Wolf--
1) Vista is a beta as you know. And a beta that is a helluv an
unfinished work in progress., that is not about to be finished in a month
and a half when it first RTMs no matter how many parties and dancing up
and down when those choppers take off. And a beta where many ambitious
projects were just dropped that will never see the light of day. As far
as I know, MSFT is not charging for this Vista beta--other than to get a
mailing fee for the DVD for CPP releases (they also have to pay their
Seattle packager and distributer).
2) It's a beta that has been distributed to the public in some "milestone"
builds to the public. It doesn't fit any legal definition of piracy in
the country where Seattle is, that Nancy Anderson Associate General
Counsel of MSFT, who is charged with piracy litigation will be pursuing,
and MSFT couldn't be happier that it's being pushed out by other means.
Their attitude is "just spell our name right" whatever you call our OS.
They want that puppy in every chicken pot hoping it will spur sales.
Windows Vista--So Close and Yet So Far
By Jason Cross
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2010632,00.asp
You should be protected by the appropriate software and hdw NAT firewalls
and Anti-virus program as far as downloads "full of viruses". Files can
be scanned before you execute and install them.
"I just find it odd that those of us that spent months testing and fileing
bug reports on the beta 2 release got basiclly told to "shove off" by MS
on
the later builds of vista."
It's not odd and it's not serendipidy. While there may be unparalleled
talent and some imagination at Redmond they have a corner on the market in
arrogance. They could not care less about feedback from the public. They
can't even metabolize Beta bugs properly and I could show you furious
posts about bugs ignored and marked as fixed or "by design" when they
aren't fixed or the design is beyond belief in some cases.
It is obvious that by restricting your access to bug information on
Connect MSFT has complete contempt for you. The only thing they don't have
contempt for is in your wallet and it's green. They want that. See
www.longhornblogs.com on the eggregious pricing policy that will hit a
family of 4-5 or a small office.
1) Walling off their Beta chats as secret (although almost all have been
posted on the web but not in a central location by MSFT because that would
smack too much of education on a site)--but by some of the community
liasons on the Vista teams on the Redmond campus. Those sites are not
well known and Suzy Desktop PTA and Nascar Daddy ain't visting them.
All of them should be on the Vista site period and in a prominet place.
MSFT has thousands of people who work in the realm of education and seems
not to have a clue about how to disseminate information and convey it for
education of the public nearly a month and a half before they internally
RTM the thing.
2) Walling off every Beta Live Meeting that would educate the public for a
number close to 120-200 max participants on the planet who show up. Live
Meetings aren't reproduced or archived which is nothing less than stupid.
3) It is shove off, but leave your money in their pockets. They need toys
and they demanded in negotiations for Halo the Movie that the softies get
a luxury jet to the premier. Arrogance loves glitz and materialism to an
exponential degree. They need toys and they want your money to finance
them.
UAC execution is tin ear and it's another form of shove off.
The Upgrade Advisor is patently false--another form of shove off and
intentional intimidation. It lies to people about what will work and work
very very well on Vista. Their numbering system on hardware is a
byzantine, bizarre, worthless joke.
Device Manager has never, and won't in Vista tell you whether a driver is
corrupt or not. It says it does, and it lies. The stork didn't bring
device manager--a team or three did.
The hardware wizards in Vista and the update driver mechanism from Device
Manager do a poor job of finding drivers and while it's relatively easy a
lot of people won't realize they need to browse to driver files by path to
get many drivers installed in Vista.
Many software drivers' programs require Driver Verifier to have deadlock
detection turned off and the inspections of an Antivirus programs' drivers
to be turned off to avoid BSOD stops that increase exponentially even in
the face of a successful Startup Repair.
"Duo Core/4 on the Floor GHz and GB of Ram" in their little laptops of
course.
My advice to you if you think you have a "top of the line system" is to
try Vista on it. You will be able to get RC1 very soon using the MSFT
Akami server for fast download. Also there are very savy hardware users
on this group who know some of the upper and lower limits of Vista because
they've tested at both ends and if you ask about any hdw profile or
particular hdw, they'll be glad to tell you their experience.
I have a lot of screenshots on people's boxes full of trash and false
statements from the Upgrade Advisor where I've put Vista on the box, and
any problems aren't due to the intrinsic hdw profile.
CH