The Windows Longhorn Vista Beta has finally, to much fanfare, been released to the IT community and boy! is everybody excited! It's good looking, fast, and more secure, and now comes with the ability to search by metadata to find documents previously buried wherever the default directory shoved them. This is a fine gesture from the Redmond behemoth, releasing a test beta 1 to developers and MSDN subscribers to allow a head start implementing all these great new features.
There is going to be a more secure user structure, encouraging users to get away from Administrator and down a level to user, where the possibility of irreparable harm is reduced, as well as making it harder for malware attacks seeking administrator access to carry out their nefarious schemes. Faster startup and crash recovery is being honed, as well as more protected memory and system directories, to better manage unstable programs and drivers, reducing the chance that a bad driver will crash the whole system. Installation will be managed through an image-based install rather than massive directories of files to be moved and replaced ad infinitum, which should make customization easier. Lastly, the graphics scheme, the front-end, the dashboard of the whole system, is named Aero. I wonder if it's just me that seems to find some interesting parallels in the above text...? I'm surprised that they didn't name it Kitten, since it seems to have some growing to do before it can run with the big cats... [Britt Godwin]
