gerbil linearizable intern …

At a briefing given to Japanese press about Windows Live, Tetuya Onoda (Windows Live Director) held up a nice big picture of the new Windows Live Homepage that looks set to replace the existing personalised Live.com page. …

From the DirectX SDK aug2007:

“Direct3D 10.1 Tech Preview

Direct3D 10.1 is an incremental, side-by-side update to Direct3D 10.0 that provides a series of new rendering features that will be available in an upcoming generation of graphics hardware.

TextureCube Arrays which are dynamically indexable in shader code.
An updated shader model (shader model 4.1).
The ability to select the MSAA sample pattern for a resource from a palette of patterns, and retrieve the corresponding sample positions.
The ability to render to block-compressed textures.
More flexibility with respect to copying of resources.
Support for blending on all unorm and snorm formats.
This tech preview provides an early look at these features and the handful of new APIs that support them. The August 2007 Direct3D 10.1 Tech Preview requires the Windows Vista SP1 Beta which will be available to MSDN subscribers once it is publicly released.”

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=529f03be-1339 -48c4-bd5a-8506e5acf571&DisplayLang=en

But, if the apps become fully compatible, Vista will be a top priority, but the point remains, we are not going wait until SP1 to make a decision to deploy when the tools are ready.

As note in my Vista FAQs on my blog:
Is it recommended I use Windows Vista in a production environment?

You sure can, Microsoft has designated Vista as final and ready for PC consumption. Of course not all persons or businesses will immediately install or upgrade to Vista. “Some will take the wait and see approach before biting the bullet. Some cases might either require more testing or simply compatibility issues that will prevent them from upgrading right away.”

http://adacosta.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E8E5CC039D51E3DB!9709.entry

But the point is, that should not be determined by a Service Pack.

Long Zheng publish on his blog a slide that shows the Microsoft roadmap. This is extracted from Steve…

While I agree Vista is “just as functional now as it will be when SP1 is released for it.” Deployment of a new operating system, for something as big as Vista, at a company, especially a public company, represents risks. Could it bring the whole system down? What’s the downtime of productivity? Could it take longer to deploy than expected? Will our existing software fail to operate correctly? Could out staff cope with it? Will we lose business and sales as a result of that? These risks are held accountable by managers and ultimately the Board of Directors. And guess who they are accountable to? Shareholders and SEC! Guess what will happen if the boss installs Vista on all the machines as soon as it came out just because he thought it would make the company look “cool”? That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen! And let us not get into the details of the cost of maintaining compatibility, retraining staff, reducing resistance to change, etc.

Businesses ultimately, have a different set of mindset as to what and when to deploy new software. Remember… businesses don’t just jump ship to a new OS just for the sake of newness… an OS for them is to RUN a business… not to play Crysis…