Windows the next frontier

NaiyaShamiso

New Member
I want to blog on the site, and want to know if my writing is any good or if I will embarrass myself. Pleas let me know what you think. I also have one or two more. If this one is any good, I can post them as well and see what you think. These are a few years old, please excuse the out of date information, I want to know what you think of my writing ability.
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Windows the next frontier, where no computer has gone before. Well this may not be Star Trek and I am defiantly no Gene Rodenberry, but there is one thing that is true and will be true for long to come, it is an exciting time to be alive. Since the development of the internet and then the World Wide Web, computer technology has boomed. Anything from Gimp, an image editor, to Direct X 11, a 3D graphics engine, technology is moving at a very rapid rate. What I am going to be talking about today is the development of the Windows Operating system. To understand the advancements in what we have today, you must understand where it has come from; you have to travel to the past.[/FONT]

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[FONT=&quot]“Many longtime PC users trace the Microsoft Windows® operating system to the 1990 release of Windows 3.0, the first widely popular version of Windows and the first version of Windows many PC users ever tried. However, Microsoft initially announced the Windows product seven years earlier and released the first version in 1983.” [SUP][1][/SUP]. This version of windows was not called an operating system, due to the fact that it relied on a DOS to run, and was referred to as an operating environment. Even thought Windows developed and became “better”, according to Microsoft, it was, could not escape one fact; it was totally dependent on DOS to operate. This was a problem that Microsoft wanted to get rid of. Microsoft started work on a project to change that, it was called Windows NT. “The Windows NT Workstation 3.5 release provided the highest degree of protection yet for critical business applications and data. With support for the OpenGL graphics standard, this operating system helped power high-end applications for software development, engineering, financial analysis, scientific, and business-critical tasks. The product also offered 32-bit performance improvements and better application support, including support for NetWare file and print servers. Other improved productivity features included the capability to use friendlier, long file names of up to 255 characters.”[SUP] [1][/SUP] No matter how much people want to believe how much of a drastic change Windows 95 was the fact still remained that it relied on another OS to run.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]Everybody has heard the term “eye candy”, and to some point the things that look nice are not always great plug ins. Anything that changes the way information is input, whether eye candy or not can drastically change the way a tasks are completed. With Windows 95, Microsoft started a modern desktop on a Windows machine. With Windows you only get one choice for the desktop. During the development of the desktop, many things have come out in the making and development. Aero is one of them. Aero is a 3D engine that runs on the desktop level, this means that it can be used to render things like Explorer Windows, Chess games, and even more impressive is the fact that it dosen't have to cache before Windows starts. “Windows Vista is the first Microsoft Windows operating system that provides a range of user experiences that gracefully scale based on a system’s hardware capabilities while still giving the user full control over configuration options. All computers that meet the Windows Vista minimum supported hardware requirements will run the Windows Vista Basic user experience. Computer systems with more capable hardware—in terms of performance and video memory capacity—will run the Windows Vista Aero experience. Aero provides an additional level of visual sophistication and a more responsive and manageable user interfaces. Aero is based on a new and innovative window-management technology in Windows Vista called desktop composition. Desktop composition supports the Aero features including smooth and tear-free window transitions and management, transparent window borders and client areas, Windows Flip and Flip 3D, and live taskbar thumbnails. All these items are collectively referred to as Windows Aero.”[SUP] [2][/SUP] This opened the door for new things to come out. Peak, well it is called Aero Peak. This feature give you the ability to at opened windows no matter in what order they are in or if they are minimized or not. This is an example of eye candy that makes things easier to do with visual features. With the upcoming Windows 7 things will are looking up bright for Microsoft.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]The last thing I would like to touch on is security. Security has always been a problem with Windows. There are more holes in the code then Swiss cheese. This makes keeping sensitive data a difficult task. With Windows NT based computing comes many features to help with this problem, one is user and group permissions. “Group policies are used by administrators to configure and control user environment settings. Group Policy Objects (GPOs) are used to configure group policies which are applied to sites, domains, and organizational units (OUs). Group policy may be blocked or set so it cannot be overridden. The default is for subobjects to inherit the policy of their parents. There is a maximum of 1000 applicable group policies. Group policies are linked to domains, organizational units, or sites in Active Directory. A policy must be linked to a container object in Active Directory to be effective. They are stored in any domain for storage but can be linked to other domains to make them effective there also. The policy must be linked to the container (site, domain, or OU) that it is stored in to be effective in that container. One policy object can be linked to several containers. Several policy objects can be linked to one container.”[SUP] [3][/SUP] This is a good way to work with large groups in a business setting, with many users. Not only can you set up policies for local accounts, but for domain accounts as well as internet accounts.[/FONT]
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[FONT=&quot]Just with this little bit of information, one can conclude that the changes in the world of Windows is large and ever engrossing. This trend should not end any time soon, there will always be better ways of doing things and with every release of Windows Microsoft get a little bit smarter about how they do their OS.[/FONT]
 
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