No, not the Somali pirating that’s lately gained some notoriety. Software pirating-ish, sorta, kinda not quite.
When Me$$y$oft gave away demo/”preview” copies of Windows 7 alpha at WINHEC the other day, “Some one made the sketch his own” as it were, and almost immediately iso files (in torrents) were sprouting up all over the web.
OK, so I’m downloading one of ’em now. Of course, as I understand it, the thing has a 30-day kill switch and is designed to be a trial, so while I may be violating some law’s letter (I haven’t actually checked the nitty gritty on the licensing), I may actually be observing the spirit of the law better than those who stick to its letter. *huh*? The spirit of copyright law is, “Do no monetary harm to the copyright holder and do not harm the copyright holder by making unauthorized changes to his work.”Heck, I may (may) actually do Me$$y$oft some good if its claims for Windows 7 pan out by giving it a positive review.
Caveats: if the torrent fails, I’ll bail on checking out/reviewing Win7. AND, even if the torrent succeeds, this is a very, very early release and may be too buggy for even a fair VM tryout. VM? Yep. You don’t expect I’d hazard a REAL machine with an alpha-release OS, do you? *heh* Anywho, here’re a couple of graphics to whet your appetite:
BTW, while I don’t usually try out pre-release OSes, because I just don’t like “sacrificing” a working machine for the task, VMs are giving me a LOT of flexibility there. Using up a lot of hard drive space, too, but that’s what large hard drives were made for, eh? (Still, I may have to buy a couple of nice big drives somewhere soon down the road, but with 500GiB drives for $50 that probably won’t be that big a deal. Need spares, anyway.)
Also note another Very Good Reason to try this iso out in a VM:
No-one yet knows if any malware has been injected into the ISO, so anyone downloading it will surely be hoping that is not the case.
Consider yourself warned.
I look forward to your review. If Windows 7 turns out to be halfway decent I might just completely skip Vista.
Oh, and…
Aaarrh Matey! (yes, I know it’s not September 19th, but it fits the theme of the post).
Yeh, well, good luck to me. The torrent’s showing a d/l “speed” approaching 0 bytes/sec and estimated download time of 120 hours or so. Heck, Me$$y$oft will probably shut off the spigot before this thing’s done.
But… if half what Me$$y$oft’s saying about Win7 is even in the ball park, it’ll be a reason to skip Vista entirely for a LOT of folks. I know that if it’s halfway decent, I’ll probably put it on a quad core (“Look! Bright! Shiny! A reason to buy new toy!” *heh*)–even if only in a dual boot with a decent Linux distro. Expect a beta mid-January.
Aarrh!
I only have Vista on a laptop I bought for my wife for her grad school efforts. All my other puters run XP Professional…. Maybe 7 is better? It would have to be real good for me to give up XP Pro.
Ha, and even with the preview I forgot the Argggghhhh!!!! Thanks for the reminder Perri
Yeh, GM, Vista hasn’t convinced me to “upgrade”–although I do work on Vista comps with some frequency. In fact, I never really saw a reason to switch wholesale to XP. Heck, the only XP comps at twc central are Son&Heir’s, Lovely Daughters, Wonder Woman’s notebook and some VMs I maintain for reference. The rest (non-VM, real machines)? Linux, Win2K and Win98–and each of the physical Windows machines have specific tasks that they are best suited for.
I’m still sold on Win2K as the best desktop platform Microsoft’s published to date. WinXP’s not bad, but most things–particularly networking–are just easier to do in Windows 2000, and a properly configured Win2K comp is remarkably stable and secure, as Windows comps go.
Still, I’m betting my next “mission critical” machine will simply be another Linux box. Oh, maybe a media server/mpc that uses Windows, but then again, maybe not.
Update: the torrent’s still downloading! *sheesh!*
Finally! (~10:45a.m. 6 days after starting!) The download’s finished. Never had a torrent take this long before. Lots of times I checked it, there were NO sites offering the thing, and it just sat there, stalled.
Let me know how it is, and e-mail me that desktop JPG file m’kay? Sweet looking!