that you don't want it ......

What's so compelling of having to change for the sake of change?

Mine is the jacket to go out and have some fresh air.

Of course they knew, they probably want it installed all over the shop so they can get more bug reports etc. Even if the testers are dirty pirates, they might still moan on a forum or blog about various features, which MS will harvest like satan harvests souls!

this way, when all these dastardly pirates start to find that the code is having a less than friendlly impact on their test systems, they have no legal recourse, while M$ can sit back and let the flood of comments and suggestions come pouring in

MS may put on a show and say "Oh no, please don't!", but quietly in the background they know they need to keep the PR machine motoring along until the final release, get the Vista debacle papered over.

Every beta copy of W7 that is downloaded is one less Ubuntu/Fedora/CentOS/whatever, that is not being downloaded.

Now wouldn't for a minute suggest that MS sort of accidentally let this happen, they're not the sort are they!

After having used Vista for the last year, I have decided to run Ubuntu on servers and pc's in the company. If someone needs to use windows for whatever god-forsaken reason that cannot possibly be thought of then I'll be more than happy to show them the joys of VM Ware. They can trast the OS and switch if off when they are done and I dont have to worry about it! Only need to maintain 1 image and dont need to buy any new hardware.... maybe some RAM sometime just to make them feel special!

You say hello I say goodbye!

Why would anyone want to install a potentially unstable build of Windows? I don't get it.

Anyway, what's the URL for the torrent? :)

if it gives you a better operating system in the future - who cares?

Seems like the best idea to me unless it just flat out doesn't work, which I think could be entirely possible.

Not full of bloat then.

Mine's the one with the eight 1.44MB Win 3.11 disks in the pocket.

Future versions of Windows are going to be successively leaner and faster as more and more

apps are centralised on the much vaunted 'cloud'.

There will come a point where Joe Public is paying an arm & a leg for what is essentially

dumb terminal access to a mainframe server.

...and I'll bet M$ will mange to bollox *that* up too!

"Why would anyone want to install a potentially unstable build of Windows?"

I agreen, it's mad! Why on earth would ANYONE install a potentially unstable build of Windows, like Vista, XP, 2000, NT4, ME, 98, 95...........

Oh wait, thats EVERY build of Windows.

Hardly a big deal for MS. A pre-beta isn't ever going to become someone's main OS. Almost all the people who download it will be those who simply want to have a play with it to see how it's shaping up.

.....I like it. Started using this beta since last week and already I feel much more settled with it then 1 year of crappy Vista. So far hasn't crashed ;-)

It is the 64 bit version and it's picked up all drivers and everything. Installation was a doddle and fast (faster then Unbuntu).

Still got a stupid UAC nag, but that's easy to solve. Seems to run a fair bit faster out of the box. There's a lot more toys that I don't have on my Vista edition - but I'm a cheapskate. IE8 seems to have some very interesting toys to play around with especially blocking.

I'd say, much better effort then Vista, but still a bit bloated compared with XP. 8/10.

Why bother with a beta? Well, I'm a geek and I like to fiddle with things.

Pirate? Well guess where I got my version from!

Oh no! Microsoft has a new operating system! Its barely in Beta and it SUCKS! I'm shocked!

MS knows what its doing with the pre-release. To say its anything other than PR and Marketing is ignorance. On top of that, YES, they do get more bug reports, which in turn *should* make a better product. (I won't give them credit for this)

On another note, I takes huge corporate balls to basically say your last product sucked, so your working on the new one ASAP to solve the problem. They have done this before with ME and 2000. Its not a new problem at MS.

Who'd of thought that Piracy was the next best thing to happen to M$?

"Every beta copy of W7 that is downloaded is one less Ubuntu/Fedora/CentOS/whatever, that is not being downloaded."

Presumably in much the same way that every song downloaded for free is a guaranteed sale of that same song that didn't happen and never will happen.

Apples != Pears. Who knew?

MS must be getting desperate to retain interest in Windows, releasing a "pirate" copy only days after the latest Ubuntu release...

"Pirate Bay, Seedpeer and Mininova have unsurprisingly started hosting both the 32-bit (2.72GB download) and 64-bit (3.36GB download) versions of the early look at Windows 7."

No, no, no; Pirate Bay and the other torrent sites don't host GB of files, they host the .torrent files that describe the torrents, and enable your client to identify seeds and leechers.

Understanding this distinction is the difference between having your servers confiscated then returned with a mumbled apology, and going to prison.

...MS only move to the "potentially unstable build" when the product goes gold.

Just wondering.....

or should I load 2008 server,lol.

Off to check out 8.10 'U donut 2' ; sorry ubuntu

"ME & 2000"...

Really? 2000? I was under the impression that it was probably the best OS they ever produced! I know there are a ton of businesses that are still using it, even though I believe it is out of support now. It was basically XP, without the crap, released a year earlier. (That being said, I think they cleaned up a few things in XP, so it might be a tad better, still the same thing really)

It must be handy to have an idea of the new Windows OS if you're in the business of constructing trojans and the like. Keep a log of all the holes you've found and those that other helpful people have broadcast. With a bit of luck you'll find some that others haven't and you just sit back and wait for the official release.

On the other hand M$ get to save a fortune in beta checking and interminable post-release patches and iffy Service Packs (not that this will be reflected in the price)

The losers, as always, are the punters.

["Meanwhile, Microsoft confirmed last week that (official) public beta testing for its next operating system will begin early 2009"] ... and one suspects that the unofficial public beta testing has just begun.

Now will someone please explain to me (without resorting to words like "smokescreen", "made to look like an in-house subversive at work" or "deliberately misleading attempt by microsoft to drum up interest in Vista's imminent replacement and thus inadvertantly proving that effective customer support for both XP and Vista is now at an end") how an unreleased piece of incredibly secret and commercially sensitive software has managed to make it onto the public torrent network.

Ah - waitaminute... this is a microsoft security issue isn't it.

it was x22 1.44Mb floppys for win 3.11

@ Dr. Mouse, You forgot Windoze CE, which just about sums up Windoze,

CE ME NT

MIne's the one with the 9" cavity blocks in the pocket.

Its x9 if you include the suplimentary disc for win 3.11, it was however x22 (ish) for 95 sure your not mixing then up?

no, i think you'll find he was right. Windows 95 was on 22 1.44Mb floppies ...

It was definitely not 22 floppies for Win 3.1

Even Win95 was only about 10 floppies (with a weird 1.8MB formatting), although Internet Explorer was probably another 3.

... the antithesis of the bloated OS.

Check it out if you're fed up of the slow, bloated Operating Systems being heaved out by the usual suspects - MS, Apple, Ubuntu, SuSe, Fedora etc. 94MB download, fast & fully featured.

As the eminent Sir William Gates the turd once expressed his sovereign wish that if people would pirate software he would like them to pirate his Microsoft software.

Leaven this with a bit of old fashioned bribery

http://blogs.computerworld.com/microsoft_bribes_again

"But if, as appears may be the case, Microsoft is letting people have Dell XPS M1330 laptops with 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processors and 3GBs of RAM on "indefinite loans"..."

and... we (maybe) have a winner, extra points for MS-Vista as the obvious loser.

"On another note, I takes huge corporate balls to basically say your last product sucked, so your working on the new one ASAP to solve the problem."

Yeah coz the Mojave product was a big fat admission about how crap Vista is right? So was their last $300m ad campaign.

C'mon dude wake up.

...they don't sue a single person for downloading the beta !

Maybe it's because they finally need to compete again, SHOCKER! Plus the Dreamcast/X-Box/X-Box 360 still hasn't replaced PC's by nearly as much as they would have liked, i.e. not at all :P The last really good OS MS actually had a direct hand in creating was OS/2, and this new version sounds like OS/2 v.2, as in, it will probably be good. Too bad there's no one left to buy it since we're all broke ;P harr-harr

Don't get me wrong, the NTs weren't too bad (well, they didn't try to kill me in my sleep at least), but for doing the same things, even today, Unix/Linux is more cost effective and reliable. AND predictable, doesn't take 15 certificates in MS to find out what went wrong :P Personally I think windows is haunted, or possessed by demons, THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!

look how they gained market share with 3.11/95/98...

minimal protection and it took over the world through various incarnations of dodgy copy.

move the hardware generations along a notch and the versions to match, they put in the licenses and got rich(er)

basically every web2.0's wet dream.

looks like someone at M$ remembered where they came from. finally.

they want the market share back after the fails of the last few episodes..

Bates Incarnate 'cos that's where he'll go, philanthropy or not.

I'm going for Ibex myself as soon as the dust settles. I'm at Gibbon at the moment and it works fine for just about everything I need to do on a computer. (I have to work at a new company later this week and I think its a 100% Windows shop....not looking forward to this one bit, it'll be like going back in time five years or more.)

that was provided to a couple of thousand developers at the recent Professional Developers Conference.

Maybe you read about it here on ElReg?

.... because we all love a good train wreck.

Won't argue about 95,98,ME, and Vista

But 2000 I've been using it for over 5 years on 2 different PC's, and still do, and find it VERY stable. The one PC is being used as a Apache web server, FTP server, Webmail server, and ran utorrent for over 1 year without a single crash, reboot, or being turned off. Only reason it did go down eventually was due to a power outage. Dunno about you but running for over a year with no reboots or crashing sounds pretty stable to me.

XP is on my tablet and i don't really see any real stability issues with it.

why is it, as soon as there is an article regarding a microsoft product, the trolls all come out to rip them apart.

6801 has hardly been available for any time at all yet, not long enough for anyone to give it a proper and or honest review of its features. remember, its is a pre beta and not even a RC, so it is just a demo of its features. performance should not even evaluated.

yet the trolls all come out to say how crap every other MS product sucks and that all MS programmers a clueless morons.. etc etc.. continuing on to go suck each other off while talking about the various flavors of Linux.

yes, vista on the whole was a flop. and mostly because of the bad press it got. It is not as bad as most of the trolls will have you believe. if you don't like it, don't use it, go back to playing with the homebrew os you praise so highly. the homebrew os that a lot of the hardware drivers are windows drivers in a wrapper.

so to all the trolls, get back under your bridges !!!!

> MS must be getting desperate to retain interest in Windows, releasing a "pirate" copy only days after the latest Ubuntu release...

Oh yes, that'll be it.

Nothing to do with the fact that MS have tacitly admitted Vista was a marketing disaster and pretty much shot Vista sales in the foot by so publicly accelerating the push towards Windows 7.

Nothing to do with needing to get the early version out there good and early to start picking up feedback and bug reports.

Nothing to do with the fact that the PDC is always at this time of year and it was an excellent opportunity to get W7 into the hands of its developer and unofficial testing community.

Yeah, nothing to do with any of that - it MUST be because Ubuntu has released its latest version. Because with even Shuttleworth reckoning it has a total installed base of a hilariously tiny 8 million, Ubuntu is absolutely the major competitor to Windows 7 isn't it!

Ooops... the last line, "Ah - waitaminute... this is a microsoft security issue isn't it" is my attempt at subtle sarcasm... I kinda hoped that it could be your final clue. YES ... thank you for reminding me that windows7 has been released to developers (are you saying the almighty Microsoft Corporation doesn't now how to write and test it's own software? shame on you. Next thing you'll be telling me is that they deliberately purchase their competition so that they can release other peoples' innovations as their own) ... I also said, "smokescreen", in-house" and "deliberately misleading attempt by microsoft to drum up interest" ... which was also sarcasm but also a little more offensive however you seem to have read only the header and footer and missed out completely the informative bloat in between. 1+1 = 11 ?

I think he meant 2000 was the answer to the crappy ME release, much like 7 is the answer to Vista, not that 2000 was a crap release.

9 disks for wfwg and 6 for plain 3.11

dos 6.22 three disks ?

Yep. Win 3.1 was 6 also IIRC

I remember installing DOS 5 on my 286... from 2 x 1.2MB 5.25" floppies... onto my 30MB hard drive!!

Ah.. those were the days....

Mine's the one with the "Turbo" button!