Microsoft next Windows version 'Vista' (update Sept. 01)

[endofall]

---

Even the MS giant is havin difficulties finding a good name for their product or maybe they are aware about the existing trademarks but they don't care about it simply bcoz "MS will crush you".

[endofall]

MS Vista screenshots: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/p...a/default.mspx

source:
Windows Vista Virtual Pressroom
Published: July 27, 2005 | Updated: July 27, 2005

my sweet observation:
folders transparency
detailed file info with ratings (aka the windows media player)

[samsungster]

Windows Vista Beta Program Begins
Windows Vista--the next version of Windows, formerly code-named Longhorn--hits a major milestone today with the release of Beta 1 code, Microsoft announced. Microsoft also released the first beta of Internet Explorer 7 for
Windows XP (as well as the version bundled with Windows Vista).
The preproduction code being released today--several days before the August 3 deadline Microsoft gave itself when it announced the name of the OS last week--will be made available immediately as a download to 10,000 technical beta testers, most of them from the enterprise information technology and developer community.
Another half-million or so members of the Microsoft Developer Network and Microsoft TechNet (a support group for IT professionals who use Microsoft products) will soon have access to Beta 1, but without the support available to the official testers.
Beta 1 will not be available to the general public, at least in part because it lacks many of the user-oriented features Windows Vista will have when it ships in the second half of 2006, Microsoft officials say. a??The whole canvas is not complete," says Greg Sullivan, group product manager in the Windows client division. "We've painted less than half the picture here."
What's Not There
Missing from Beta 1 are such significant features as a new version of Windows Media Player and support for tablet and Media Center PCs, Sullivan said. But Beta 1 does mark the first public appearance of several technologies that Microsoft has been discussing at various developer and customer events over the past few years.
Brad Goldberg, Windows client general manager, told reporters and analysts at a recent pre-Beta 1 workshop that Microsoft's design goals for Windows Vista fell into three major categories: instilling a "new level of confidence in your PC" by improving security, privacy, performance, reliability, and ease of deployment; bringing clarity to the organization and use of information; and "seamlessly connecting you to people and devices."
Of the three, improving user confidence was at the top of the list at the pre-beta workshop. "We have to nail the fundamentals first," says Windows client director Austin Wilson. Microsoft is determined to avoid "the patch management nightmare" and to seal off vulnerabilities "so that things like Blaster don't happen in the future," he adds.
Wow, Great Graphics
People who load the OS will immediately be struck by the whiz-bang graphics of the Avalon display engine. Icons are more detailed than ever and can be scaled to your liking; you get actual thumbnails of most documents; and if your PC has a display driver that supports Longhorn's graphics, you can enjoy the transparent window frames of the Aero desktop theme.
The search field at the bottom of Windows Vista's Start menu lets you quickly locate a program by typing in all or part of its name.Search is ubiquitous throughout the user interface: Every window has a small search field to the right of the address bar, and there's even a search window at the bottom of the Start menu. Most of these search fields are context-sensitive: For example, if you type in the name of an application in the search field on the Start menu, you'll get a list of all matching executables, so you can avoid scrolling through the huge list you'd get by clicking on the All Programs button.
Windows Vista's Explorer windows embed a search field (top right); the bottom of the window displays detailed, customizable metadata for the highlighted document (in this case, Windows Vista security dialog).As before, Windows Explorer shows your folder system; but in addition to holding the folders you create, it comes prepopulated with a number of virtual folders that let you peruse documents by file metadata--information gathered by the file system--regardless of their actual location. For example, opening a virtual folder called Authors lets you check out all documents by specific authors, as identified in the file metadata. In another virtual folder, you can peruse documents according to keywords that you assign to files.
User Account Protection
One key new feature that Microsoft hopes will head off malware is User Account Protection. The OS adds a new type of user account, called a Limited Account, that provides fewer privileges than an administrative account but more privileges than a Windows XP guest account. People logged in as Limited users will be able to perform routine functions such as installing a new printer, but won't be permitted to install new applications or perform other types of tasks that malware tries to perform.
Internet Explorer 7 marks the IE debut of tabbed browsing. Also new: an RSS feed discovery button, located on the menu bar between the history and printer buttons.IE 7, which integrates an RSS feed reader and such long-awaited features as tabbed browsing, uses some of the technology behind User Account Protection for a protected mode designed to prevent drive-by spyware installation. Limited users can browse only in protected mode, but IT pros can set system policy to make protected mode the default for all users, including those logged in with administrative privileges. In protected mode, "the only thing [IE 7] will be able to do is write to temporary Internet files and the [browser] history," Wilson says.
Microsoft's goal is to move most Windows Vista users off administrator accounts. User Account Protection is turned off by default in Beta 1, but it can be turned on via the Start menu; it will be on by default in Beta 2.
One potential issue with this plan surfaced during the workshop, in a discussion of the Windows firewall in Windows Vista, which will be able to monitor outbound traffic (the firewall in Windows XP checks incoming code only). By default, outbound scanning will be turned on only in corporate editions of Windows Vista. According to Wilson, that's because if it were turned on in consumer editions, any application that needed to access the Internet would be unable to do obtain it, and a user would need to have administrative privileges in order to enable legitimate applications to function.
Better on Basics
Other fundamentals in Windows Vista will include faster and more secure startup, both during boot-up and when returning to active status from standby mode; improved user-mode (as opposed to kernel mode-based) driver design so that "a printer driver that crashes isn't going to crash the OS as well"; and an antiphishing filter (debuting in Beta 1 of IE 7 for Windows XP, but not in the beta of IE 7 for Windows Vista) that will identify suspect sites based on their behavior and will identify confirmed phishing sites based on a dynamically updated database.
Windows Vista uses image-based installation, so most of the OS is installed via a very large file as opposed to many small files. For consumers, this may not matter much, but it should simplify massive deployments by IT professionals, who can easily customize the image file by dragging and dropping in new files. Other IT-oriented features include an improved event log that permits administrators to specify tasks (such as notifying an IT staffer) to perform when certain types of problems occur.
The OS will have a new restart manager "that we think will reduce reboots by 50 percent," Wilson says. Windows Vista will also have new tools for diagnosing and dealing with problems such as crashes of specific Windows services, hardware failures, networking issues, slow performance, and resource exhaustion. For example, if a hard disk failure seems imminent, Vista will urge you to back up your data.
Overall, Microsoft hopes that its work on fundamentals will reduce the cost of owning and managing Windows by 25 percent, Goldberg said.
The general public may have a chance to test-drive the OS, but probably not before the Beta 2 release--and Microsoft's Sullivan said that it was as yet impossible even to guess at a date for the second beta. However, Microsoft still plans to ship Windows Vista in the second half of 2006. "There are good business reasons for us and our partners to ship in time for the holidays in 2006," Sullivan said.

[Uzumaki Naruto]

Beta 1 will not be available to the general public, at least in part because it lacks many of the user-oriented features Windows Vista will have when it ships in the second half of 2006, Microsoft officials say.

-from PC World

[vern]

I've been trying the Beta out. The best parts are behind the scenes technology.

[afortaliza]

See the Microsoft Windows Vista screenshots:

http://news.zdnet.com/2300-9590_22-5806815-2.html

[Visual C#]

Microsoft facing trademark trouble?

Microsoft Vista May Face Trademark Trouble. There's a line of sewing machines, an elevator monitoring system, even a brand of detergent used to clean dairy equipment — all bearing the brand name Vista.

1. Buy them out.
2. Expand market.
3. Profit!!!

Seriously though, I think Longhorn sounded better; Vista sounds gay IMO.

[samsungster]

Vista's pretty, but doesn't yet impress!
The digital surgeons at Microsoft Corp. have been stitching up a new operating system for a couple of years. And now that we're allowed a peek, it's still unclear what Microsoft has in mind-- a tummy tuck or a heart transplant.
One thing's certain: The new software sure is pretty. Maybe that's why Microsoft recently dropped its rough-and-tumble working title of Longhorn. The new product will be called Windows Vista, a handle that calls to mind a ski lodge in the Rockies, instead of a bedroll on the Chisholm Trail.
Vista uses a new graphics engine called Avalon for drawing windows and icons on the screen. Windows feature translucent edges and hurl themselves onto the screen with a zoomy animated effect.

The toolbar with its familiar Start button is now black with glowing green accents, and the Programs listing has been revised in a way that keeps it from running all over the screen as you install more applications.

Still, after a few days' use of Vista, it's hard not to feel disappointed. Dolled up though it is, Vista still resembles good old Windows XP, only with a lot more bugs.

Some are especially irksome. Vista connected easily to the Internet, but wouldn't link with other machines on a local network. It rejected the driver for a Dell laser printer. Oddest of all, it would not make friends with a Serial ATA hard drive -- the kind found in most new computers. Good thing the test machine had an extra drive that uses the older parallel ATA interface, or you might not be reading this.

Of course, Vista is still beta code -- early beta, at that. It's still a year away from going to market. Glitches are to be expected at this stage. But one might have hoped for a little more innovation, as well.

Instead, we settle for a new Internet Explorer browser that seeks to play catch-up with products like Firefox. At last, there will be tabbed windows in a Microsoft browser, and built-in support for those RSS data feeds we've all learned to love.

Not bad, this browser, but it needs work.

You can't drag its toolbars around to rearrange them, a pleasant feature of today's Internet Explorer.

Another small peeve: In Firefox, try to shut down the browser while multiple page tabs are open, and you get a warning that asks if you really want to close them all. It's a boon to the absent-minded surfer. Microsoft offers no such courtesy; kill one tab and you kill them all.

Microsoft vows that lots of additional features will be included in the next Vista release. But there won't be as many as we were promised four years ago when Microsoft announced its plans for the new operating system.
Vista was supposed to have included a new system for managing data on the computer's hard drive. The system, WinFS, would feature the same kind of database technology used by companies and governments to house vast stores of data. This would let Vista users locate any file on the computer in a split-second.

As for the Avalon technology that makes Vista look so pretty, Microsoft plans to offer it as an upgrade to Windows XP. So one of Vista's most promising features won't be available till a year after its release, and the code that makes Vista so pretty will work on today's version of Windows.

Remind me again why anybody would want to buy Vista?

Security, perhaps. Windows is notoriously easy to infect with rogue programs. Just ask Massachusetts workers who had to fend off last week's attack of computer worms. Such things rarely happen to Apple Macintosh computers, or machines running Linux, because their operating systems block unauthorized programs. Microsoft says its new security features will do the same, and make Vista machines as secure as a Macintosh.

Not a moment too soon. An effective security upgrade might help Microsoft overcome its toughest business rival: Microsoft.

In desktop operating systems, the company's only meaningful competition comes from earlier versions of its own products. Somehow, Microsoft must persuade a large percentage of the world's 650 million or so Windows users that it's upgrade time.

And lately, the company's been having trouble making the sale. According to a survey released in June by the research firm AssetMetrix, only 38 percent of businesses are running Windows XP, four years after it was introduced. The older Windows 2000 software is still in use on 48 percent of corporate computers.

It figures. Windows XP and Windows 2000 are based on the same software core. Windows 2000 came to market first, and provided nearly all the benefits of Windows XP. So millions of sensible Windows 2000 users shut their wallets.

A version of Windows that's nearly impervious to the sort of nastiness we saw last week would be Microsoft's best sales gimmick in years. Can they pull it off? We probably won't know for a year. That's when Vista will hit the street; a pretty young thing right off the bus from Seattle, and moving into a bad neighborhood.

[samsungster]

Microsoft Bolsters Video Content Security in Vista.
Move positions Windows Vista OS as a platform for home digital entertainment systems.
Microsoft plans to include new ways to protect video content in the next version of its Windows desktop operating system, signaling its intention to to position the OS as a platform for home digital entertainment systems.
Microsoft will provide technology in the core architecture of Windows Vista to secure "premium content flow," according to John Paddleford, a lead program manager in the Windows Digital Media Division of Microsoft, speaking in an interview today. This type of content comes from sources such as cable and high-definition DVD (HDVD).
This secure technology will reside in the Protected Media Path (PMP), enabling high-definition media to flow securely from its origination point through the operating system to whatever an end point, such as a high-definition TV screen or other media output device, Paddleford said.
The platform will provide both user-mode and kernel-mode protection to digital media content, such as Protected Video Path (PVP) and Protected User Mode Audio (PUMA), thereby ensuring that content cannot be stolen, Microsoft's Web site reports.
"As you bring content into the system and as it leaves the system, it's protected," Paddleford said. PMP will protect digital content, too, if it's transcoded from one format to another--such as from an MPEG2 file to a Windows Media Video file--he said.
"The whole idea is that with Protected Media Path, when you're transcoding, that's a pirate point where someone could siphon the content out," Paddleford said. To protect content at this juncture, Microsoft has created a secure memory space that would-be pirates can't easily access while files are being transformed from one format to another, he said.

Coming Christmas 2006

Already, Microsoft is previewing some of its new digital video content protection technology in the now-available Beta 1 version of Windows Vista. The company expects the OS to be released for sale in the United States by the end of 2006.

Several factors are motivating Microsoft to provide this kind of protection, Paddleford said. One is Microsoft's desire to position a PC as more of an entertainment device. The company's Windows Media Center Edition--which is optimized to run a variety of digital content and television programming on PCs--has already made some inroads in this area.

Another factor prompting these new protections is the influence of major movie studios and media content providers, Paddleford said. Microsoft is working closely with companies such as Walt Disney, Sony, and Twentieth Century Fox Film, all of which are hungry for reassurance that their content will be protected when it runs on Windows.

One problem with trying to protect digital video on a PC is that the machine itself was not designed to function as a secure platform for this kind of content, said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft.

"Microsoft has to do its best and provide a good-faith effort to make the PC secure for antipiracy," he said. "[But companies] are worried about piracy, and it's a legitimate concern [because] the PC architecture was not created with copy protection in mind."

May Not Be Used?

Moreover, Microsoft's investment in providing new technologies for protecting content doesn't ensure that content providers will adopt them, Rosoff said.

He cited as an example the Secure Audio Path (SAP) technology for protecting audio content, which Microsoft included in the Me and XP versions of the Windows OS. Though Microsoft claims that 95 percent of sound code manufacturers support SAP, "no content owners have chosen to take advantage of it," Rosoff said.

This same fate could befall forthcoming digital media protection technologies in Windows Vista, he said. "Content owners may not take advantage of what Microsoft is doing," Rosoff said. Their alternatives? "They could bypass the PC altogether, or come up with some other type of system," he said.

Microsoft's proactive effort to work with major content providers gives the company a fighting chance to make the PC a mainstream entertainment device, Rosoff said.

"Microsoft is trying to forge relationships with content providers--they talk all the time," he said. "Microsoft certainly is not working in a vacuum here."