Vista is supposed to have a 3-d interface and they supposedly grabbed from stuff from Mac OSX Tiger. One of the really popular features in Tiger is Widgets which can grab info from the web and display them on your desktop graphically. There are a few other buttons that will get things out of the way when you are looking for things.
But I haven't seen Vista myself. I wouldn't mind trying out a beta but a public beta isn't out yet. Though the old schedule was March but who knows when the CTP will be out. I could ask someone at work for an MSDN beta to try it out but don't have the spare cycles on my machine (I really need a second x64 machine for builds and tests). I've checked with our local system support guys and they haven't played around with Vista yet other than a really old beta.
The requirement for a 256 MB or 512 MB video card is a bit of a shocker for a new OS. So I'd like a desktop that I can put 4 GB of memory in and will look at a 256 MB video card.
I may just stay with XP Pro though. I'm very, very happy with it.
As far as Operating Systems goes, the background on the difference between Windows 95/98/ME and XP get rehashed at ihub from time to time as there are plenty of folks from Digital Equipment Corporation around here.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
