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Your point about MS Vista is valid, but the perceptions about XP might be based on two quirks. One is that problems fade over time. After about 2½ - 3 years it seems that most people forget the bad things and remember only a rosy picture. I'll get back to that. The other quirk is that people quickly get used to a lower level of performance and adjust their expectations and behavior accordingly. Spam and lost e-mail are the best example, but XP is a lot less flexible in many ways than 2000 was.

Getting back to rosy memories. SP2 was released far behind schedule and long after the initial hype. XP SP2 broke hundreds of applications, many had followed MS dogma about DCOM and other non-standard, mS-annointed methods of developing applications. As far as the whole operating system goes, XP SP2 brought down around 15% of XP machines to the point where the systems had to be rebuilt from scratch. Many reviewers likened the service pack to a trial of pain more like a full operating systems upgrade than a service pack.

Don't even start about the DRM, licensing and interoperability problems that SP2 added.

What's really tragic, is that despite the egregious problems of XP and, later, XP SP2, it seems like a rose garden compared to MS Vista. The good part about Google's emphasis on WINE rather than native Linux, Solaris, or BSD applications would be that it facilitates those who can hold out a bit longer in XP to be able to upgrade to a modern system, hopping off MS Windows completely, and avoiding the twin Tar Babies of MS Office 2007 and MS Vista.

Anyone remember when someone did this for Blaster and created the "Welchia" worm variant? An article on it is located here: White Hat Worm and Microsoft even complained that it "generated excess network traffic". Now they are proposing to do the same thing? How are they going to make the worm spread, through vulnerabilities like Welchia did? Hope they don't use an RPC vulnerability and cause your system to crash like it did!

I guess this goes with all of the tags we've seen today on articles of "whatcouldpossiblygowrong?".

The original release of Netscape 1.0 was freeware. Certain companies, such as the one I worked for, asked for a "supported" (payware) version and were turned down. Enough people must have asked, because eventually there was a "1.1N" version that you could buy. But there was no revenue model around browsers in the very beginning. (And yes, IE was free/bundleware but it was a complete joke compared to Netscape until v3.)

Also, according to this article, Netscape Server was introduced 12/94.
http://www.entmag.com/archives/article.asp?Editori alsID=6373

I believe you are mistaken in your analys.

It doesn't mean it "sounds simular to psychology 101" it is what you think to read. It's just flattering you praise my ability to recognise psychological patterns and making an analogy as accurate it makes you suspect I speak out of experience or am writing from my subcontious.

There was no personal information in my post, but mostly it seems most slashdotters seem to relate best to "highschool dynamics" and analogies relating to that. I do not speak in terms of "smarter", "the whole school", cause I haven't been there in quite a while. I don't mirror myself to my "popularity" to define myself or to place myself into society (nor my intelligence, nor my education, nor my possesions).

As a matter of fact when you get into the "real world" (I'm assuming you're a highschool kid) popularity matters not. The results you deliver matter, your actions and how you take care of your family and people who have value in your life and not how "cool" people think you are.

You don't have to agree persé, people disagree, not everyone thinks the same. Doesn't mean the other has "unresolved social issues" when one doesn't share your views or misses the motivation of certain comments which imply IE-usage is down and decling. Exact percentages are impossible to show. Cause ofcourse windowsupdate will have a near 100% usage IE browsers.

Now, you say "You cannot neglect 80%" (as that seems to be your point). You cannot neglect that 20% goes out to actively download a browser when one is installed in the OS already, which caused IE to win the browserwars. In my view Microsoft is trying to stop people migrating away and implementing features which weren't planned to keep up.
So to you, Microsoft has remained its identity of "staying steady on front in a dominating position" when they sortof lost interest before?

Dell, Dell, Dell. The customer at one site decided to buy into Dell's 'home-grown' mid-tier SAN offering in that brief period of time around 2001 after Dell and EMC had parted ways and before Dell came back to its senses and re-partnered with EMC. The re-badged EMC Clariion controllers + arrays on a Brocade fabric had not given us a single issue in the year they'd been in use, but this new demonic half-breed SAN shows up as part of the "new Win2K SAN" (yes, this customer ended up with 4, I kid you not, 4 different and non-connected SANs in the same physical server room).

Dell techs came, and Dell techs went. We had a former field-circus clown who was "certified" on this new storage system sitting in our server room, leafing through the product manual and scratching his head while customers were ranting and raving about not being able to get to their files. The cluster software didn't work. Various bits of the hardware routinely committed seppuku rather than operate with that demon of a storage system. The Dell-trained installers ran the cables backwards between the disk trays and the controller (gee, I wonder where all these fiber-channel errors are coming from). Files mysteriously disappeared. Various VPs within Dell called and made weekly pledges of earnestness in an effort to not get their product thrown out of the server room.

A few months after all this, Dell quietly discontinued their 'home-grown' SAN products and went back to EMC.

I'm happy to use their laptops and desktops as long as someone else pays for it :), and their entry-level to midrange server offerings aren't significantly worse than anyone else's, but may I be damned to the foulest depths of Hell if I ever recommend their storage systems and professional enterprise services to anyone. Ever.

then Microsoft says it's going to release SQL Server Express for free

SQL Server Express is just the 2005 update of the MSDE, which has been around since SQL Server 7.

Of course Microsoft wasn't trying to fight open source - they were primarily trying to get developers to use SQL Server (and derivatives) as the data layer of their apps, instead of the traditional MS Access/Jet that was prevalent. Before it most developers would respond "I'm not making my customers pay for SQL Server", so Microsoft made the MSDE. They knew that many customers would eventually grow into the "real" SQL Server.

Do know know what the resources of Microsoft even are? 40 billion/year buys you a lot of developers, *full time*. 40 billion/200k (counting overhead, etc..), gets you about 200,000 developers. This is much more than Debian - about 900 part time, plus another 50,000 part time for upstream (guesstimating). Very few full time developers in Debian or upstream.

I have been dying for their supercomputer OS. Microsoft considers supercomputer OS . I really hope MS doesn't ditch that OS too. I have been speccing itanium clusters and they seem to fit my needs. I also can't wait for .Net to come to Itanium, I'm sure MS will write the best optimizing compiler.

Then again, they started the project back in the 90's when 2000 was still in development. They probably developed all their apps to run on NT (read 16-bit) and didn't want to port them to Win2K or Win2K3, or ran into some sort of backwards compatibility.

No one writes exploits for NT anymore. A fine example is the Sasser worm - it didn't affect NT systems, only Win2K or later.

You (gasp) TEST things before you implement them!

Apparently you are not employed by Microsoft :-D
Microsoft admits major flaw in critical Windows 2000 security patch

As a side note, you mentioned building KDE. I built KDE using konstruct right after 3.2 came out, and it took the better part of 8 hours on a 2.4GHz/1GB RAM workstation.

Hate to break it to you, but several products couldn't be patched, because someone (hint, the letters M & S are prominent) were scrambling to get the patch out. Oh, and that patch didn't patch it, so there was another patch, which, omg, still didn't fix the stupid security hole. (if I still had the link, I'd post it)

Oh, and .NET has issues too.

From here, although again, now that 10g is included in the benchmarks, Oracle wins again. Here's an article that described SQL Server beating Oracle before 10g's release though. MS SQL Server had the top spots for almost a year on tpc.org, if I remember correctly. And that was in TPC-C, TPC-H, and TPC-W, although I think Oracle still won on the TPC-R. Admittedly, I think some of that was due to their porting to 64 bit using an unreleased-at-the-time 64 bit Windows 2003.

What are you basing that statement on? This Gartner study released earlier this year has Oracle as no1 followed by DB2 but both of them losing marketshare, while Microsoft in the no3 spot increased revenues for 2002. And, MS SQL is the number 1 db for Windows.

Microsoft don't write software, they assimilate :)

Microsoft made their name through DOS - but did they write DOS? No, they bought Seattle Computer Products' 86-DOS operating system. Microsoft wrote Internet Explorer, right? Well, no, it was born out of code licensed from the Spyglass browser. Did they write SQL server? Nope - that was again developed with code licensed from Timeline.

Infact, whatever the latest bandwagon is, Microsoft buys out the competition? Instant messaging becomes in vogue? Microsoft buys an instant messaging developer. Holes in file security? Microsoft buys a XDegrees, a security specialist. Worried that Mac's can emulate Windows? Microsoft buys Connetix, the makers of Virtual PC. Microsoft worried about viruses negative effects on OS sales? Don't worry, Microsoft have just bought GeCAD, an AV vendor...

If there are problems and people do have security issues, I'm SteveB@microsoft.com. They know where to send e-mail and give somebody a hard time about it."

>> They've never even announced a date for Longhorn. What on earth are you talking about?

I quote from one of their Press Pass documents they have online at microsoft.com:

"Over the course of 2004 you'll see a couple of releases in the betas for "Longhorn" and we'll see that coming to market in 2005.

Now, I'm sure that many of you have heard about or wonder about the possibility of whether we're going to do something before "Longhorn," is there an interim release, and that's something that I don't expect us to do. Currently we have some additional releases that are coming out as follow-ons to the XP Media Center Edition and the Tablet PC Edition so we've got some great advances and fit and finish and addressing additional international marketplaces with new handwriting recognition, new guide data for Europe for the Media Center and so on.

So you'll see some good incremental moves there but really the weight of the company, the weight of all the people in the Windows client division and across the platform's division, the weight of that effort that we're doing is around "Longhorn" and that's what we're focused on and we hope to get you all really pulling the same way so we can come out with a huge wave of excitement for the industry when "Longhorn" ships in 2005."

(quotes and italics mine.)

Several online sources have credited varying target dates for Longhorn, but all generally agree that 2005 will be the earliest that it will be available to the mass market:
Longhorn Betas in 2004, GA in 2005 (ENT News)
Analyst Pegs Longhorn Release at 2006 (ENT News)
Microsoft Pushes Back 'Longhorn' Release (Open Tech Support)
A Longhorn Delay? Not Quite (WinInfo)
Microsoft announces Longhorn release date (CNet News.com)
(I have no affiliation with these sources.)

Microsoft themselves show that 2005 is the target date of Longhorn in a slide picture. (png image)

>> As if that matters. Those are early, early alpha shots, as we all know. All the cool builds with the 3D acceleration are in a different Microsoft lab anyway that hasn't had one of their builds leaked.

First, can you prove there are "cool builds" that will have 100% of the suggested features in a shipping version of Longhorn? Secondly, the history of Microsoft's software release stategy has been plainly made clear numerous times. Hype, Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, Buzzwords-o'-the-day, Gross Appropriation (oh sorry, I mean Innovation), and just downright unfullfilled expectations litter the computer timescape.

For a company that has been in the software business of well over 25 years, one would think that with their talk of innovation and "exciting new time-saving" features, we would all have an operating system on our machines that used voice controlled openGL hyper speed interfaces, smart enough to do your work for you while you browsed sites like slashdot. Isn't the entire point of using a computer to save time and be more productive? This sadly is not the case today .

>> I'm not really sure what breathing room you're talking about. The developer preview of Longhorn is coming out later this year. The list of features Longhorn already boasts is staggering, and I doubt within two years that ANY Linux projects will come close. We'll still be stucking using X11 with a hacked on desktop simulator, business as usual.

>> They've never even announced a date for Longhorn. What on earth are you talking about?

I quote from one of their Press Pass documents they have online at microsoft.com:

"Over the course of 2004 you'll see a couple of releases in the betas for "Longhorn" and we'll see that coming to market in 2005.

Now, I'm sure that many of you have heard about or wonder about the possibility of whether we're going to do something before "Longhorn," is there an interim release, and that's something that I don't expect us to do. Currently we have some additional releases that are coming out as follow-ons to the XP Media Center Edition and the Tablet PC Edition so we've got some great advances and fit and finish and addressing additional international marketplaces with new handwriting recognition, new guide data for Europe for the Media Center and so on.

So you'll see some good incremental moves there but really the weight of the company, the weight of all the people in the Windows client division and across the platform's division, the weight of that effort that we're doing is around "Longhorn" and that's what we're focused on and we hope to get you all really pulling the same way so we can come out with a huge wave of excitement for the industry when "Longhorn" ships in 2005."

(quotes and italics mine.)

Several online sources have credited varying target dates for Longhorn, but all generally agree that 2005 will be the earliest that it will be available to the mass market:
Longhorn Betas in 2004, GA in 2005 (ENT News)
Analyst Pegs Longhorn Release at 2006 (ENT News)
Microsoft Pushes Back 'Longhorn' Release (Open Tech Support)
A Longhorn Delay? Not Quite (WinInfo)
Microsoft announces Longhorn release date (CNet News.com)
(I have no affiliation with these sources.)

Microsoft themselves show that 2005 is the target date of Longhorn in a slide picture. (png image)

>> As if that matters. Those are early, early alpha shots, as we all know. All the cool builds with the 3D acceleration are in a different Microsoft lab anyway that hasn't had one of their builds leaked.

First, can you prove there are "cool builds" that will have 100% of the suggested features in a shipping version of Longhorn? Secondly, the history of Microsoft's software release stategy has been plainly made clear numerous times. Hype, Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, Buzzwords-o'-the-day, Gross Appropriation (oh sorry, I mean Innovation), and just downright unfullfilled expectations litter the computer timescape.

For a company that has been in the software business of well over 25 years, one would think that with their talk of innovation and "exciting new time-saving" features, we would all have an operating system on our machines that used voice controlled openGL hyper speed interfaces, smart enough to do your work for you while you browsed sites like slashdot. Isn't the entire point of using a computer to save time and be more productive? This sadly is not the case today .

>> I'm not really sure what breathing room you're talking about. The developer preview of Longhorn is coming out later this year. The list of features Longhorn already boasts is staggering, and I doubt within two years that ANY Linux projects will come close. We'll still be stucking using X11 with a hacked on desktop simulator, business as usual.

It's still good to see Linux get this certification though. It's another step towards displacing Windows.

Microsoft set out to get Win2K certified and only completed the process last October according to .

Linux now has the upper hand because MS does not yet have XP certified.

The release date of April 22 was released a long time ago

(ie: January 21, 2003, just incase you didn't get the picture)

However, the reality of it is that our current environment still favors closed source software
I think I would agree with you, but this editorial doesn't. Don't hate me, Trinity,. I'm just the messenger.

But it's good to know that Treebeard and friends have their own magazine these days.

"teeth" ...is converted to... ?teeth?
"johny's basketball's pressure" ...is converted to... ?johny?s basketball?s pressure?

I noticed this bug first in AbiWord and I was most
certainly annoyed when I forced myself
to read through all 12 pages of my
document and correct the ASCII text problem.
This "bug" disappeared, or shall I say this ?bug?
disappeared and have no way to replicate
it to other people on how it
happened. Does anyone know what it is?
Filesystem bug, glibc bug, or document format
bug?

Actually this story at Windows NT magazine ENT, pointed that out back in November.

Here's a startup that uses a policy similar to what you've outlined: insuretrust And here's a story about them.

My only experience of SMS was when we were evaluating Amdahl's awful A+EDM. SMS was slightly better, but both were hampered by NT's design flaws. In the end, we went for SMS for NT, and stuck with rdist for Unix. I haven't been able to check out their web site, to find exactly what features the Linux client has, but I'm betting it's run either as root, or with setuid root privileges, and I'll pretty much guarantee it'll be closed source, and users won't be able to fix the security holes that I'm sure it'll introduce...