Don’t get too excited, but you’ll find some details here. This is the new Virtual Folders feature, for instance.
Bear in mind this beta release is mostly about plumbing and infrastructure. The interface you see will change many times between now and next year, when the final version ships.
Scoble says so:
Chris Jones, VP who runs the build team for Windows Vista, among others, was great yesterday (we interviewed him for Channel 9). Anyway, we’re trying to get that video up this afternoon sometime. On campus there’s a big party thanks to shipping Beta 1. He said they would sign off on the beta at a meeting this morning and that it would be on MSDN Universal soon.
Wonder when it will be available for download by beta testers? The new Microsoft Connect Web site, which is coordinating the beta, says the status of my application is still “Pending.”
My lack of connectivity last week kept me out of the latest round of the DRM debate. Chris Lanier started it with a very sensible post here. He makes the point that DRM is already a major part of the digital media ecosystem, and in fact most of it is practically invisible. If you watch digital cable TV, rent a DVD, subscribe to HBO, own a DirecTV or Dish satellite, or even drag out one of your old commercially released VHS tapes, you’re already dealing with DRM, and you probably don’t even notice.
Both Thomas Hawk (here) and Alexander Grundner (here and here, plus this related post) have jumped all over Chris with several passionate posts that essentially make three points (and I’m sure they’ll let me know if I’m oversimplifying):
Chris has had several follow-up posts (here and here), and there’s been a lot of discussion on various message boards about this. But these lofty philosophical and theoretical discussions so far have ignored the two elephants in the room:
Look, if Microsoft or MythTV or Beyond TV or TiVo could get HDTV content into their platform, they would have done it long ago. Arguing that this is an epic battle of good versus evil without considering the technical and legal factors makes the debate meaningless.
Matt Haughey at PVRBlog gets suckered by misunderstands SnapStream’s Beyond TV 4 announcement:
SnapStream have announced their next major rev will include support for HDTV recording and playback. This is pretty significant, as HDTV support in software PVR applications is still fairly new, with MythTV’s HD playback in early stages. It sounds like Beyond TV will support at least four different HD tuner cards as well.
By all reports, Microsoft’s Windows Media Center is holding off on support for HDTV recording/playback until Longhorn is released next year, so for those running windows-based home theater PCs, BeyondTV may be the only choice for quite a while.
Commenters, including me, have jumped all over Matt for getting this one 100% wrong. Here’s what I posted:
Excuse me? Windows Media Center Edition 2005 has supported over-the-air HDTV since day one. The others are actually playing catch-up.
The missing piece of the puzzle, which no one has yet, is CableCard support. I’ve written about the details here.
Microsoft and all the other companies aren’t “holding off” on anything. The hardware to decode HDTV over cable needs to exist first, and it needs to be approved by CableLabs.
And of course over-the-air HDTV is no big deal. I’ll have a lot more to say on HDTV, cable, and the upcoming update to Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 later today.
Update: Rakesh from Snapstream makes the valid point that their original press release made no comparisons with other software, so it’s unfair to say Matt was “suckered” by the announcement. He’s right. I apologize and have edited this post accordingly. Also, Matt has corrected his post now.
I decided to let Mwave.com build me a new Intel 830-based (dual core) PC. See the updated version of this post for my reasons.
Rumor has it that the beta of Windows Vista will be released tomorrow morning. With a little luck the hardware and software will arrive simultaneously.
I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan, I love red wine, and I’m especially partial to Italian reds. So this certainly caught my eye:
Legendary American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan may not have had a chart-busting album for a while, but his red Italian signature wine is an international hit.
The wine, named Planet Waves after his 1974 album, is made by the Fattoria Le Terrazze winery here in Italy’s central-eastern Marche region and is a vintage blend of 75% Montepulciano and 25% Merlot.
Despite a steep price of some $65 a bottle, all 415 cases made the first year sold by November, more than half of them sent to the United States, and the only complaints were that there was not enough of it.
If you’ve been wondering what to get me for my birthday (September 29), wonder no more.
(More details here.)
With Longh…. er, Windows Vista Beta 1 just around the corner, I need to get a new PC. I’ve got a small checklist already:
Dell’s new 9100 series would fill the bill just fine, and the prices are exceptional. Except given Dell’s complete hostility toward customers, I have no desire to support them.
So, what should I do next? I’ve got a perfectly good ATX case here that I could strip the old mobo and CPU from and build another PC from scratch. I’ve done that before. I have a lot of deadlines in the next two months, though, and I don’t really have the time to spend on a science project. Plus I need the box to just work, and build-it-yourself projects have a higher glitch ratio, in my experience.
Anyone care to recommend an independent dealer who builds a quality white box PC to order? I would probably prefer a barebones model that I can upgrade a piece at a time.
Update: Based on a comment (thanks, CandyMan53), I decided to order a box of components from Mwave.com and pay them $80 to put the system together, test it, and ship it to me. The component prices were very competitive, and I’m willing to pay $80 to have someone else go through the grief of assembling everything. As Dwight Silverman notes in another comment, he needs a full day to build, test, and troubleshoot a new PC. I wish I had a spare day lying around, but I don’t!
Mwave gets generally good reviews from ResellerRatings.com. In several of the complaints I saw on that site, there were replies from the company that put the complaints into reasonable perspective, and at least one commenter changed a negative review to a positive one after the company saw the negative feedback and made things right. Dell could learn a thing or two from that approach.
Best of all, the system I wound up with cost exactly as much as the Dell I had been looking at, with significantly better specs (bigger hard drive, twice as much RAM, a much better video card, gigabit Ethernet).
I’ll let you know how it turns out.
It took a while longer than it was supposed to, but I’m back online.
Tips and other content will resume shortly.
The same yokels who insist on spreading the “clean out your Prefetch folder” BS are now spreading the word that there’s a super-double-secret registry setting in Windows XP called SuperFetch that will slice your boot times dramatically.
No, there isn’t. A commenter asked me about this the other day and I didn’t have an answer. Fortunately, Bink.nu tracked down the real story and posted the details in a terse but accurately headlined story, Inquirer “Superfetch” story is crap:
So I checked with Windows internals guru Mark Russinovich, he said this won’t work, “SuperFetch” string isn’t even in the kernel (check with strings.exe)
Mark Russinovich knows as much about the guts of Windows as any living human being. If he says this setting doesn’t exist in Windows XP, you can take it to the bank. (The Superfetch setting will be in the upcoming Longhorn Windows Vista beta, but that’s a completely different story.) And if you see any Web site that tries to insist that there’s any benefit to cleaning out your Prefetch folder or enabling this latest bogus tweak, you should assume that any other advice they give you is worthless as well.
Welcome, LangaList readers! To read more about why you shouldn’t clean out your Prefetch folder, start with this post and just follow the links.
Three strikes, you’re out. Comcast didn’t seem all that interested in my business, so I called American Satellite and ordered a shiny new DirecTiVo. Couple that with the Qwest DSL line and we’ll be a Comcast-free household.
Oh, and major, major props to American Satellite, and especially salesperson Ray, who insisted (with no prompting from me) that he did not want or need my Social Security number and would be able to process my order without it. Finally, someone gets it!
I am really looking forward to using the TiVo interface again. But of course I’ll also have a Media Center PC with two Media Center Extenders for music, photos, and standard-definition TV…
Ed Bott 