Windows 7 & 2003 Server
For those that follow such things, I tried out the Win7 beta today.
Installation, from start, to desktop loaded took just about exactly an hour. This is much more than some of the numbers I'd seen being thrown around, like 14 minutes.
But, yeah, it's basically Vista SP2. Compared to the Vista beta I'd had installed on that partition before, they have addressed at least some of my issues. UAC is much more laid back. I came across it twice; once each while installing Silverlight and Kaspersky.
The real thing is that everyone expects monumental improvements each time a new OS comes out, but there's not much of that you can do any more. I mean, as much as people harp about how OS X is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows, Leopard wasn't much of an improvement over Tiger. Most of the improvements were easily had via download from Apple or by 3rd party stuff. A lot of the best improvements in Leopard were in the developer support stuff (new APIs and whatnot), and I expect that it's about the same in Vista and Win7. The real benefit will come when developers start using the new technologies, which will only happen when they feel that they can without alienating a huge portion of their potential customer base. I frankly find it quite astonishing that Apple manages to get developers to use their new technologies very quickly.
I also installed Windows 2003 Server in a VM to play around with it. I'm not impressed. My first attempt was setting up a DNS server. The installation failed because it couldn't bring up the configuration window. Why couldn't it do that, you ask? Well, the initial error message didn't help. I went to manually turn it on under Services and got the real error message: That it can't start because there aren't any network interfaces. (I hadn't installed the driver for the network yet.)
So let me get this straight. If I ever decide that I want to set up a Windows Server before rigging it up to the network, I'm hosed, because configuration requires the server to be *running* and the server requires a network connection before it'll run. Good grief.
OTOH, I imagine that, stupid hurdles out of the way, a braindead office person might be able to manage to operate a Windows Server. If I'd had it available before I had to learn BIND9, it might have been nice, because I wouldn't have had to learn the zone file format. Of course, now that I have learned it, I prefer it. Zone files are vendor-independent, and because I can add arbitrary record types, I can actually publish an SPF policy with an SPF entry. The Microsoft DNS server only lets you pick record types from a list. (Which is, to be fair, pretty inclusive.) I'm also not certain if it allows for anything like the BIND9 concept of views. My DNS server returns different information, depending on whether it's being requested from inside my network or outside. (From outside the network, all of our machines are the same IPv4 address, because, well, we've only got the one. We do, however, have an entire /48 of the IPv6 space, so those are published.)
Maybe it's just a different paradigm, but I'm not impressed.
Installation, from start, to desktop loaded took just about exactly an hour. This is much more than some of the numbers I'd seen being thrown around, like 14 minutes.
But, yeah, it's basically Vista SP2. Compared to the Vista beta I'd had installed on that partition before, they have addressed at least some of my issues. UAC is much more laid back. I came across it twice; once each while installing Silverlight and Kaspersky.
The real thing is that everyone expects monumental improvements each time a new OS comes out, but there's not much of that you can do any more. I mean, as much as people harp about how OS X is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows, Leopard wasn't much of an improvement over Tiger. Most of the improvements were easily had via download from Apple or by 3rd party stuff. A lot of the best improvements in Leopard were in the developer support stuff (new APIs and whatnot), and I expect that it's about the same in Vista and Win7. The real benefit will come when developers start using the new technologies, which will only happen when they feel that they can without alienating a huge portion of their potential customer base. I frankly find it quite astonishing that Apple manages to get developers to use their new technologies very quickly.
I also installed Windows 2003 Server in a VM to play around with it. I'm not impressed. My first attempt was setting up a DNS server. The installation failed because it couldn't bring up the configuration window. Why couldn't it do that, you ask? Well, the initial error message didn't help. I went to manually turn it on under Services and got the real error message: That it can't start because there aren't any network interfaces. (I hadn't installed the driver for the network yet.)
So let me get this straight. If I ever decide that I want to set up a Windows Server before rigging it up to the network, I'm hosed, because configuration requires the server to be *running* and the server requires a network connection before it'll run. Good grief.
OTOH, I imagine that, stupid hurdles out of the way, a braindead office person might be able to manage to operate a Windows Server. If I'd had it available before I had to learn BIND9, it might have been nice, because I wouldn't have had to learn the zone file format. Of course, now that I have learned it, I prefer it. Zone files are vendor-independent, and because I can add arbitrary record types, I can actually publish an SPF policy with an SPF entry. The Microsoft DNS server only lets you pick record types from a list. (Which is, to be fair, pretty inclusive.) I'm also not certain if it allows for anything like the BIND9 concept of views. My DNS server returns different information, depending on whether it's being requested from inside my network or outside. (From outside the network, all of our machines are the same IPv4 address, because, well, we've only got the one. We do, however, have an entire /48 of the IPv6 space, so those are published.)
Maybe it's just a different paradigm, but I'm not impressed.