WinV Commeth

Like it or not, the cows (or steers) were put out to pasture.  The Texas Longhorn fans will be disappointed but I think unless they beat OU this year, they don’t deserve to be our mascot anyway.  Hee Hee.  Anyway, the Windows Marketing organization has come up with a new name for the next generation of Windows.  It’s Windows Vista.  Vista has a number of interesting connotations.  See some of the dictionary definitions at https://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=vista. 

I kind of like the butchered term WinV (for Windows Vista).  As one of my colleagues pointed out, that could be a Roman Numeral.  So be it.  5th generation Windows it is.  Actually, that’s rather close to the mark.

You’ll start to see a lot of air and ground cover on the product.  It will be available for the masses soon and I plan to run it as my production environment starting with Beta 1.  I’ve been doing that since the Windows 3.1 Beta days so I know all about the pitfalls.  It can be an especially scary proposition for a presenter like myself.  You never know if some issue might crop up in front of 150 people.

No worries.  The only way to get the bugs out is to run WinV through it’s paces and report issues in a timely fashion.  I run a pretty healthy mix of software so I’ll stress and strain it plenty.  I’m downloading one of the daily builds right now.  It probably won’t be the Beta 1 build so I’ll get t rebuild my machine a few more times before Beta 1 gets locked down.

I still can’t talk about it much.  When Beta 1 becomes available, we can talk all we want about the new features, UI, etc.  Fortunately for me, our last laptop puchase has a nice video chipset.  This will be helpful for some of the new UI stuff and of course running Half Life 2.  See a tiny peek of the product name launch video.