14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's been hard at work over the last few months, if they aren't battling an outdated patch they're working on different ways to say that Vista is delayed. No, I'm being slightly critical of Microsoft, in comparison, they are one of the better software companies about patch releases, even if they're a marked target for public scrutiny. A quick recap of what's going on with Windows over the past week is somewhat interesting. Looking a bit at Paul Thurrott's site gives users a bit of a recap on what's been announced and what's been done.
Adam Anderson, a product manager in the Windows division clears up some confusion about Blue-ray support in Vista. "Microsoft is adding the ability to detect a movie disc for a variety of optical formats, which is known as AutoPlay, since OEMs will have a choice of which drive they want to place in their PCs. The HD DVD AutoPlay feature is already implemented, and Blu-ray's is under study. This simply recognizes the particular media that you put into the disc drive, so implementing this feature for Blu-ray does not constitute native or platform support for Blu-ray in Vista. As stated before, we will leave that up to third-party developers." So this means that Blue-ray is supported and recognizes the Blue-ray discs, but unfortunately won't support them for playback. Not to worry, third party software will soon have exactly what you need to play them.
Some Vista clarifications are also in the books. According to Thurrott, "Microsoft plans to ship the feature-complete internal build on January 31, 2006, and then ship a near-feature-complete Community Technology Preview (CTP) build to testers on February 17. Windows Vista Beta 2 is due on April 12, followed by a release candidate (RC) build in July and release to manufacturing (RTM) in August. Assuming this last date is met, the general release of the product will occur in October."
There's some hope for the rest of us that Vista will actually get out by this year, but speculation is in the air that delays are rampant, especially with the long awaited SP3. Currently scheduled out for 2007. Paul Thurrott wraps up the generalities of the past week while adding a little random notes too. To check out the full article, click here.