I hate Vista!

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I still use Windows XP SP2 32bit edition - Vista is rare and not popular, and it is uses too much resources. And I think that MacOS X is not the only alternative -- Linux is also nice OS; it became less nerdy and less "Soviet" style (principles "make it yourself" and "user is clever and will understand principial scheme of TV set") and rather friendly to end user.

What is ancient about shadow copies? I have never seen that tech anywhere before. Are you referring to CVS / any versioning control system? Shadow Copy is kind of like that, except it's a per volume versioning system that's fully automatic. You never have to commit new versions. If you want an older version of a file you just right click on it and do "Restore previous version".

Ok, I did a web search and found that OpenVMS had something similiar. Is that what you're talking about? Fair enough, but I think this is the first time it's been brought to the consumer.

About the new graphics stack (WPF), it's true that Linux and OS X had the compositing windows, each with its own buffer way before Vista did. But my goal isn't all around Vista advocacy, I'm just trying to change the mind of the crowd that thinks "I already like the Windows platform, but Vista offers nothing new over XP." Windows vs. OS X vs Linux vs other is a whole different ballgame I think.

The domino window selection is Flip3d, and I agree that it sucks. But the important thing is that the OS is no longer using bitmaps to store desktop graphics, which opens up possibilities for userspace programs. Switcher is a free tool that clones OS-X's "exposé" feature. Not only does it look cool, but I find it actually quite useful, unlike Flip3d.

However, I'm not sure if Beryl and Mac Os X support resolution independent graphics though. (I really don't know if they do or not, but I suspect no.)

Here's an example:
Old GFX Stack (Bitmap)
WPF (Vector)

When more programs are developed/ported over to the new stack (WPF), this will be useful if you say, had a laptop with incredible resolution on a small screen, but you didn't want everything to be tiny. I think this is a key feature of the OS.

The "Do you really, really want to do that?" - I think this is actually somewhat useful, although Microsoft could have chosen a better way to do this. The easiest solution to a lot of the "security" issues in windows is to default users to use non-administrative level accounts. This is how linux "solves" the security problem. For some reason, MS has decided to continue the tradition of having the default user account be administrative level for home users. Now in Vista, whenever something needs elevated privileges, it does the special confirmation box that dims the rest of the screen. So I guess it's a decent way to approach the huge hole of having all users essentially be root while doing their day to day tasks, but yeah it can be annoying.

As far as the other stuff, there's a new sound system. The biggest thing the user will note is that every program has its own volume control in the OS. Instead of turning up your PC's volume to watch a movie and then going deaf when a friend IMs you, you could turn down your IM client to be pretty quiet and turn up the movie player. Also most of the sound system now runs in user-space. Most drivers (not just sound ones) are now split up into two parts, a small kernel space driver and a user space driver that interfaces with the kernel space driver.

There's a new print system that's vector based as well (like the gfx stack.) And a resolution independent document file format that is handled by the print system instead of an application.

Networking supports IPv6 natively and no longer treats wireless devices as emulated wired devices.

There's a new Video API for playing blueray etc, but as you noted it sucks because it's really just a DRM framework.

The filesystem supports atomic writes/deletes over multiple files.

There's some API stuff to make windows development easier but I doubt you care about that

Actually, go back further, to just VMS, when it was young. You got to choose exactly how many versions it would keep. Consumer? No. There were NO consumers in those days.


Very true. But as you go on to say, Vista's improvements in this area are hardly likely to entice users away from XP, to Vista, as they are so minor a difference, from the user's perspective. I raised the alternative of Linux (and indeed, OS X), as a reason why some people might find more mature and extensive composite display management rather attractive.


An interesting question, but I'm not certain that it can be asked, in a sense. What you describe has to be implemented at the application level, essentially. I guess SVG has been around for a long while, for example. TrueType fonts... the question is just at what point the graphic is rasterised, and who does it. Currently, my avatar produces some rather pretty moiré patterns as I zoom and pan (and my display is knackered, so I'm using zoom and pan continuously). I'm actually quite surprised at how well Compiz manages zooms of arbitrary factors (1.2 is my factor per zoom step).


This is somewhat reversed. Unix started off as a multiuser system, where people were protected from one another, and so on. Linux never "solved" a security problem - it just never had one. The concepts of security were all there, mature, before Mr. Torvalds left school.

Microsoft took CPM and ditched security. They've been trying to bolt some working security back on ever since.


Wouldn't that be solving a problem that didn't exist?
I can't say I can recall ever having a problem controlling the volume.
I certainly can't see myself wanting to control individual applications.


Does that mean that Vista can handle Postscript at last?

I could say, about time, and, I didn't know it did so, and what difference would that make?
On second thoughts, how on earth did it cope with a wireless connection, if it purely emulated a wired connection? There must have been something else going on, surely, or it wouldn't understand the connection's non-wired capabilities... ah... but maybe it didn't.


Curious, and really only relevant in connection with proper database functionality, which the databases themselves handle.
I wonder, does the atomicity apply across the gross "volume" concept that MS seem to adhere to. I.e. can it manage multi-volume atomic operations? I'd say that it was pointless if it can't.

I've never much cared for the Windows API. It always seemed so locked into MS's proprietary bits'n'bobs. Last time I was using it was via C# and so many of the low level bits were broken. MS seem to have the attitude of "it's OUR private API, and the bits of it that WE use work, so we don't care if the bits you are trying to use are broken." That was me using some low level graphics, and finding that you couldn't rely on their drawing routines to draw the right pixels, according to their own documentation.