David has Microsoft vistulations
My colleague David Berlind has been busy with his new Microsoft Vistulations blog, uploading dozens of Windows Vista screen shots ranging from what the new gadget loaded Windows Sidebar might look like to a 24-image slide gallery of the entire Vista installation process. If you are wondering what "vistulations" means, we're not precisely sure, but we didn't want to get into a legal wrangle with Microsoft over use of the Vista as the blog name, so we came up with something that sounded good to the ear, at least to us, and contained the 'Vista' seed.
From my perspective, 'vistulations' is a combination of vista (a distant view or prospect), ululation (howling or wailing), undulation (movement in waves). You get the idea.
Testing Vista isn't all that David is up to. In an effort to help you keep your thumb on the Vista pulse, he's all over just about anything that's Vista related -- such as how Microsoft demo'd an unreleased-to-beta-testers build of the Vista that's different from the one they handed out at the Professional Developer's Conference in LA; the full text of the official Microsoft Fact Sheet that was published along with that PDC-build (aka: the September Community Technology Preview [CTP] Release); a poke at Microsoft Windows Team member Raymond Chen, who argued in his blog that there's no need for one all encompassing version of Windows. If Linux can do it, argues David, why can't Windows?
By the way, on its current course, there will be seven different editions of Windows Vista. David also points to what he thinks is the best slide show of some the new features in the unreleased build, summarizes eWeek's reporting on Vista's developer helpers, finds some golden nuggets of Vista news over on Paul Thurrott's blog, and looks back in time to a period when many Novell NetWare 3.x shops jumped ship to Windows NT Server instead of NetWare 4.x because moving to either required the same effort (Novell's Jack Messman is apparently hoping history will repeat itself, pushing Vista users to Destkop Linux). As he gets deeper into his testing, be sure to check the MS Vistualation's blog or better yet, tune your RSS reader to the blog's feed.