking from first hand experience when saying this. The only thing that counts is the motherboard. As long as you don't change your motherboard you can reformat as many times as you want, however if you do change your motherboard you WILL need to contact Microsoft and go through them to reactivate Windows. You can do this 10 times, but once your motherboard is changed and you've successfully reactivated Windows you may format as many times as you want with your new hardware without being worried about activation.

I have heard that people have gotten past that limit of 10 reactivations with a new motherboard, so it really depends on the person you are talking to on the other end of the phone. All in all 10 different motherboards for a single PC is quite a feat, the likelyhood that 95% of people will go past 10 is highly unlikely. And if they do then they probably aren't using Home Premium/Ultimate but Business/Enterprise due to the differences in licensing.

You are not quite right. If you change memory (WinXP), it requires the reactivation. I don't know, if it subtracts the number of activations or not, but after upgrading my PC's RAM  I had to run the activation procedure again (HDD, processor, mainboard and videocard remained the same). However 10 reactivations is still not a problem anyway.  It may be too few for several people, however AFAIK those can increase the number of activation by calling the helpdesk.

In Vista it does not, I wasn't talking about XP.

Not...

I remember the good old days, when an OS was just an OS... I don't want a "complete" system, I want a platform to run my own choice of software. Windows 7 seem to be going in the right direction.

As for Ubuntu to be better... Well... Sure... It has its good bits, but to run the software I like I need to install literally hundreds of different librarypackages, some of the HUGE, which includes 2 complete desktop systems (gnome and KDE). I need perl, tex, python and whatever... It's not a home desktop system, because even the smallest apps have a huge lot of dependencies that potentially cause a conflict because it upgrades a librarypackage, or some other component that program X uses. It works for business use though, since they rarely change alot when it comes to what software is installed.

I agree entirely as well.  I will upgrade to 64-bit only when Windows 7 is out though, or if Elemental requires it, which would be a great design but poor business decision.

If it is an Combisystem which is using 32 Bit Games, Programms etc. and 64 Bit Games without Problems, I will buy it. I mean the same like Windows XP (that is a Combi from Win NT [Industrie] and Win ME [Gamers]) where many older Games Work (which were produced for Win 95/98/Me).

Vista have to many Problems, so the most People must use WinXP and Vista on one Computer. I know some of this Peoples. And I remember a time where I must use Win 98 and Win 2k on one Computer, because 4 Games did´t start on Win 98 but running on Win 2k without Probs.

Vista really doesn't have many problems, a lot of hardware has problems with Vista though. Initially the problem was that microsoft didnt provide enough information to hardware manufacturers on how to code proper drivers. Things have changed since, if you buy good hardware with properly coded drivers today, you'll have a very stable system.

Windows 7 uses the same driver architecture as Vista, and now hardware manufacturers know how to code for it. (There are still some who can't though, research before you buy... It's my only advise.)

So really, if you've skipped Vista because of "problems", and have upgraded your hardware since, but stuck to XP anyway, keep this in mind when you upgrade to windows 7 and call it the best thing since sliced bread; Vista would have worked just fine with that same hardware too.

If 64 bit was good at compatibility, I'd move up, but the problem is that moving up to a 64 bit-OS has no guarantees of running everything.

Ummm - I'm not sure what you're running that requires 'hundreds of libraries' - even running KDE programs under Gnome (I'm looking at you Digikam!) doesn't require *that* many - heck, even a complete KDE install doesn't even require that much - I've been playing around with it for a year, and I think the KDE downloads for Digikam were the largest requirements, and that was only ten minutes over low end DSL.

And apt-get handles dependencies fine - since Linux can actually handle having different versions of the same library fine till everything is updated to the new one (Which, in my experience, requires *lots* of tweaking in Windows), I'm curious how you managed to foment a dependency conflict? Never had one yet. Or was it something you were installing manually - that would certainly make a difference I'm sure.

Not to imply that Ubuntu is perfect - despite an improved wireless support in 8.10 that has helped, I still find myself  reseting wireless once in a while (I'll boot, and it sets itself down to 1 m/s), and MPlayer has issues with the video driver (No idea - everything else works fine), but keeping dependencies up to date or installing programs I would characterize as its strengths over windows, not it's weaknesses.

Jonnan

Depends on who you're talking to and what you mean by both "many" and "problem." For some of us PC geezers, a close second in the Vista Annoyance races to driver problems is the frakkin' too-"helpful" UI that assumes that I want my PC to look like a Mac, I have no idea how to learn or modify my own settings, and I am completely ready to put my "personal" computer in more or less complete submission to a mysterious server farm off in "the cloud."

I've been running a Vista box for almost a year and a season now, and I will confirm that my hardware-related problems have been seriously reduced by a combo of Windows Update and my own efforts at driver maintenance. But that is basically just the decline of what struck me as the worst problems, and by no means all of them. Seems like MS-oriented devs are increasingly disinterested in keyboard support, folks who understand a folder tree structure, and anyone who might want to put time into personally supervising the security of "their" PC. I *still* have no certainty that I can even list, much less control, all the files installed on my machine. The warning tremblors came with XP, and since I started using Vista, I began to consider the idea that I just had no hope of being 'master of my own domain' in PC-land unless I made it more or less a fulltime job. I went through more than a few CPUs when a goal like that was perfectly reasonable for a 'backyard mechanic,' and the end of those days is still "a problem" for me.

It's not a single piece of software obviously. Just list how many "lib-" packages you have, and then tell me it's not hundreds. There are forked libs, forks of forked libs, distributionrelated patches, kernel version patches and their uncles and granddaddies. The same goes for the software components...

Windows isn't so much better really, but atleast there's some kind of general standard. Regular Joe User loves that.

My point is aimed at non-technical users. The average windows user really just want a working computer doing the stuff that they expect. No tweaking, no hacking, no extreme supervision of security... As long as it works, they don't really change anything. Unless you're into fishy things (legal or non-legal, doesn't really matter), such as installing odd software or visit weird websites, you really just need Vista, some basic security suite and possibly some system maintenance software to keep it running smooth.

None of the non-tech people I've installed Vista for has any kind of weird OS related problems. Those with XP seem to get more problems with non-responsive software, spyware and other things like that.