Vista Ship Gifts

Our ship gifts for Vista came the other day.  We got a fleece pullover and the final DVD for our DVD cube.

Fully updated, the cube is a collection of 4 DVDs, containing the bits for Vista Beta1, Vista Beta2, Vista RC1, and Vista RTM.

There's also a booklet: 

If you can't read the text, it says "You are holding 3.5 Gigabytes of passion, dedication, and pure geek goodness"  "RTM NOVEMBER 8th 2006"

 

Within is a timeline of pictures of computers running Win 1.0, Win 3.1, Win95, and Windows XP with the text "time to make history..."

And then, the best part (IMHO).  A picture of Vista and the text "Handcrafted by:"

 

Of course, I'm there:

Btw, I'm using a coaster we were given when Microsoft moved into it's current campus 20 years ago as a paperweight.  I somehow thought it was appropriate.

 

At the back is a bunch of pictures of the ship party and the text: "Wow.  What an incredible journey.  Thank you."

  

Very cool.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  Do the DVDs have the source code included?

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  I'm curious what the level of burn-out is like at Microsoft right now. Having followed development and been involved in the betas, etc for years now the release mostly makes me think, "Ok, what's next?" Is there a sense of taking a breather or is everybody ramping up for another (likely/hopefully shortened) major dev-cycle? I'm sure lots of Microsoft people are excited about what is possible on the Vista platform, but I know from experience that after working on something for a long period of time it's pretty tough to re-energize.

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  Vince: Source code?   Why would they have source code?  These are the same bits you get in the store, and the bits in the store don't have source code on them. Chad: Right now everyone's working on planning the next version of Windows, so almost all the stress is off.  

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  I'm curious about something else too, and you might be able to talk about it since you worked on the audio stuff. I know there are likely still issues with both driver availability and quality that will improve as Vista percolates through the market. My m-audio interface doesn't have drivers yet so I'm using the on-board Realtek AC97 in Vista. I've noticed lots of clicking and popping even without heavy load on the PC. From some of the videos and other things I've read it seemed like the multimedia scheduling stuff was supposed to take care of this kind of thing. I don't expect an answer to the problem, I'm patient and expect stuff like this will get worked out. I'm just wondering about the level of instrumentation data that is or can be returned to MS. Is there a conduit to get this type of performance data to MS and not just hard crash related data? I'm sure, judging from the amount of instrumentation in Vista, that there's some counter(s) that would indicate what is causing the problem. Guess I should have enabled the on-board audio during the beta, but I typically leave it disabled in BIOS and use the m-audio in XP for multitrack recording...

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  what they should have done is given you a DVD with the source code, but encrypted with an unknown key.  Now that would have been a cool souvenir.  You could impress people by saying you have the windows vista source... and it would have been just as useless and safe to hand out as a windows install DVD w/o a product key.

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  You've earned it Larry - and thanks for taking the time to share it with us. Much appreciated. I'm also looking forward to running Vista.

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  You can read everywhere (?) that the Vista source code has about 50 million lines.  Whether that's true or not is another story.

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  There appears to be some text (?) on the front face of the DVD cube. If its text, what is it?

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2007
  I should imagine that there's not way the Windows source code would fit on a single DVD.

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2007
  Phylyp, it's the number 2006 repeated over and over in different sizes.

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2007
  > I should imagine that there's not way the Windows source code would fit on a single DVD. Why?  4GB is a lot of space, and source code compresses extremely well seeing as it is mostly text.  I think you can fit all the source code from a typical linux distro onto one DVD, and a linux distro comes with a lot more software than vista does.

• Anonymous
  February 04, 2007
  Vista would have more media, though (images, video clips, music, etc).  That's part of the full source image, although it's not programming code. I have to say though, I'm a bit ambivalent about Vista because of all the DRMing badness going on within it.  Most of the rest of it seems like a good step forward, it's sad to see it get torpedoed by such user-unfriendly rubbish.

• Anonymous
  February 05, 2007
  Such passion and love and dedication... and yet, the general public is treated to the criminally bland "wow" campaign. We will never see another "start me up"

• Anonymous
  February 10, 2007
  When we release a product to market at MS, tradition holds that everyone involved in building it is usually

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2007
  Wow, "Windows Vista Team Blog", did your Windows Vista just crash?

• Anonymous
  August 11, 2007
  On 30 January 2007 Larry Osterman and Nick White blogged about the shipping gifts distributed at Microsoft