An early build of Windows 7 is now in the hands of thousands of software developers, who got code at this week’s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. Major hardware manufacturers already have copies, but many more will get them at WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, which opens in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
Microsoft is providing tonnes of information, so I hope they’re paying attention. Windows, uniquely, has to work on PCs from more than 10,000 companies, and run well over 1 million applications for roughly a billion users. It has to handle everything from tiny handhelds to the large rack-based servers that run major corporations. Indeed, you can build your own PC and expect Windows to work on it.
It’s no secret that too few suppliers paid attention to the last version, Windows Vista, which therefore got off to a bad start. Badly written software either didn’t work correctly or kept bringing up pointless alerts from Vista’s UAC (User Account Control) security feature. Some components and peripherals either had no drivers, or worse, had really bad drivers. Some PC manufacturers were slugging Vista systems with old software written for XP. Many other problems came from Microsoft’s failure to deliver what had been expected — and when.
It took the best part of a year (and a lot of investment) to solve these problems, so that today, Vista SP1 is far better than the original — and far better than its reputation. To give just one example, the Windows Engineering blog points out that the number of applications and tasks that generate a UAC prompt fell from 775,312 at launch to 168,149 in August this year, and the number is still falling.
Of course, changing Windows isn’t like remodeling a boutique, it’s more like redesigning a city. It involves moving well over 90 percent of the whole microcomputer industry, some of which is highly resistant to change. It takes time.
The good news about Windows 7 is that it maintains compatibility with Vista device drivers and software, according to John Curran, who heads the Windows Client Group at Microsoft UK. It will therefore benefit from Vista’s problems in the same way that XP benefited from Windows 2000’s.
What else it contains remains to be seen, because Microsoft has changed the way Windows 7 is built. With Vista, features were pretty much added through a “top down” process, which was uneven at best. With Windows 7, development is “bottom up,” and teams are not allowed to add their feature to the main build until it has been both coded and tested. You may end up with fewer features, but the quality should be consistently higher.
Since builds are not “feature complete,” it’s hard to say what Windows 7 will include. We know that it will have a much improved UAC and better management of drivers and devices. We know it will have multi-touch features and gesture recognition. We know some parts will have ribbon interfaces: Windows is now being run by Steve Sinofsky, who was ultimately responsible for the ribbons in the hugely successful Office 2007.
Either way, it should do well. It doesn’t matter if it’s not a big upgrade on Vista, because 64-bit Windows 7 is a very big upgrade for the 80 percent of the market that is still using 32-bit Windows XP.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located