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Windows Vista ISO
Does anybody have a copy of Vista, at all? I've tried downloading several of them through bit torrent, but they don't work.
On the Microsoft site, you can only get them if you're an MSDN subscriber.I've registered for the beta testing, and MS says it'll ship beta 2 out fairly soon. However, I don't think they'll ship it to me. I'm a student after all.
On the Microsoft site, you can only get them if you're an MSDN subscriber.I've registered for the beta testing, and MS says it'll ship beta 2 out fairly soon. However, I don't think they'll ship it to me. I'm a student after all.
Comments
Minimum Requirements (Vista-Capable PCs):
* 800 MHz Intel-compatible processor
* 512MB of RAM
* DirectX 9.0-Capable Graphics Processor
* 20GB HD
Recommended Requirements (Premium-Ready PCs):
* 1 GHz Intel-compatible processor
* 1GB RAM
* DirectX 9.0-Capable Graphics Processor, with 128MB graphics memory. (64MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor less than 1,310,720 pixels [no more than 1440x900]; 128MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions from 1,310,720 to 2,304,000 pixels [no more than 1920x1200]; 256MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions higher than 2,304,000 pixels [more than 1920x1200]).
* 40GB HD with at least 15GB "free space"
The thing that struck me most was that, once you turned off all the transparency and graphical fluff, it looked and behaved exactly like Windows XP.
Except for the crippling DRM and ridiculous system requirements, of course.
My laptop exceeds the specs by far:
1.73 Ghz Pentium M
500Mhz FSB
1GB RAM
60GB 7200RPM HD
CD/DVD Burner
GeForce Go 6800 256MB (overclocked to 400Mhz)
LCD is 1920X1200
That being said, Vista is better than I expected in some ways, and as bad as I'd heard in others. You do have to do a lot clicking to go into administrator mode. When you double-click the time to set the clock, you get a dialog box containing a button, which, when clicked, causes a standard Vista popup ("a program needs your permission to continue"), then finally another dialog box to change the time.
Essentially, what they did is to allow running programs only user-level access, as in linux, unless you specifically authorize individual actions to be run with administrator permissions. So, theoretically, no more activeX scripts installing and running executables (read: viruses, spyware, trojans) on your computer.
Of course, people will just get in the habit of clicking "ok" every time the box pops up, and approving the spyware.
The graphics are shiny, but for some reason I can't get Aero to run, despite my computer's very high hardware capabilities. The mouse cursor sometimes slows down for a few seconds; this is a sign of extremely high load on a computer, and should basically never happen. I salute Vista's ability to close programs that stop responding, by not allowing the window to freeze and the close button to become useless. Then again, in XP, you can usually stop a program with frozen window by right-clicking its taskbar icon and clicking close. Or, of course, you can load the task manager.
All told: if they can make it less annoying and actually more secure than XP SP2, then it's a worthy upgrade if you need or desire Windows for some reason. It's certainly not a better OS than Tiger, Ubuntu, or SLED. How could it be? It's just imitating them at this point.
As for DRM, what exactly are you referring to? Windows Media Player 11 and its associated stores? WiMP is an application, not an OS. iTunes also sucks. Whatever. I use Winamp, and I store files in non-DRM mp3 format on my hard disk. If Vista is actually planning somehow to DRM my non-DRM files, well...wow. But I doubt it.
Vista is just Microsoft imitating the features of OSes that are inexorably superior.
Vista does have some nasty DRMs, but most of it has to do with output of high definition content. Let's say you download a relatively high-res video from the intarweb. Your super awesome LCD monitor is plugged in with a DVI cable. Vista will refuse to play DRMed videos at full resolution for you. You need a video card, a monitor and a cable that all properly support HDCP in order to actually watch things at full resolution. They want to make sure you aren't using the analog hole. Of course, the code that enforces this DRM is way down in the OS. Thus, it won't be easy to remove it without some h4x0ring.
There are other instances of evil DRM in Vista, but they are just more of what we are already used to. Surprisingly enough, a lot of evil DRM schemes have fallen by the wayside. Remember palladium and trusted computing? Those seem to be all but gone now. Good.
Then I remembered: oh yeah, there's no such thing as HD content. Well, there is, in that you could always take a video and size it to whatever the hell resolution you want, but you're of course limited by the original quality. But, bandwidth being what it is, there's really no readily available HD content out there, at least not besides tech demos.
I did find some Microsoft WMV-HD demos, which are executables, so whatever those do I'll take with a serious grain of salt. I also found an nVidia PureVideo demo. 247 MB, a few minutes long, and still compressed to hell. Now, MPEG and all similar (read: absolutely all) video codecs being what they are, the artifacts are absolute in size, so with a very high-resolution video, they become much smaller at any level of compression. JPEG is the same way: compare a highly-compressed 300 dpi image to a less-compressed 72 dpi image at the same actual size on screen.
Anyway, I ran the nVidia movie, and it looked darn good. It did seem to be truly 1080p despite my lack of HDCP support, though it really was only a bit better than a 480p DVD played on the same screen. I'd chalk that up to two things: firstly, DVD's are encoded in MPEG-2 format, at a compression rate far lower than virtually all internet video, and thus have minimal artifacting. Second, DVD decoding being somewhat easier than 1080p, it's a bit smoother. Any computer *can* decode 1080p, but to do it perfectly at 24, 30, or greater fps every second for hours on end (on a machine that's also performing other tasks) is damn near impossible.
Here's a screenshot of the video in action (paused). I'm not sure if I could spot signs of downsampling if I tried, but I don't think I did.
Then again, they probably just haven't enabled HDCP yet. Even if they had, nVidia, the content provider may just have disabled it for this video...to help sell technology which requires it. (hmm.)
Ultimately, HDCP will be used only by those who choose to use it. You can still shoot HD video yourself and upload it to anyone on the net without any protection. Fair play to you.
Kenjura, try MacBreak for some 540p content. They used to have 1080p stuff too but their BitTorrent tracker crapped out.