Seven shades of Vista
p2p news / p2pnet:- “If you’ve been wondering why Windows Vista has taken a long time to reach Beta 1, we can now tell you why,” writes Ken “Caesar” Fisher on Ars Technica.
There are seven separate editions of Vista headed your way, he says. But, “ OK, that’s not the reason for the delay, but how else do you introduce that many OS versions, without invoking Snow White & friends? Join me know as I romp through the various editions, many of which you’ll see are just barely differentiated.”
First there’s Starter Edition, “which like XP Starter Edition, is a crippled (and lame) product aimed at the two-thirds world.”
Next is the Home Basic Edition, “really the sibling to today’s Windows XP Home. However, as the name suggests, there’s also Home Premium Edition, and this is where we start to split features like hairs and create a cackle of products. HPE will build on the the Basic Edition by adding, most notably, the next-generation of Media Center capabilities, including support for HDTV, DVD authoring, and even DVD ripping backed up (of course) by Windows DRM. For non-corporate types, this is probably going to be the OS that most people use. It’s similar to XP Pro in power, but with all of the added bells and whistles for entertainment. Well, most of them.”
Then there’s Windows Vista Professional Edition which “won’t occupy the same spot that XP Pro occupies today, because this time it’s truly aimed at businesses”.
Bill and the Boiyz are, “also planning both a Small Business Edition and an Enterprise Edition, which build upon pro by adding (seemingly minor) features aimed at appealing to each market,” says Fisher. “SBE, for instance, includes a networked backup solution, while EE will include things like Virtual PC integration, and the ability to encrypt an entire volume of information.”
And last but not least, “there’s Ultimate Edition. Hey, I’m just glad that they didn’t call it Extreme Edition”.
(Via slashdot)
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See:-
Ars Technica - Windows Vista product editions revealed, September 10, 2005





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September 11th, 2005 at 3:58 pm
The volume license key (VLK) that requires no activation.
September 12th, 2005 at 2:21 am
If last time is any indication, yes, and it’ll come out a month before bill and “da boys” are ready to let you buy it.
September 12th, 2005 at 9:02 am
Just when I thought MS couldn’t make a more stupid marketing move, I was proven wrong. This is just going to confuse MS’s already ignorant customers… This won’t help MS gain any market share.
September 12th, 2005 at 6:44 pm
Apparently oor billy and his band of merry troubadors have come up with some pretty ingenious protection for their new babies. If I remember correctly the word kernel level was mentioned once or twice.
Not that this will really matter as no doubt some enterprising young shaver will figure out how to bypass or disable it, given time. The real question now is whether or not it’s actually going to be worth pirating it? Looking at the currently released screenshots and specs of Vista, it would seem that M$ have decided to take a liberal sprinkling of the best features of both KDE/Gnome Linux and OS X/Tiger desktops, dressed it all up in Vista pants and called it their own! So do we pirate Vista and rely on the kindness of fellow p2p’ers with valid installs to give us our non-critical updates? Or do we simply bite the bullet and switch to linux? Where we could rejoice in learning a new set of commands and way of working, consider it the payment for a free OS. In my opinion, the only valid reason to keep XP installed is for playing games. The only other software I can bring to mind, of which there is no real equivalent to in linux is anti-spy software. There is a very good reason for this though
So Bill say’s, ‘OK, let’s make it impossible for all these damn free loaders to copy our new OS’…
I say, ‘Fuck you Gatesy, your OS isn’t even worth pirating. Why pay good money for a KDE wannabe when you can get the real deal for diddly?!
Alas poor Windows, I knew it well.
A desktop of infinite jest.
Look out Linux, here I come!
Baggy