Science Forums 2

[geokker]

I watched the Microsft PDC as a webcast yesterday. This is a special event which occurs when Microsoft have major announcements e.g. shipping a new product, new alliance etc. Most of the presentation centered on their forthcoming operating system due for shipping next year. I remember in 2000 the announcement for a radically new operating system codenamed 'Longhorn'. Next year they say, 'Windows Vista' will be shipped - potentially, six years of focused development.

Aspects of the operating system were enthusiastically demonstrated. Features new to Windows included: Gadgets, indexed searching, tabbed browsing, hardware acceleration for the gui, graphical application switching and vector graphic processing.

For me, this is Microsoft playing catch-up with Apple to an almost plagiaristic degree. When OS X was demonstrated during a similar event, there was a similar amount of aped features like a taskbar, fast user switching, integrated searching.

As a Mac/Linux user, I found a lot of it quite funny. One speaker addressed the 'Windows rot' performance deterioration over time/usage. He said 'Users shouldn't have worry about that stuff' and then explained how the problem hadn't been solved but a feature automatically sweeps the problem under the carpet. There was also a demonstration of a graphical developer framework including XAML which appeared to be a proprietary version of HTML 'watch how easily I can make this grid scalable' yeah, that's called a table. Then they waxed lyrical about the vector nature of the GUI. Open standard, XML based SVG? No, some proprietary language copying and changing standards.

So I wonder what it all realistically means for the user. I can imagine when Vista ships, consumers will have the choice of upgrading to Vista - old machine, it'll run like a dog - or buying a new PC - pricey. Currently, Windows XP is £250 off the shelf. the Apple Mac Mini starts at £359 - and it works. No 'USB device not recognized', windows that fall apart, crapola third party DVD players, slow searching and shocking PC Case design etc. etc.

Will it be quick? Windows XP is mind-numbingly slow. Just clicking the start button takes an unpredictable amount of time - even on a sparkling-new machine. Shutting down - an age. Must I really have to close all the apps nicely? Logging in, to make itself look quicker, it loads the desktop while other stuff is still loading - so you have something to look at which you cannot use for a few minutes - without getting frustrated and crashing stuff.