digital.brarian

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

CODI - Mark Minasi Keynote Address

Mark Minasi Keynote: The Future of Windows

author of the Mastering series of computer books.

Visit his website for a free newsletter.

What's coming and when...

IE7 end 2006?

Windows Vista (weirdly pronounced vee-stah) end 2006

Windows Longhorn Server by the end of 2007

IE7

Will run on XP SP2, 2003 SP1

Will not run on 2000, NT4, Win 98, Win 95

Ships with Vista

Why do you care?

* UI improvements
* More secure
* RSS aware (enamored, actually)

IE7

* Tabbed browsing (FireFox anyone?)
* Search field will let you configure to any search engine…eventually
* Printing will auto-size to fit the page
* Less icon clutter
* RSS support (called “web feeds” in the inevitable MS-ese)
* Finds RSS links on a page automatically
* More UI stuff (thumbnails, shuffle) as betas progress
* Transparent PNG support

IE7 Security

* 1 click cleans out your cookies, internet history and passwords
* all active X controls need to be approved, even pre-installed ones
* IE in “protected mode” cannot modify any files or settings; just the temp internet files.
* Extra menu option lets you run IE with “add ons disabled” mode.
* “Manage add ons” now lets you delete some active X controls.

IE7 Anti-phishing

* system looks out for phishy behavior
* flashes the URL bar yellow
* Microsoft will run a service of known phishing sites and IE7 will check that service
* If you try to browse to a known phishing site, the URL bar turns red, and IE blocks you from going there.

Vista

* New version of workstation NT WS 6.0
* Not a version of server, that’s a year later
* Big foci:
o Very revised user interface
o Better security platform
o More .NET-sity including a .NET CLI shell
o Networking changes
o Platform for a new Office 12
o WinFS isn’t in (bad) but may appear later (good)

Program manager upgrade

The UI

* GDI became “Avalon” which is now “Windows Graphics Foundation”
* Great for GUI coders, games
* Lots o’ translucency
* Keyword “beautiful”
* Things preview more quickly although that may depend on CPU power
* Alt-Tab is a lot prettier; more thumbnails, shuffle
* Smooth zooming, you quickly choose how “close” you want to get
* Vector graphics
* Really needs a 2004+ video board

More UI—It’s the little things!

* “my computer” is now “computer”
* “documents and settings” is now “users”
* and there are search bars everywhere
* philosophy is search, browse, subscribe

User account protection—protecting us from ourselves

* used to be called “limited user account” LUA
* gives local admins two tokens: low-power admin and normal admin
* application checks the low power token, if it’s no good, then it checks the normal admin token—but it prompts you if you need it.

Windows firewall can block outgoing traffic

Sniffs out RAM & HD failures early

Server spec news:

your best buy is 64 bit hardware from AMD

32 bit is now considered “legacy” by Microsoft

Jack Blount agrees with this (64 bit from AMD), and mentioned it in another presentation.

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