Windows XP: Prices, And One Reaction

Jim42688 writes: "Looks like the prices Amazon was reporting for Windows XP a while back were right. On the back of today's ad for CompUSA, it lists the prices to preorder. Home Full, 199.99, Home Upgrade, 99.99. Professional full, 299.99, Professional upgrade, 199.99." Perfect timing -- Fwis writes: "Use your power as a consumer to Boycott XP. The site is now functioning smoothly, and we invite you to log in and participate in discussions, polls, and news stories related to Microsoft's release of the XP line of products." There are some interesting links on this page if you (or someone with purchasing power at your company) is considering XP.

Comments

bah, for windows users...

[2MuchC0ffeeMan]

i'm a windows user... i'm sorry...

but anyway, check out these benchmarks of win2k vs winXP ... please read the WHOLE THING before flaming, becuase it says it's winxp rc2, but it's so much slower it shouldn't matter.
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.html?i=1501& p= 3

Re:bah, for windows users...

[Chmarr]

It wasn't release candidate 2 that was being tested, it was BETA 2. This makes a big difference, release candidates usually have all the debug information stripped out. The idea of a release candidate is to have a version of the code that could very well ship if nothing appears wrong with it.

Beta versions, on the other hand, often have a lot of debugging information built in that could cause bloat and lag.

Personally, I hate windows, and I'll be keeping XP at a very long distance. However, if we're going to rag a product, let's do it for the right reasons :)

Re:bah, for windows users...

[ivan256]

Funny, Last I checked debug information only effected load times.

Re:bah, for windows users...

[Lally Singh]

Nope, because you end up with code that looks like:
(normal asm code)
jmp 245
(line number info, symbolics, etc)
245: (normal asm code)

Which really thrashes the cache and disrupts the pipeline pretty harshly.

Re:bah, for windows users...

[ivan256]

I don't know how windows works (I don't program for it), but in linux, the debugging information is in the symbol table. If debugging symbols changed the way the code worked it would be a big problem, because you could have code that broke when you compiled it normally and then work differently when you were debugging it. I've never heard of a compiler (Again I don't program for windows so my experience is limited in that aspect) that generated different code when you compile with debugging mode. There is no reason to anyway. There is no need to mingle the hints for your debugger among the code when it could be in a seperate place. The only thing that I could think of that would slow down a program if it was in "debug" mode is if you had #defines or the like at compile time that enabled code for debugging like assertions that compile out; but if your assertion code causes that big of a performance hit then you have other issues. I always thought that assertions that compiled out were dumb anyway. There is no reason that you can't use your debugging tools to put dynamic triggers in if you control the calling code and you know they're safe to remove later, and if you don't trust the calling code then you should be leaving the assertions in when you ship anyway.

WindowsRG

[jeffehobbs]

Personally, I'm waiting for WindowsRG.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/uploads/27000/275 49_winrg2.swf

Re:Windows Xp May Be Ok

[anshil]

What I got impression from is 'putting NT and 9x together' is only a marketing farce. It's the old NT core kernel after all, they want to let the 9x series dye, and only call the change in flowerly name :o)

price

[Anonymous Coward]

Home Full, 199.99, Home Upgrade, 99.99. Professional full, 299.99, Professional upgrade, 199.99."

Linux... Priceless

Re:price

[sheldon]

Perhaps, but when you go to Best Buy all you see is the Mandrake Power Edition for $64.99.

Oh, and the Redhat Deluxe Workstation for $79.99.

So, ok another $20 or so and I can get WinXP. I'd rather have WinXP anyway since it runs my software.

Linux was a far more compelling upgrade when it sold for $20 at Best Buy. That was over two years ago, however.

Re:price

[sheldon]

Sure... If you got 5 days to kill with your 56K modem.

It still took 8 hours to download with my 1Mbps DSL line.

Again, the CD's need to be cheap at the local Best Buy or you can forget about it.

Re:price

[ananke]

I'd spend more time on bashing a troll, but I do not like to waste my precious evening with guiness on a person like you.
Few quick facts/replies to your comment:

Linux' cost consists not only of the frequent updates, which require
new cdrom's to be bought if you don't have a high speed Internet
connection.

what's your definition of 'frequent'? just because there is a newer minor/major number of your distro, it does not mean you must upgrade to it. i do not count security patching, which is a normal required thing for any os, including your beloved freebsd. besides, it's easy to update a lot of distros via slow link.

linux administrators pricing? you're nuts? linux admins are the CHEAPEST on the market now, because of their abundance. try finding an admin for what you call 'mature' unix, such as solaris, aix, bsdi, blah, blah for the same price you could get a linux admin. no way.
breaking down? i guess you do not use linux often, if it breaks for you. i've been running linux on my personal box, as a os of choice [i do not count the linux servers at work, etc], and i never had such problems. hardware problems with hard drives will cause most os'es to respond weird.

ext2? ext2 is not the only choice. you got reiserfs, jfs, xfs, etc, etc.

i think i will go finish my book, because i know it's pointless. ohh, you mentioned 'silly messages' that linux kernel spits out? can you give me some examples? i'd like to say two things here: first, linux is a kernel only. rest are gnu tools and other things. second and most important, have you looked at the history of UNIX at all?
unix has a history of pranks, word puns, silly messages, and such. i hope i don't have to point them out here, you should know some of them already.

Re:price

[ichimunki]

Am I the only sane person here? ;)

First, the price of RedHat Deluxe or whatever being $79 is mostly because what they've included in the box is a support contract and a printed manual (I hope I'm right).

The sad fact is that many of the more expensive Linux distros include proprietary software as key components of the distro. Look at how long Netscape was considered essential (and for some users it still may be considered as such). There are also a lot of other "open source" programs in a lot of distros that have confusing, difficult, or essentially non-free licenses.

However, generally, one CD is all a home or business needs to buy. As soon as you have two computers on which you want to run your OS, Win XP doubles in price. Not so Linux, you've just halved the cost. This ratio continues to grow for each machine you add to your network.

But really, who cares? Either you care about user freedom or you don't. If you do, the stable build of Debian GNU/Linux is available for less than $20 from a huge number of resellers-- just an example, many BSDs are also good options. If you don't, you shouldn't just go out and buy your OS at Best Buy or Circuit City based on the price! You should consider what applications you want to run, then choose your OS based on that. Have we dumbed-down computing so much that we are no longer interested in even bothering to do basic grunt work, like making sure we have any clue what we are doing before we go making OS purchase decisions?

Re:price

[Dwonis]

Maybe he can't count (OTOH, you can't spell "liar" either), but the point is still the same: [GNU/]Linux is NOT only $20 less than XP.

Re:price

[Dwonis]

The only way MS is going to have a decent OS is when they finally put the following features in the OS:

* Symbolic links
* Named pipes
* A real shell
* NO REGISTRY
* Better locking semantics (i.e. eliminate "sharing violations")
* POSIX processes (basically, fork() and signal())
The most important thing is the POSIX processes. Not being able to fork and send signals back and forth has been my biggest problem with Windows programming.

I guess in other words, Windows will continue to suck as long as it doesn't have the backend power of a Unix.

Re:price

[ichimunki]

I can count. :)

The problem is that the total cost of Linux doesn't actually go down from $79 to $39.50 if you have two machines. The total cost of Win XP does go from $99 to $198, though. But on a per machine basis, the price of XP is fixed. Whereas with each additional Linux machine the cost to purchase Linux decreases.

I admit to being somewhat duplicitous since the comparison wasn't really fair. However, the AC is a twerp, that much I do know. The basic fact is this: (assuming equal base prices for Linux and XP) the difference in total software purchase cost is Linux = XP/Number of Machines.

Re:price

[4of12]

The problem is that the total cost of Linux doesn't actually go down from $79 to $39.50 if you have two machines. The total cost of Win XP does go from $99 to $198, though. But on a per machine basis, the price of XP is fixed. Whereas with each additional Linux machine the cost to purchase Linux decreases.

Ay, there's the rub, the One Thing that makes XP different from previous Windows.

In the old days, Home and Small Office Pirates got the price of Windows divided down by the number of machines by installing the same software on multiple machines. Now, with XP, that won't be so easy.

It's no surprise that I heard quite a bit of grumbling and murmuring in the software aisle a few months ago when the Helpful Knowledgeable Store Clerk was talking with a User. A lot of the more knowledgeable PC users are very much aware that XP is a significantly "less useful" product from the licensing perspective in the everyday real world.

My prediction: all the XP success and fanfare of units shipped will be as a result of shoving it down the throats of the OEMs, who don't have a choice. However, the consumers have little reason to bite, even if Windows Me was a downgrade from 98SE in terms of stability and usefulness.

Re:price

[Dwonis]

About cost: Linux has a lot of hidden maintenance cost. It's only free if your time is of no value for you.

Bullshit. I was hired to introduce GNU/Linux in a WinNT shop, and all Linux machines in the shop were almost completely maintenance-free. The firewall has been running flawlessly since it was set up (the only "maintenance" has been changing iptables as needs dictated). Ditto for the mailserver. Yet, for some reason, the WinNT webservers fsck up nearly every day (we haven't moved to W2K yet, and though the W2K machine shows some improvement, it's still miles behind the 'nix machines.)

WinXP to the consumer is just another release...

[Sj0]

Lets see...Modified UI to make it look slightly different than the last version of windows? Yup. Lots of monopoly leveraging technologies designed to crush smaller companies ekeing out a living? Oh yeah. Requires an upgrade to the latest hardware? Bingo. Slower than the last release by a good factor? You bet. All I see, despite all the hype(that many slashdotters are buying into), is just another useless windows release. One that to the regular consumer, means more money down the tubes for hardware they don't really need to check their E-mail, and write letters in Wordpad. Of course, Microsoft will be kept afloat by the 'oh but this ones based on NT! It's stable!' fanboys out there, but anybody who has seen NT in action knows it's inadequacy on older hardware, and people are finally getting used to the idea that they don't really need the latest version of windows or the latest processor for what they do.

Personally, if support for windows 9x dropped to a certain level, I'd just stop using windows altogether. To be perfectly honest, as soon as I can play the majority of my windows games using linux and my savage4 accellerator on another, non MS OS, I'll drop windows altogether. I'm just sick and tired of seeing microsoft pushing it's competitors out the window by including it's own version of an existing utility.

I own original copies of OS/2, Beos, Caldera Opendos, and Linux Redhat. I also downloaded Xgui, Gimi, and a host of other shells. My opinion? I don't have enough choice still. I could run Xdos on my 8088 and still run dos apps. Why is it so hard for the US DOJ to crack this obviously abused (on a regular baisis) monopoly?

Oh yes, and look at every windows release -- you'll see a huge group trying to fool themselves that 'THIS one will be good!'. They existed in winME, why not this one?

Let The Invisible Hand Do Its Work

[bill.sheehan]

Why boycott Windows XP? I'm not going to buy it for many reasons, not least of which is the price, but why boycott? The pricing clearly shows that their target market is business. I figure that any business that expends its capital on locking itself into monopolistic Microsoft products will simply spend itself into non-competitiveness. A prudent business will look long and hard at all of its options before writing a check to Redmond.

These are hard times. Everyone has to learn to do more with less. The IT department is not exempt from this economic reality. The CIO who blows the budget on the fastest new computers and the latest bloated commercial software had best keep his resume up to date.

"I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks!" -- "Bill Gates" on The Simpsons

Re:Let The Invisible Hand Do Its Work

[erroneus]

The invisible hand is tied.

Re:Windows Xp May Be Ok

[Dimensio]

Since it puts NT and 9x together I'm kind of glad that a lot of home users will now have an actual stable OS.

When I, as a home user, wanted an actual stable Windows OS, I went to Windows 2000, as did quite a few people I know. We did lose some legacy and DOS-based support but AFAIK Windows XP loses most if it as well (I understand that there is some kind of DOS compatability mode, but I don't know all of the details) and after getting used to Windows 2K, I don't see a need to switch just to get the little extra that XP offers. Also, XP Home Edition doesn't even have all of the features supported in Windoes 2000 (off the top of my head: advanced security features and SMP support) -- to get a 'true' replacement we would need to upgrade to Windows XP Professional. Again, why go to the expense and performance hit of an XP upgrade when we already have most, if not all, of what we want anyway.
.
One thing I do think about sometimes. A lot of linux distibutions come with various programs already on them that do things like cd burning and such. Now Windows comes along with new things built in.

Well...yes, but my understanding is that a number of third-party apps that people used to use for these purposes are crippled or non-functional. Apparently it's a 'bug' with the upgrades that XP has (and not an attempt for MS to force you to use their apps exclusively). Most of my friends with CD-R drives already have the software they need and they know how to use it -- it's pretty standard to get software with the drive. Maybe it's convenient for MS to offer seamless CD burning options integrated in the OS, but I could do without the overhead (and the crippling of my other choices).

Re:Windows Xp May Be Ok

[mindstrm]

One problem with things being built-in... is that MS destroys any competition, and eventually controls the feature-set.

If people no longer need to get third-party software to burn cds, for example.... there is no longer a market for cd-software. Eventually, MS dictates the hardware interface to the manufacturers, seeing as how they are the only ones producing software, and pretty soon... you get the picture.

Why should an MS user Upgrade ?

[redelm]

I just don't see any compelling reason. I have plenty of MS Win95 licences, and really see no need to upgrade those boxen. Just like my Linux & FreeBSD boxen who almost always are a few versions behind.

MS-Win95b is acceptably stable given enough RAM, HD and maintenance. The only thing that has caused me to upgrade a few to Win98 is USB cameras not installing on 95.

MS-WinNT may be more stable, but some hardware and software still refuses to run under it. I believe XP is an NT descendant, so I'd worry about this.

Upgrading is fine for journalists who have stories to write, and for other software reviewers. I just don't know why the rest of us should upgrade. To get a bunch of bugfixes & security patches? Feh! If I need'em, I'll get them separately.

Re:Why should an MS user Upgrade ?

[sheldon]

It's difficult for me to explain because I've been using NT exclusively since '97 except for one brief month in '98 when I ran Win98 to try it.

But let me first state:

Win9x is *NOT* stable.

As far as incompatibilies, this was true in the early days of NT. But since around 1998 or so it's been difficult to find hardware that does not work on NT. Similarly nearly all software with the exception of games has worked fine.

Win2k improved the situation greatly by implementing DirectX fully so now every modern game runs very well.

There are also numerous usability features in Win2k especially that make it a compelling upgrade over Win95. Far less annoying, it doesn't steal focus away from your mouse at inopertune times. The quicklaunch bar is good, as is the more consistent ability to manage icons in the start menu.

Another feature of NT/Win2k over Win9x is that they are faster. Part of this is because the shell is multi-threaded. On Win9x when you start a program up, as it's loading and doing it's thing, you are locked out of doing anything else. For someone going from WinNT/2k back to Win95 it is readily apparent and frustrating.

As far as Windows XP, the most compelling feature of this will be the final elimination of Win9x from the support channel. You spoke of incompatibilities, and now you will see none. A vendor can write one set of drivers which will work on either Home or Professional editions.

There are usability changes in WinXP as well. I haven't decided if I like them all yet, but I certainly find many of them to be solid improvements.

Yes, it's true that WinXP is a evolutionary upgrade from Win2k. But if you are coming from Win95, I shudder to think why you wouldn't at least upgrade to Win2k.

Re:Why should an MS user Upgrade ?

[(H)elix1]

If it means I can lock my folks out of installing all those "501 shareware games", hork with drivers, and otherwise lock the machine down so they can NOT fiddle with it, I'm in.

I like the idea of not giving my Mom or Dad Admin rights to a box, which was real hard to do with the Win9x versions. Win2K, much easier, but they balked at purchasing a "business OS" for home. This time, it has the right amount of sugar coating.... fluffy "home" version, still runs Office, and I'll never have to remove icons from the control pannel after my dad blasted an app rather than uninstalling it. The days of keeping a backup of my folk's registery settings is almost over!

Re:Why should an MS user Upgrade ?

[ncc74656]

Probably the most compelling reason to upgrade to windows XP is remote desktop connections.

VNC over SSH does this already...I use it all the time to connect to Win98 & Win2K machines sitting behind Linux firewalls. All the stuff you need (VNC & Cygwin) is free (speech), too.

a boycott makes us no better than M$

[roxytheman]

If this software is good, then buy it, use it and enjoy it! Then again, if it is just a piece of crap, don't buy it, use it -or enjoy it! It is up to you! Boycotting a great piece of software just because it is made by M$ is wrong I think. I have never tried XP, and propably never going to buy it, but if it is good, people should have the right to use it, and maybe we can learn from it and improve out favourite penguin or devil-OSes ...

Re:a boycott makes us no better than M$

[King_TJ]

I'd agree, except I guess the only problem is the people who aren't really aware of what they're getting into until after they buy a copy of XP and install it.

Despite all the marketing information and even a few screen shots I looked at online, I had no idea what the XP overall "feel" would be until I installed a release-candidate 30-day trial for myself. The average user doesn't wipe their hard drive and install 30-day trials of operating systems, just to decide if they should buy it or not.

(For the record, I wiped XP off my drive after giving it about 5 days. My wife refused to use it, saying it looked too "cartoon-like" and was noticeably slower launching several programs she commonly uses. I could deal with the new appearance of things, but I really disliked all the attempts to coerce me into using MS products for everything. It installed MSN messenger by default, and each "mouse-over" to the shortcut in the system tray reminded me to click to sign up and activate it. Then, they kept bugging me to go to their web site and sign up for a Passport account, to use their .net functionality. Uh, no thanks.)

For that price...

[john@iastate.edu]

...they ought to bundle a free computer!

Seriously, are we approaching the day that windows will cost more than the computer it runs on for most people?

"Boycott" is defined as...

[dstone]

"To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an
expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion."[dictionary.com]

"An expression of disfavor"? Okay, it might be a stress release, but unlikely to accomplish much.

Or fighting coercion with coercion? Lame and hypocritcal. (The ability to coerce is one of qualities people dislike in a monopoly.)

That's more than Windows 2000

[Animats]

Windows 2000 Professional, boxed product, is $249 at Amazon.com. As a pre-install, Windows 2000 Pro adds $99 to a Dell computer over Windows 98. XP at $299 is not a winner. The OEM deal has to be a lot better than this, or nobody will buy.

Back up now

[Publicus]

Hey, I'm an editor at boycottxp.com, we got hit hard there but we're back up now and we should stay that way. It might be a little slow at first but keep checking back as the traffic levels off. We're excited to hear what you have to say.

I'd love to see

[Dark Paladin]

A version of Windows XP (because the only reason I still use Windows is for my ATI-TV card, and to review computer games) that only has these features:

1. Basic OS/Gui.
2. Directx 8

That's it. I don't want a media player, a browser, or all of the other stuff. If they had this out, I'd pay $30 for it, and be perfectly happy. If I wanted the other pieces (browser, chat module, blah, blah, blah), I could choose whether to buy them from MS, or go and use something else (so an extra $15 for MS Explorer, or I could put Mozilla on the box).

Now everybody wins. MS is happy because it gets $30 from me (and the potential of more money if I choose to pay $99/$199 if I want all the bells an whistles), the DOJ is happy (because it makes a truly level playing frield, since other companies can compete with the other add-ons (at least in theory)), and I'm happy because I can review my games.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Re:I'd love to see

[NonSequor]

Depending on what TV card you have you should be able to get it working with the BTTV driver or GATOS. I absolutely despise the drivers and program that come with ATI's TV cards. Often, for no apparent reason, the program would refuse to acknowledge the existence of the TV in. The composite video in would work and I would get a nice blue screen from that, but no actual TV until I rebooted and tried again.

Re:I'd love to see

[evilquaker]

Now everybody wins. MS is happy because it gets $30 from me

No, Microsoft is not happy, which is why you haven't and you never will see such a version of Windows. They aren't happy for (at least) two reasons:

1. You're going to buy Windows anyway... why should they sell you what you want for $30 when they can sell you that + a bunch of crap you don't want for $200?
2. Why should they give away a chance to get their software on your PC? Every PC that ships with media player is another PC they can claim is part of their "installed base". This they can then use to get companies to stream in their format, as opposed to Real Audio/Video.

So keep dreaming... such a thing will never happen.

Re:I'd love to see

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Well but Microsoft could count you in their userbase once for each component you buy. Imagine the marketing spin they could get then:

"We have over 1 billion users of Microsoft products in the USA alone!"

Re:I'd love to see

[darkwhite]

This they can then use to get companies to stream in their format, as opposed to Real Audio/Video.

Even though you are right, I have to say that even though WMP8 is an ugly piece of shit, RealPlayer is much, much uglier, more unstable, and it installs spyware and other crap to boot. I would prefer Quicktime to WMP and WMP to Real, however what I would really like to see is a single player for all formats that's small and fast, like Winamp... of course that will never happen since all those video formats are proprietary.

Transparent Encryption?

[dragons_flight]

Does anyone know about the "transparent encryption" that they talk about in the professional edition?

I realize it's not likely to be really strong, but if it's decent (and not critically flawed in implementation), it might be an incentive for me to upgrade eventually. I've never seen a good encryption scheme for Win that wasn't a major hassle. If you know of one I'd like to hear of that too.

I can't escape Windows because I write software for it occasionally, and need the ability to work with Word/Excel/Access file types.

I heard somewhere (but have no idea if its true) that the encryption requires a different file system be implemented (NTFS vs FAT32, IIRC). How would this affect an upgrade?

Re:Transparent Encryption?

[citizenc]

From what I understand, what transparent encryption does is when you save documents to the "My Documents" folder, Windows XP will encrypt the files so that other user accounts cannot access those files.

Re:Transparent Encryption?

[NMerriam]

You don't need XP for encryption, it's a basic feature of windows NTFS implementations out of the box. They may have made it more transparent or something in XP, but you can encrypt files/folders/drives in 2k without the additional overhead of XP.

I've got one box I've been running XP on for the past few weeks and can only say I'm pretty unimpressed. Win2k blew me away the first time I used it, and it's a great desktop system, but XP is trying to be WAAAY too many things to WAAAY too many people. If you want a wizard to tell you how to wipe your butt, buy XP, otherwise Win2k is the perfect level of maturity, driver availability, stability, etc...

Re:Transparent Encryption?

[Meorah]

128-bit hashed local file and directory encryption. "transparent" because its based on the user's access token that they receive when logging onto their PC. In other words, if you log on as a certain user, and encrypt a file, then you will be able to access that file at any time as long as you are logged on as that user. Log on as a different user, and try to access the encrypted file, and you'll be denied access.

The mechanism for encrypting files is simply a checkbox in an "advanced" menu. Only 2 button clicks deep, but far enough out of the way that most people won't accidentally enable encryption. Also, you can't encrypt files that have been compressed natively... Of course, the work around is that you use winzip or pkzip or winrar to compress your files, then encrypt them with the built-in encryption.

This is only local encryption! If you want encryption over a network, you've still got to use IPSec, Kerberos, VPN, etc.

All of these features are available in Windows 2000 and XP. In fact, just about every worth-while feature in XP is also found in 2000. Oh yah, you get to use WPA in XP! Another reason to upgrade to 2000 instead of XP if you're going to use Windows.

Re:Transparent Encryption?

[helloRockview]

Good to point out that the XP encryption, of course, is only local to the box and doesn't provide any type of network-based encryption without using some other suitable protocol.

However, I'm curious how XP's encryption works in a file server environment, where multiple users or applications are shuffling bits on and off the disk using SMB or NFS, for example. It might be very useful.

There have been far too many cases of data hijacking these days and I suppose it would be advantageous to have a central file or database server encrypt data on disk, regardless of whether the client is a user or an application. There is an overall lack of regard for storing data in an encrypted format today, even though this is the place where the bits will live the longest (as opposed to the network, per say).

Re:Transparent Encryption?

[tcc]

It's called "transparent" because even if encrypted, microsoft can "clearly" see thru it with their passport and backdoor key :)

Grass roots movement

[Alien54]

People need to also talk this up on Talk shows:

Well, mr. talk show host, I was talking to a friend who was testing this new version of Windows, and boy is it a dog"

[insert reasons that the talk show host can agree with]

just enough to poison the well. simple reasons for regular folks, like the whole Passport fiasco.

heck telling them the plain truth about the copy protection stuff and registration stuff will do the job.

now mind you, I would never do something like this, but you can't even make a copy for your kids machine, or for your wife. You got to buy a whole nother copy! I paid my money. I should be able to do what I want with it!

That should be good enough to do the job.

- - -
Radio Free Nation
an alternate news site based on Slash Code
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"

Already!

[BlowCat]

I guess I'm already boycotting Windows XP, all other versions of Windows, as well as OS/2, GNU/Hurd, NetBSD, Solaris, AtheOS and whatever else is not installed on my computer.

Boycott makes sense if I would buy something but I don't in order to "punish" the manufacturer. How many slashdotters would buy Windows XP if not this boycott?

Re:Already!

[Flavius Stilicho]

"How many slashdotters would buy Windows XP if not this boycott?"

I would. I decide what our corporate technology standards are, what products are purchased and what OS is installed on our 150+ PCs. Currently, that standard is Windows 2000 Professional and Server so I am in a prime position to upgrade to XP. However....

About a month or so ago, a rep from Microsoft called me to give me the pitch for XP and how it would make 'everything so much better.' I actually had a great deal of fun with that call. Essentially, I told him that I had absolutely no intention of going to any XP product anytime soon. He courteously informed me that if I didn't it would cost us way more when we finally upgraded. I responded by saying that 'anytime soon' was just my nice way of saying that I'd never goto XP. He balked at that one and asked why. I told him that, frankly, I didn't care one bit for MS's licensing practices, the quality (or lack thereof) of their products, the inherent insecurity of their products and a few others that I can't remember. When he asked what our intentions were, I told him that we would stay with the 2000 line for a couple years. After that we would begin evaluating alternative operating systems and applications -- primarily Linux. I then told him that our core application was a client server model that already had a web based front end and could easily be ported to Apache & Oracle or MySQL. As for Office and messaging applications, I told him that there were many solid alternatives to Exchange already on the market and StarOffice would work just fine for our Office Suite needs. At that point he said "Oh. Thank you for your time." and hung up.

I decided to start boycotting Microsoft products a while ago -- when the details about the new licensing scheme were released. I know that 150 PC and 20 servers isn't much to MS, but it's aleast a half million dollars when it's all said and done. Had it not been for the licensing changes, I probably would have upgraded.

Windows XP for free?

[joestar]

WindowsXP Vs. Linux Mandrake: Some Aesthetic Observations is the title of this excellent article that I recommand to read.

Re:boycott XP?

[error0x100]

Perhaps you missed it in the news, but Microsoft was recently tried in court for illegally abusing their monopoly position to retain dominance and unfairly squash competition. It was generally called the "Microsoft antitrust trial", and not only was Microsoft found guilty, but the appeals court upheld the guilty verdict. So Microsoft's success was ill-gained - this is not just arbitrary opinions of some people, its a fact that has been not only found in court but upheld by the appeals court (or do you think all the judges are also just jealous of Microsoft's success?).

The reason for the boycott is basically that all the illegal tactics that Microsoft used to gain dominance are still being used, they continue to break the law, and the lack of competition that results from this is harming customers.

Did you really not notice this trial that was going on? It was very well publicised. Or did you just neglect to listen when the facts of the case were discussed in the media?

Re:WindowsXP in the year 2401

[blang]

Thursday, November 01, 2401".

I predict that in 2401, retro CD-ROM coasters will be en vogue again.

Well.. I have to say.

[mindstrm]

Aside from the urge to boycott microsoft completely...
I'm quite happy with win2k as my MS platform. It's the best thing they've produced so far, and after hearing about some of the sugar-coating in XP, sounds like it still is.

Like I'm gonna switch (of course, they'll make their licensing prohibitively harsher... but we'll move to sunrays next)

And if...

[Shin Elendale]

If it was the only car on the market, or perhaps: the car you HAD to buy when you bought a home.

-Elendale

Re:WinXP to the consumer is just another release..

[pmc]

Most of what you said I agree with but not "Of course, Microsoft will be kept afloat by the 'oh but this ones based on NT! It's stable!' fanboys out there, but anybody who has seen NT in action knows it's inadequacy on older hardware, and people are finally getting used to the idea that they don't really need the latest version of windows or the latest processor for what they do.

Firstly Joe Public probably only has the vaguest idea of what NT is, so there is limited mileage on the "based on NT" bandwagon.

Secondly NT is stable on older hardware - it's the more modern stuff that tends to trip it up (it really doesn't understand IR ports and USB very well). NT server on fairly standard hardware can easily have uptimes of more than a year (provided you don't and try and log on to the box - there is (or was - it may be fixed now) a memory leak in the GDI routines which breaks the explorer shell fairly terminally after about 6 months. All the services still work, but the box is a bit of a basket case if you need to do something interactive.

I'm not sure about people and new machines/OS. The machine I'm using now is triple boot box (Mandrake, Win98, W2K Advanced Server) with dual 350P2s and 256MB of ram. So fairly long in the tooth now. I've not seen anything that I want to do computer wise that I can't do on this box. So no reason to upgrade here. But I see lots of computers with a much higher spec being sold as the owner has upgraded to a more recent machine. What are these people doing with their machines?

So I think people may realise they don't need the new machine, but they still seem to want one. Then there is the monopoly leveraging that superwhizzy app only works on XP, to "encourage" people to upgrade to it.

and look at every windows release -- you'll see a huge group trying to fool themselves that 'THIS one will be good!'.

W2K was actually a good release. Probably too good. Having looked at XP from the server end (and particuarly the directory services bit of it, which is what I do at the moment) there is almost nothing that has changed that makes even a marginally compelling case for moving to XP. Of the top of my head the only change that is of note is how XP handles changes to group memberships (The gory details are that in the multimaster environment if person A is added to a group at DC1 and person B is removed from the same group later at DC2, but before the change had propogated from DC1 to DC2, this causes a conflict that is resolved by using the most recent change, which means neither A nor B are in the group after all the changes have replicated). This is a design flaw in how groups are stored and replicated in W2k (basically the group including all the members is replicated when changed in W2k, as opposed to deltas of the membership list which is how I think XP does it), but it isn't that hard to work around.

Re:WinXP to the consumer is just another release..

[pmc]

In XP you can roll back schema changes too, I've just remembered. This is nice, and may save a little bit of time during testing (rollback as opposed to rebuild), but won't impact a production environment.

Ridiculous upgrade restrictions�.rape you 4 $$$

[helloRockview]

I don't know much about XP and think that you'd be nuts to head to the store on October 25th and install this thing on your PC (as with any other MS OS in the past).

I finally installed Windows 2000 on my work PC and was - for the first time in the history of Windows - actually impressed with its performance and stability. For the first time ever, I wasn't rebooting my PC five times a day (which is a frustrating contrast to some of my Linux boxes that are approaching 1 year of uptime). I was so impressed with 2000's stability, that I installed it on my home PC and my girlfriend's laptop, which was experiencing the good old Win98 10-a-day reboot exercise.

So this article got me wondering if there was anything that XP would offer me in the future that just might coerce me to upgrade in the next year or so. So I found a link on MS's site that let me "Check my upgrade options" . I was shocked to see that the only upgrade path from Win 2000 is to the XP Professional Edition, which costs $100 more than the Home Edition.

Why is this the case? Isn't XP Professional is nothing more than the XP Home Edition with a few more add-ons? Anyone have any insight as to why MS restricts you from upgrading 2000 to XP Home Edition?

My money is on the fact that they figure only business and power users are using Windows 2000, so they just want to rape people for the extra $100. Upgrading my three Windows 2000 PCs to XP would cost me $600.

It'll be a cold day in hell before I shell out another $600 to MS.

What's the alternative?

[themaddone]

The problem, as it always has been, is that people can't use Linux.

Hell, ask anyone... Using Linux probably has never been easier. I, for the first time, installed Red Hat 7.1 a few weeks ago... Until then, I had been a diehard Windows user... Not because I wanted to be, mind you, but because I didn't think I could use Linux, or that it could replace my desktop.

So I yanked out my Windows HD, put in a clean one, and installed Red Hat. Hell, it astonishingly simple. The biggest problem I had was KDE or Gnome? But then I started using it...

I'm not a completely naive Windows user... I mean, I read Slashdot, right? But when you have to spend 75% of your time reading websites and manuals and going back and forth to websites and trying to figure out the terminal, and... Well, it's frustrating. Too frustrating.WindowsXP makes things easier for the average, not so bright computer user. People won't have to upgrade, they'll buy new PCs with XP already on it. And they won't even bother to ask "Can I get Red Hat, or Mandrake, or Slackware on that?" And the reason is simple. Despite the fact the MS is a monopolistic megolith, along with groupls like the MPAA and the RIAA and others who eat away at people's freedoms (to choose, to speak, whatever), they (WE!) will tolerate it because there isn't a better choice. And until someone designs a new operating system, one that can run Windows programs, and offers the ease of use that Windows does, you'll never have a real alternative to Windows.

I'm an economist(-in-training). I know that competition drives prices down, and forces product quality up. But if someone doesn't come along and design an alternative, all we'll ever get to do is sit here, bitch about it on Slashdot, and feel sorry for people that don't know the difference.

I'm going to keep using Red Hat. Not full time, not even half time. But I'm going to try to learn to be proficient on something that isn't Windows, so I don't have to use Windows. But in the end, it's just a hobby, and I'll keep coming back to /dev/hda1, where I keep Windows.

-Josh

Re:What's the alternative?

[bero-rh]

I'd be interested in knowing where you're still having problems - we're all so used to using Linux that we can't see it through the eyes of a beginner (and so don't know which parts need to be changed to make it possible for everyone to convert).

Re:What's the alternative?

[dr_db]

What should have been done, in the heady days of overpriced stocks, is usability testing. RedHat, Corel, one of them should have started taking schwoobs off the street, and getting them to use linux and comment on the interface, as well as video taping *how* they use it.

The only way it will get on the desktop is a better interface - just as good is not enough for people to go through the hassle of learning.

I use Win2K. I haver played with Linux, but all my clients use win32, so that's what I develop to. I wish I could move enough to Linux to move to an alternative (and the authorization thing in winXP makes me run it down every chance I get). However, they won't, and if I don't supply win32 apps to them, I don't eat.

Some of you developers out there that are better than me (and there are lots, and many, many more worse than me), build the desktop that will bring them in. Not just a pretty desktop, but you need *compelling* money saving (making?) features that will make businesses move. Instant messaging - awesome business tool. Some kind of video conferencing - awesome tool. Icons that pop out (a la osX) - eye candy but useless. Bunches of rabid supporters that cannot conceive of somebody using an alternative without launching a personal attack - worse than useless. All the linux users out there have to remember that *they* are the alternative users.

Last bit is a rant - I have been flamed mightly for using Windows. But it is my fucking job, and I hate when people think I should give up work, let my family starve, etc, so I can go to the One True Operating System. (Hey, let's rename Linux OT/OS - heh)

DB

Re:What's the alternative?

[Pengo]

Don't you just love those generic "It's too hard complaints"? Long on complains, low on details. This guy claims to know about Linux "because he reads SlashDot". Trust me, that's not enough. Do you have any idea how many people don't learn anything about Windows by reading ZDNet? Besides, I've read lots of books on playing chess, and I still suck, so trust me, reading isn't always enough.


Man, don't be such a jerk. The guy has a very valid point. If you want some examples, let me give you some.

1. Recompiling the kernel to get a sound card or network card working that didn't come w/the distro.

2. Getting 3D-accell video working so you can play quake 3.

3. Setting up internet sharing on anything but Linux Mandrake.

.. etc. etc. etc.

The windows world is one of 0 documentation, but the difference in Windows is you don't need it.

At work, home and office I have a Linux/Windows dual box combo for various tasks. For one box I have a STACK of books, the other.. not a single one. ;-) You can guess which one is for which? You got it.. Linux/UNIX. Obviously one was designed to do complicated things, the other wasn't. I wouldn't expect the Windows machine to do what my Linux box can do if I had a stack of Windows manuals. But for the average user, this mentality isn't going to take them far. They want to use the box for accomplishing simple tasks, etc. Unfortunately linux can prohibit at times this from happening. (ie. playing quake 3, etc). Windows makes this DEAD simple. (as does Apple OSX mind you).

I can't imagine setting up a production webserver on windows any more than I can imagine playing quake 3 on my Linux box. One is for work and one is for play ;-)

Re:What's the alternative?

[Pengo]

Ok, sorry for calling you a jerk.. point taken. ;-) Was pretty trollish of me to say such a thing.

Anyway, yeah... Installing a new sound card on a PC or upgrading a video card on your mac would be something an above-average person would try.. but I would be surprised if someone w/out 6-month to 1 year experience using linux and getting used to the in's and out's of the system could do such a thing.

Lets take moms and stupid co-workers out of the view for a few minutes. I have a younger brother who is a programmer. He has years and year of Windows experience. He knows how to use Linux, and even does all his text editing in VI. (I know, VI doesn't make the man..

He tried to install RedHat on his machine as he is learning C++ and wanted to use kdevelop. By the time I helped him get XWindows working correctly as his monitor he installed was different than the one he was really using, changing his network settings (Tried RedHat 7.1 lately?) get his strange network card working, (again this was after install he put it in..) and then readjust the frequency on the monitor from 75 hz which it seemed to be stuck at until I pointed him on how to edit the xconfig file. .. anyway, it was like this .. blah blah blah for about 2 days when he finaly talked me into going over and helping him work through some of these issues as he was pretty frustrated.

Now me as a linux hobiest thrive on such challenges, but his mentality is not so tinkerish. This is not good, it's not bad.. it's just him. I would say that there are quite a few people out there like him too.

Anyway, the point is.. until these almost-trivial to technofile linux guru's are trivial to people that just don't have time to muck with it (ie. my brother) ... Linux is going to be a voodoo magick-stick only used by witch-doctor techno-skum like us. :) Might I add, this same person bought a G4 about 4 1/2 weeks ago and has sinced turned off that linux machine as he can do everything he needs (development/colaboration with coworkers) on a single machine. OSX seems to be doing what linux hasn't been able to. Take Unix to Mom.

Re:What's the alternative?

[damiam]

try /dev/hda1 for starters. what the fuck is that supposed to mean? damn. (i know its like the second hard drive or something, but still)

In Linix, the /dev/hd* files represent the hard drives. /dev/hda is the first drive, /dev/hdb is the second drive, and so on. The number at the end is the partition, for example /dev/hda1 is the first partition of the first hard drive and /dev/hdb3 is the 3rd partition of the 2nd hard drive.

I agree that the way Linux accesses devices is outdated and unintuitive. This is something devfs is working on.

Re:What's the alternative?

[cpt kangarooski]

Just because there is a logical order to it does not mean that it is easy to use or worth keeping around.

I've got to agree with the previous poster - Unix is in no shape to be used by mere mortals. However, I don't really think that it can be saved.

This isn't to say that I'm a big fan of anything else currently on the market - everything sucks. But it is far far better to develop a system where usability is a core concern from day one than to keep trying to add a facade onto Unix, or worse yet, just giving to people as is. The former option, if solidly built, if designed to have a compatability layer through which it can still run Unix software, strikes me as being a far far better option.

Re:What's the alternative?

[mattdm]

(So, um, biting down on the troll, here: )

The 'h' in "/dev/hda1" is a bit weird, but beyond that it makes totally sense and isn't arbitrary at all: All devices are in "/dev/". "hd" means IDE hard drive -- SCSI hard drives are "sd". It's "a" because it's the first device of this type -- "hd0" would have been reasonable too. And "1" because it's the first partition on that drive. So it's actually a fairly reasonable hierarchical naming scheme. It may not be "intuitive", but few things in computers really are: it's just a matter of what you're used to.

The situation on Unix seems better than the one on DOS/Windows, where hard drives and partitions are given letters in basically random order, with CDROM and other devices thrown into the mix -- and since the second floppy drive (what power user would buy a system with only one floppy drive, right?) is "B", hard drives always start at C. Now *that's* arbitrary and unintuitive.

Re:What's the alternative?

[Admiral Burrito]

try /dev/hda1 for starters. what the fuck is that supposed to mean? damn. (i know its like the second hard drive or something, but still)

What are you doing that you need to use the /dev/hda1 device name? In my experience, the install sets up your /etc/fstab for you and you don't need to worry about the "/dev/hda1" thing (or even the "/etc/fstab" thing).

Re:What's the alternative?

[Malcontent]

"I should give up work, let my family starve,"

If the only means you have to keep your family from starving is to write windows apps then by all means go ahead. I guess I am one of those lucky people who can do more then one thing. I know many languages, know many operating systems, and know quite a bit about networking (a bit about project mangement too). I can pick and choose what I want to do. Thanks for remind me that there are a lot of people in this world who are basically one trick ponies. I will try to make that fact a competitive advantage in the future.

You better hope MS survives the next round of legal wrangling intact and also survives the sates and the european union inquiry too. It seems like you have put all your eggs in this basket. Good luck to you.

Re:What's the alternative?

[Malcontent]

" You're right. (and brave...posting something like this on in such a pro-Linux environment ;)"

What are nuts? The man is marked +5 insighful (although I really looked for some insight in his post could not find any). The days of slashdot being a pro-linux environment are long gone. The MS astro turfers make sure any pro windows post immediately gets modded up to +5. This is prime proof of that.

Re:What's the alternative?

[Malcontent]

Have you ever heard of a thing call MacOSX? You should look into it because you just described it.

Re:What's the alternative?

[HiThere]

New hardware won't have the option of having the older versions of the OS installed. And it's illegal to install the CD you purchased for another computer.

So older versions of Windows won't remain acceptable in the office environment. It's happening. My boss man thinks it's a good idea (really!). I think he's crazy, but I doubt he's the only one.

Re:What's the alternative?

[HeUnique]

Okay,

Now compile the kernel with DEVFS - and explain it to him ;))

Re:What's the alternative?

[pjrc]

The problem ... is that people can't use Linux.

I see this same statement all the time, and while I generally agree with it, just yesterday it finally occured to me why I find it so bothersome. That reason is simply:

They can't really use Microsoft Windows either.

These masses of "average joe" users who will never be able to use linux really don't know how to use windows either. Almost everything about the computer is "too hard" for them... except playing a couple simple games, reading email and surfing the web, and sometimes struggling through a word processor.

In all of these cases where the "can" use windows, they are blissfully unaware of 95% of the features that the software offers them. They save their files whereever the "save as" dialog defaults, and later if someone asks them to copy the file onto a floppy, they have no idea how to do it or even where they put the file on their drive. These are the masses that constantly need someone to "fix the computer". I could go on and on (but not today).

The point is that saying "linux is too hard" is usually meant to imply that "but windows is easy". The sad truth is that the vast majority of the population can't really use ANY operating system, linux, windows, macos, Be, whatever. Of course, the vast majority of the driving population can't change their car's oil or probably even a tire, and they can't program their on-screen controls VCR, etc, etc.

Sure, windows is probably overall a bit easier, largely because of automated install programs and more commercial software (that has a lot of work put into reducing costly tech support queried).

For these mainstream novice users, the system they've invested hundreds of hours not really using in any signifcant way, but stumbling and strugging through to get the minimal "productivity" they manage is going to be easier than anything that is a change, not matter how much a change for the better it may happen to be.

Well, that's enough ranting for now. There's already hundreds of messages, so it's highly unlikely many people will read this... but I feel a bit better finally coming to terms why "people can't use linux" bothers me, when I generally agree with the statement.

Re:What's the alternative?

[mj6798]

But when you have to spend 75% of your time reading websites and manuals and going back and forth to websites and trying to figure out the terminal, and... Well, it's frustrating. Too frustrating.WindowsXP makes things easier for the average, not so bright computer user.

You spent years getting familiar with Windows. You can't expect to pick up Linux in a day. This says nothing about the relative quality or utility of the different OSes.

In fact, learning Linux probably is initially harder than learning Windows. On the other hand, learning Linux is probably a more valuable skill: you learn to use software that doesn't change every year. And once you understand the command line tools and scripting, you can do really amazing things very quickly.

The biggest problem I had was KDE or Gnome? But then I started using it...

I think the answer is: it doesn't matter. Learn to use LaTeX, Emacs, xterm, and the standard POSIX tools. Learn Python or Perl. And if you are an "economist in training", learn R (for data analysis).

Re:What's the alternative?

[Malcontent]

It's easier to bitch I guess.

Re:What's the alternative?

[clare-ents]

"
1. Recompiling the kernel to get a sound card or network card working that didn't come w/the distro.

2. Getting 3D-accell video working so you can play quake 3.

3. Setting up internet sharing on anything but Linux Mandrake.
"

However, these moderately difficult tasks don't get easier on Windows either.

I spent 2 weeks tracking down instructions for installing my scanner under Windows 2000. The driver disk supplied with the scanner a: didn't work and b: fucked the registry so that the real drivers wouldn't install. Registry hacking to make it go. I still haven't managed to make the modem go from Win2k, admittedly I can't make my linux box auto failover from DSL to modem either but both platforms have a whole range of difficult tasks.

I can't get my linux laptop to print to a HP network connected printer easily like I can under Windows, I can't have my windows partition automatically reconfigure it's network from work / home / friends automatically like it does under linux. I don't have enough memory / disk space to install IIS / SQL-Server on my laptop but apache / mysql / postgresql are fine. I can't run applications on my home windows machine from work but I can use linux apps on the linux machine from everywhere. That said, sometimes it's a real bitch to get the CD out of my Linux machine.

As far as I can see. The easy tasks are just as simple on both, the middle tasks are easier on Windows, the hard tasks easier on Linux.

Re:What's the alternative?

[Dwonis]

Trust me, if you don't understand partitions, it's hard to learn.

Heh. Then try to explain the difference between a filesystem and a partition...

Re:What's the alternative?

[Malcontent]

Let me see if I get you right.

You want an operating system as reiable as unix, as flexable as unix, and that can run unix but you don't want to use unix because it's old. Is that right?

Maintaining backwards compatibility will doom you to hell forever. If you want a new OS there are a bunch being worked on right now. From inferno to atheos to hurd to symbian people are trying out new ideas all the time. Unfortunately no commercial effort can succeed due to the chokehold on innovation that MS maintains with it's monopoly. Starting an OS company when MS is around is just suicide (look at the string of technically superior operating systems windows has left in it's wake). Actually that's an opportunity for people like you. You can jump in and make a difference in any of these projects. Go get involved it's more fun then standing at the sidewalk and pointing.

Re:What's the alternative?

[Malcontent]

"Unix is fundementally extremely difficult to use. So much so that I don't think that it's possible to remedy."

I think I disagree with you vehemntly on this point. I think that you (like most people) confuse easy to use and easy to learn. Unix is harder to learn but once learned it's easy to use. It's like vi, sed, awk or even the find command. These tools are very hard to learn and proficient at but once learned and combined they can make your computer sing and dance like windows never even imagined. They let you get your job done in one tenth the time. I'll give you a DOS example. Let's say that I want to get rid of all the jpeg files on my C drive. I can either type "del *.jpg /s" or I can do this.
start->find
Type in *.jpg
Hit search button.
Wait
select first file
scroll down a very long list
hold shift key and click your mouse selecting the entire list
hit the delete key (or do the whole right mouse button dance).
Click OK on the "are you sure" button.

Which one is easier to USE? Which one is easier to LEARN.

"But just because Unix has held out against it this long doesn't make it particularly good at anything except being resilent against MS; that's not all that stunning on technical or usability grounds."

Well considering that no other operating system has been able to stand the onslaught of MS I'd say it was very stong proof that it's a good OS. Despite the fact that MS can throw billions into making NT better and attacking unix the fact that Unix is still standing is very strong evidence that it's technically more desirable. If it wasn't significantly better it would be long dead.

Re:WindowsXP in the year 2401

[SuiteSisterMary]

Well, whatever you're typing in, it's obviously not English. Otherwise, you'd be familiar with concepts such as capitalization, puncuation, English grammar and sentance structure, and the fact that there are only two English words that are a single character long.

XP Home is CRIPPLED.

[MsGeek]

The biggest problem with XP Home is how they neutered networking support.

For instance, with my W98SE box, I can login to my Windows 2000 Server box and join the domain I set up there. It's not the same support as my W2K Pro box, but the differences are technical minutiae.

You won't be able to do that with XP Home. The only networking XP Home will be able to do is peer-to-peer, NetBEUI over TCP/IP. XP Home will NOT be able to join a domain, period. They're doing this to force companies with 2K domains to buy Pro rather than Home.

One good thing: W2K Pro CDs will drop down in price at the computer fairs when XP arrives. It's faster and better than XP and it makes 9x feel like the toy OS it is. So far, no BSODs here at Catseye Labs with W2K.

One day, we will be able to stand back and see that 2K was the high-water mark for M$ operating systems. With all the unnecessary crap that M$ is loading into XP, the ugly interface, Product Activation, phoning home, etc. etc. etc, M$ is basically doing to itself what the DOJ couldn't do. Now is the time for Linux to get its act together and make a desktop experience that is easier, better and faster than XP. Shouldn't take much. Mandrake with KDE is almost there, IMHO.

Re:Windows Xp May Be Ok

[joneshenry]

As Microsoft for XP is licensing the CD burning technology from Roxio itself, I doubt that it is going to destroy the market for CD-burning software. This is a win-win partnership similar to what Microsoft has had with Symantec for many years. Just because MS Windows consumer operating systems have defragmentation and system monitor programs already bundled doesn't damage Symantec's sale of much more comprehensive product bundles such as Norton SystemWorks. Actually from these press releases I get the impression that Roxio is trying to use their product to leverage themselves into a CD-burning/backup troika. Also I believe that new releases of MS operating systems give Roxio further opportunties to make money off of people who purchase new products.

What exactly would be the point of Microsoft's eliminating CD-burning competition? The current strategy of simply licensing technology from someone with expertise such as Roxio makes much more sense.

When I hear complaints about Microsoft's bundling with Win9x and beyond, how come I never hear anyone complaining about the biggest victim of bundling: Trumpet Software's Trumpet Winsock. So had Trumpet been located in the US instead of Australia, would it have had a legitimate antitrust complaint versus Microsoft? Before Windows 95, Trumpet was quite often bundled with ISPs' installation software packages, and it was not considered a big deal that the customer would have to eventually purchase the product. How come no one complains on how "bundling" cost Trumpet Software untold billions in revenues?

Re:To bad for MS...

[Blue Neon Head]

Oh, MS will still sell XP aplenty. After all, anyone who buys a new system will get it, whether they like it or not.

The private buyer pays a far, far higher price.

[Futurepower(tm)]

The private buyer pays a far, far higher price for Microsoft products than do large manufacturers.

Microsoft's major buyers are large manufacturers. Microsoft does what they want, which is make slower systems that require more powerful hardware.

Note that Microsoft no longer gives a full CD with every computer. You get only a recovery CD. If you use it, you must re-install all your applications.

Re:viva xp

[coats]

Linux distributions include choices! I can pick what I want from those choices -- which editor, which word-processor, which web-browser, which audio software, which image and drawing tools, and lots more.

I know my own job, my own needs, my own cognittive style. I am not forced into having to use stuff from some a** named Bill who thinks he knows my job better than I do.

Re:Transparent Encryption? - E4M

[dasunt]

Not totally transparent, since you have to "mount" the drives (actual partitions or just a virtual drive saved in a file), but E4M is a wonderful (free, OS) encryption scheme that works across all windows versions (although win98 has a shutdown bug).

Price is right, and it works fine for me. Although NTFS has a built-in encryption on its filesystem that is truly transparent, but since I can't see the code behind it, I don't trust it.

Re:Windows Xp May Be Ok

[_ganja_]

Your comment is totally uninformed; MS licenced Trumpet Winsock for Win95. These are the kind of uninformed comments generally get modded up though, at least I should be thankful that your's (so far hasn't been).

BTW, did you know that XP Pro has native .zip file support... Dunno where it came from although it looks a lot like zip folders. There goes Winzip's business model.

Re:Windows Xp May Be Ok

[cvd6262]

Apple just built a CD burner into their OS. Steve Jobs even took some shots at Roxio when they announced it at Mac World.

Of course, Apple doesn't hold a monopoly, so they can live by different rules than MS.

The funny thing is that some Mac users have told me the reason that it's okay for Apple to do this (when it's not for MS) is that the CD burner is an integrated part of the OS.

Re:WindowsXP in the year 2401

[AntiNorm]

The page for Home Full [compusa.com] states that WindowsXP won't be ready until "Thursday, November 01, 2401".

That's just the release date M$ is predicting if they had to remove all the bugs and bloat, which they don't.

Re:Ridiculous upgrade restrictions?.rape you 4 $$$

[cworley]

>I was shocked to see that the only upgrade path from Win 2000 is to the XP Professional Edition, which costs $100 more than the Home Edition.

Does anybody know the history of DOS/Windows pricing?

It seems hardware competition is fierce; greater functionality and lower prices to the point of putting memory manufacturers out of business.

I'd like to see a comparison between PC hardware and MS OS prices.

Does anybody know a link to this info?

2600

[CrimsonHat]

Did anybody else find it funny that the final build number on Windows XP was 2600? Do you think the programmers there wanted to be cool and go along with the "hacker" ideal of 2600 magazine? When our group got the latest build, I started laughing my ass off, but nobody in the group got it.

I'm not really in a position to boycott it since I have to write software for it. From what I've seen it's not too bad, and has some new features that W2k didn't have. Overall, I'm probably going to stick with W2k on my desktop for quite a while still.

One other fairly positive thing that I have to say about MS is their support for developers. Mac came out with OS X and then tried to give support to developers. Just try and find drivers for OS X and it's already been out for months! MS lets developers know a couple of years ahead of time that they are going to have a new OS come out. They give developers a bunch of Betas to work with, a bunch of release candidates, so that by the time they have the OS released, there actually are a good amount of drivers released for the OS. Apple released an OS which was basically a beta that people had to pay money for, and then didn't really give driver developers good support. Sure Windows XP isn't going to support every piece of hardware ever made, but I bet when it's finally released it will support a lot more than OS X does.

XP support for copyright 'protection' BAD

[canadian_right]

Windows XP has built in support for many new 'copyright protection' features. Why buy an OS that ASSUMES you are a software pirate?

SAP - Secure Audio Path, adds static to music if not 'authenticated.
WPA - Windows Product Activation - can deativate software if it thinks its running on the 'wrong' computer.
No Java, MS takes its toys home
Built in support for Passport - let the spam begin.
Before the Hard-drive manufactures came to their senses it was rumoured that XP would fully support the 'copyright' protection scheme IBM thought up for HDs. Anyone have info?

For more info see these fun loving fanatics:
XP and Privacy/Copyright

Windows XP FAQ

[Strangely Unbiased]

From someone who's running XP RC2:

- If you have a legal copy, WPA is no problem. You just click 'Next' , then 'Finish'.Done. And Microsoft can't use your PC spec info; it's a one-way hash code.(BTW, it's been cracked.)

- It's not bloated: It runs perfectly fine on my p250 128MB, with visual styles enabled. All the patronising features (simple file sharing and that puppy on the search bar) can be easily disabled.)

- It's stable.Mostly.

- It's got a pretty nice stealth firewall (grc.com's ShieldsUP says so, anyway.). And the built-in cd-writing's convenient too.

- It DOES run every one as administrator by default, for Win9x legacy reasons. Not hard to change that, but the default 'Limited User' profile has problems with older apps and games. The trick is to put the users in the predefined 'Power Users' group.

- It's still Windows. If you hate Windows, it probably won't change your mind, but nevertheless it's the best Windows to work with.

It's got lots of other features too, so if you have a question before you consider upgrading, I'm here for you(so nice of me isn't it)

And so it begins....

[mikethegeek]

XP will be the doom of Microsoft. One day in the future, XP will be studied along with the Apple III, IBM Micro Channel Architecture, and Intel/Rambus as an example of corporate arrogance trumping common sense with DISATEROUS results.

As one /. poster has put it (brilliantly, I might add), that with XP, Microsoft has done to itself what the DOJ never could have done: Release a product that will ENABLE competition, and possibly ruin the company.

XP is the product of the two biggest sins a corporation can commit: arrogance and contempt. It's arrogant in that it's overpriced, offers NOTHING new over WIndows 2000, and in fact, takes away from it.

The "Home" version strips you of network capability, unlike 98/95/ME/2000, it CANNOT be used as a client on anything but a peer-to-peer network. It won't allow you to log into a NT domain. I haven't tested it to see if Novell Client 32 will allow logins to a Netware server, but I'd suspect that it's broken as well. It has no support for SMP at all (though 9X didn't either), to get SMP requires the $200 "Professional" version upgrade. None of this is because XP can't do SMP or serve as a network client, it's because MS chose to deliberately CRIPPLE it, and yet sell it for a radically increased price over ME/98.

The Home version upgrade is 100% more expensive than ME! (ME could be had for $50 to upgrade from 98). For what benefit? None that I can tell. Sure, you are likely to gain some of 2000's stability, but you will surely lose game compatibility (which is why the deplorable Win `9X is still the gamers OS). Is that worth $100? Not to me. And I'd bet not to many joe blows.

MS comits the sin of contempt with Product Activation, and it's spyware nature. XP "decides" how far to let you upgrade your hardware before requiring reactication. Which can lose you your data if there is but the SLIGHTEST glitch in this process. MS is better known for creating "unintended consequences" in it's "features" than it is in writing bug-free code. XP constantly monitors your hardware configuration,assigning it a "checksum" number via some formula, and if it gets too far from the "checksum" number originally generated when you installed it, it will CEASE to function.

I hope they have those support lines well staffed.

That's right, now on a XP system, the system owner does NOT have root access to the machine! This is something no MS OS has attempted to do before.

Even if XP didn't have the fatal flaws of arrogance and contempt, the fact that it's a 100%-200% increase in price over 9X alone would be enough to doom it. In this time of economic crisis, particularly in the tech sector, a 100+% increase in the "MS Tax" will do nothing but slow sales, ESPECIALLY when you expect MS to make licenses of ME, 98, and 2000 scarce quickly.

The "window" of opportunity for Linux is open.

Re:And so it begins....

[Anonymous Coward]

The licensing on XP is tied to the system's BIOS. Upgrade your CD-ROM...no reactivation required. For most home users, who don't even know what a BIOS is, they will likely never need to re-register XP.

Most of the new hardware requirements are due to the new GUI, don't like it? It can easily be switched back to "classic" mode from the start panel. Thus XP will require similar hardware requirements as Win2k.

And as for the Home edition connectivity issues, Client for Netware is not included on the home edtion, but Client services for MS networks is. Beta versions of XP Home DO allow you to access resouces on a domain, just as 9.x clients. But they can't "join" the domain like win2k or XP pro clients...meaning no Group Policy, etc.

They had to give big business a reason to spend $ for the Pro version.

Re:And so it begins....

[Pengo]

Not that I am the MS XP lover, but a few points I must disagree on.


XP is the product of the two biggest sins a corporation can commit: arrogance and contempt. It's arrogant in that it's overpriced, offers NOTHING new over WIndows 2000, and in fact, takes away from it.


Hmm... Bold statement. Do you have anything other than blind rage to back that up?


The Home version upgrade is 100% more expensive than ME! (ME could be had for $50 to upgrade from 98). For what benefit? None that I can tell. Sure, you are likely to gain some of 2000's stability, but you will surely lose game compatibility (which is why the deplorable Win `9X is still the gamers OS). Is that worth $100? Not to me. And I'd bet not to many joe blows.


Hmm.... Isn't stability a pretty big thing for the home user? ;-) Lets face it, thats what drove a lot of people from windows to linux in the early days.. Quite frankly, the world will be a much better place with Windows running w/out crashes. 9x->ME was a joke, thats why it was a complete flop. MS admited that the sales where disapointing.. who won in the end? The consumer.. they made a choice not to buy it. I made a choice to buy Windows 2000 at home for my gaming/family computer because it's compatible with all the games I enjoy and it's VERY stable.
As to what I have heard on the street, XP is has had almost flawless backward compatibility and various 'compatibility' switches to help you if you have compatibility problems.

If XP sucks so bad, people won't buy it.. (ie. ME).. As for me, I am quite happy with Windows 2000. (I also have a dual processor PIII system) and won't be upgrading to XP .. but at least I have a choice.. even on the windows platform. I will probably be able to use my copy of Windows 2000 for the next 2-3 years without 'having' to upgrade either. For $200 thats not so unreasonable is it? I pay more than that in distributions (Mandrake) over 2 years. I wouldn't think of it as unfair. Your predictions are a bit agressive and in the end the consumer will win. There are alternatives and MS is facing huge competitors (IBM, Sony, Sun, Apple, HP, AOL/TW, etc). Someone would rise and offer a -real- alternative(s), if the situation became so hideous.

Re:And so it begins....

[Kanasta]

The worst bit is that people have to pay to call support

Re:And so it begins....

[Nailer]

The "Home" ... CANNOT be used as a client on anything but a peer-to-peer network. It won't allow you to log into a NT domain...iIt has no support for SMP at all. MS chose to deliberately CRIPPLE it, and yet sell it for a radically increased price over ME/98.

98 can't join a domain or do SMP either. Neither can its equivalent, XP home. Ho hum.

The Home version upgrade is 100% more expensive than ME! For what benefit? None that I can tell.

Well, asides from the stability, XP is specifically designed to be more legacy compatible than 2000 was. Oh, and multiple user GUI logins, and a nicer help and support, and Media Player 8, more readable text, and a newer, different version of Windows Explorer.

As one /. poster has put it (brilliantly, I might add), that with XP, Microsoft has done to itself what the DOJ never could have done: Release a product that will ENABLE competition, and possibly ruin the company.

hehe. Because MS allows you to uninstall all 300k of the Axtive X loading system known as IEXPLORE.EXE (and not the stacks of activex control it actually calls?). In case you haven't realized, Mozilla failed, spectacularly. Galeon's and Konq and Opera are usable on Linux, but Window users use IE because THEY PREFER IT.

The Home version upgrade is 100% more expensive than ME! For what benefit? None that I can tell. Sure, you are likely to gain some of 2000's stability, but you will surely lose game compatibility (which is why the deplorable Win `9X is still the gamers OS). Is that worth $100?
Not to me. And I'd bet not to many joe blows.

I'd bet otherwise. In fact, I bet you ten US dollars, redeemable on 20030101, that XP is not widely viewed upon as the downfall of MS. Something else might be, but not XPs lack of quality.

Unfortunately, many Linux users still don't get basic usability. Why do most Linux distributions sort their apsp by toolkit rather than function? When was the last time your parents on their Windows box asked for a MFC (as opposed to VCL or other) app...oh, and it can it be a web browser.

Better yet, read the modem HOWTO for a laugh.

Which can lose you your data if there is but the SLIGHTEST glitch in this proces

That is false. You will not lose you your data. If you perform certain upgrades, you your os might require you yourself to call MS within a few days and reactivate you your OS. Most people don't perform such upgrades so frequently. Even techies don't, and when you do, its only a phone call.

For the record, I use and adore Linux, and write books and articles that try and make things easier for people to do so. But I use Linux because its good and because I like Open Sourc,e not because of somerreligios anto MS zealotr, that prevents me from recognizing the good bits that are worth stealing. Oddly enough, I find Linux users that matter (i.e, not me) share the same view - the GNOME and KDE folk seem to be able to recognize that MS actually does some pretty good work, and works on taking elements of that into their various apps. In fact every major influential Linux person I've ever had the chance to meet - Alan Cox, Richard Gooch, John Hall, Marceij and George from Ximian, Raph Levine, etc. etc. has been a reasonable and clear headed person who can actually recognize that MS comes up with the odd good idea. Which is good - because we can copy them.

And that redeems my faith in Linux after listening to the Slashdot trolls condemn everything MS does, including the things it will be important to emulate if Linux is to have any chance of world domination.

Re:And so it begins....

[mikethegeek]

"98 can't join a domain or do SMP either. Neither can its equivalent, XP home. Ho hum. "

Excuse me, but I've set up MANY a `98 and ME system to run as clients on a NT domain, including this machine I'm writing this on right now (can dual boot into 98SE, and one of my servers runs 2000 Server).

Either I'm better than I ever thought I was, or else those versions of `Doze supported it.

XP Home will NOT allow you to log into a domain, because MS wants to force all businesses to use the twice as expensive "Pro" version. It's a MS tax increase, nothing more. They took OUT vital features for no good reason other than profit motive.

And the worst downturn in the tech industry since the early 1980's is NOT the best time to be doubling your prices. That alone (aside from WPA, MS's BSA extortion racket, etc), is enough to dissuade the corps from upgrading, and to give them motivation to try an alternative.

"That is false. You will not lose you your data. If you perform certain upgrades, you your os might require you yourself to call MS within a few days and reactivate you your OS. Most people don't perform such upgrades so frequently. Even techies don't, and when you do, its only a phone call. "

Will it? You assume that the code that does this will be foolproof. I've seen 9X machines LOSE PNP hardware after rebooting before, and automatically reinstall drivers. I can't say that I've seen a 2000 or NT box do that, but it's not out of the question. Microsoft HARDLY has a reputation for writing flawless code. WPA is a new CORE OS component, that has only been around for a few months now. Hardly long enough to test thouroughly, especially on the diverse configurations that will be seen once it's out of beta.

Also, I RESENT paying $100-$200-infinity for an OS, only to have the fucking OS decide not to run until I "call home" (what happens if it's on an evening, or a weekend, or a holiday?) before letting me at my data.

You see, Microsoft is ASSUMING all their customers are thieves, and are guilty of running a WAREZ `Doze until proven innocent. That is not good PR, and alone will cost them money. In fact, I'd bet that the cost of staffing the support lines ALONE because of this "feature" will eat away far more than any additional revenue they'd get because people who otherwise wouldn't buy a legit copy.

Re:And so it begins....

[mikethegeek]

"The worst bit is that people have to pay to call support"

Even worse is if they get it preloaded, you can't even call support at all (other than their 900 number).

MS convieniently "cost-shifts" all support for OEM versions to the OEM. Which hardly justifies the slightly lower price for OEM software.

It's not an unsafe bet (given MS's history of bug-infested code) to bet that there will be serious bugs in WPA that will cause the system to just DIE suddenly because a new mouse, keyboard, printer, etc was added.

Which is why I'm all in FAVOR of it being in there! WPA could be the death of MS. The more inconvienient and expensive MS makes it to own Windows (especially in a business), the MORE likely people will look to alternatives.

Re:And so it begins....

[mikethegeek]

"You've overstated the upgrade cost. Historically, the retail price for Windows (not NT/2000) upgrades was $89."

Historically, MONTHS, or even YEARS after the release, you are correct, a `Doze upgrade sells for $89. However, the past few releases, notably `98SE and ME, sold for much less at release. You are correct in stating that they were just minor upgrades (bug fixes that should have been free), but then, XP Pro is also a VERY minor upgrade from 2000, yet costs $200 to upgrade to. In fact, it's a downgrade, when you consider the (holey) firewall (which I predict will go over as well as MS's anti-virus software they put in DOS 6.0), and WPA.

When you also consider that XP Home is a similarly minor upgrade from `98SE or ME, when you SUBTRACT the network functionality that has been stripped, it hardly seems worth $100 there either. Networks at home are getting more and more common these days, especially for internet broadband sharing. MS has just made it impossible to use their "home" OS to be a client of any sort of secure network, when previously this existed.

Re:And so it begins....

[mikethegeek]

"Now take a look at XP. It is, visually, very impressive. Ergo, the user thinks it is a very advanced version and decides that it is better. "

Actually, I think XP takes a huge step BACKWARDS from the very clean, practical 2000/ME GUI. The bad 70's shag carpet color-overload "kindergarden" GUI is an insult. Actually, it's a sign that MS couldn't think of anything USEFUL to add to the GUI, so just decided to change the colors radically and make the buttons bigger. Whee!

MS changed the GUI only to make it LOOK different because they are banking on consumers and IT managers to think just because it LOOKS new, that the OS beneath it must be LOTS better, when nothing can be further from the truth. XP is a downgrade from 2000, not an upgrade, and it is debatable as to whether XP Home is even a significant upgrade from 98/ME.

You can change back to the 2000 GUI in XP, which is something I did quickly on each test machine I had to run it on.

Re:And so it begins....

[mikethegeek]

"The licensing on XP is tied to the system's BIOS. Upgrade your CD-ROM...no reactivation required. For most home users, who don't even know what a BIOS is, they will likely never need to re-register XP."

And what happens if you have to FLASH your BIOS to fix a bug or add support for hardware? Time to call home...

"Most of the new hardware requirements are due to the new GUI, don't like it? It can easily be switched back to "classic" mode from the start panel. Thus XP will require similar hardware requirements as Win2k"

Huh? Not true! The GUI is nothing more than a "skin". The old GUI is just another "skin" (like Mozilla, which has a new look, but also has the Netsacpe 4.x GUI option). Changing to that kind of engine is what accounts for the increase in RAM/CPU the GUI takes, NOT what skin you run on it.

Re:WindowsXP in the year 2401

[Datafage]

If you're going to flame someone for grammar, make damn sure your post is flawless...

Re:Top 10 reasons XP kicks ass

[ThatComputerGuy]

10) Remote assistance lets support people connect to people's machines and fix problems over the internet.

You mean we don't have to even try to get BO onto Windows boxes anymore? MS is going to integrate it into XP for us? Sweet!

Bullshit

[sheldon]

Today what is the situation?

Roxio has a monopoly in CD recording software by way of CD Creator. Roxio dictates to manufacturers how to do the hardware interface. Roxio charges an extremely HIGH price to consumers to obtain this software.

I had to upgrade from CD Creator v3 to v4 for Win2k compatibility. Roxio wanted like $90 for this upgrade.

I was able to buy a brand new CD-RW drive with bundled CD Creator for $99. A new 10X drive which was faster than my old 4X Yamaha.

I would hardly say that Roxio by itself has been benefiting consumers.

Besides, all Microsoft has done is license the software from Roxio and include it in WinXP by default.

If anything this is an example of how bundling can benefit consumers.

Chances are, the Roxio software in WinXP is limited in some fashion. Obviously Roxio did this in order to leverage sales of their Deluxe product.

But since WinXP contains some rudimentary support for CD-R drives in some fashion we now have a standard! Hardware makers can write drivers that plug into the existing WinXP OS. Software makers of all sorts can leverage the existing CD-R handling and create more full featured writing programs.

I see this as increasing consumer well being, similar to the way Microsoft increased our ability to network when they integrated TCP/IP into Win95 and eliminated the need to buy third party products like LANtastic.

Re:Bullshit

[sheldon]

That's like saying Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly because of Apple and Linux.

Linux isn't the alternative, it's the standard

[Penguinoflight]

So what if the normal user can't use Linux, they can't use Windows either. Face it, Redhat 7.1 is much less trouble to install than Windows, fact is that the Average user doesn't understand Windows either, so Why rant about why they don't understand windows also? When the pc manufacturers come to an agreement to not ship windows anymore, we will be rid of that problem. Here's why.

IBM, Compaq, and HP have reasons to dislike Microsoft, they make up probably nearly half of the manufactured computers, throw in companies like gateway, who would do it just to make an extra $100 (windows is expencive), and you leave people having to get a specialist to install windows for them, or have one custom built! Linux could work on the desktop through that route, or by apealing to the gamers (convince id software to no longer support windows). Of course other game companies would follow.

Why would that help? think about windows 3.1 vs dos... 3.1 had better office stuff, better internet capability, and it was easier to use. Yet, Dos was still the major setup, until windows 95 came along, and supported games, well. Which is still the only thing that windows9x/me does better than anyone else.

prices from June 1990

[Dr. Awktagon]

Just for shits and giggles, here are some prices from a June 1990 Byte magazine (the one with a rave review of Windows 3.0):

Windows 3.0 retail: $150

Price of a Dell 386 with color monitor and 40mb hard drive, 512K, 16MHz, a midrange system for running Windows: $2,399

Price of a 25MHz 486, a high-end system: $5,295

No conclusions but I thought maybe somebody would find this interesting!

Re:prices from June 1990

[ikekrull]

What amazes me is that the 512K 386 running Windows 3.0 machine offered a more consistent and useful UI than my P3/500 with 256MB of RAM running Mandrake 8.0

The Pinnacle

[BSDevil]

I'm a Windows user - the folks use the machine, I like games and Word, etc... for reasons - and I see no point in shelling out all this cash for XP. Even if my machine could support it (which it can't), I see nothing really groundbreakingly "new" or "special" in XP. For my money and computational power, Windows98 is the pinnacle of OSes that Microsoft has put out. The only reason I'm not saying 95 is because I like my USB. 95/98 wasn't that bad a Windows release; not too sugar-coated and it did what I needed it to do; nothing more, nothing less, and it allowed me to tweak as I pleased.

Give me a break

[raistlinne]

What he posted wasn't even remotely brave. Slashdot is not a pro-linux environment and hasn't been for a long time. Every MS/Linux article now has hords of posts like this, i.e. hords of posts talking about how MS products have upsides and linux products have downsides, and linux isn't for everyone (often mixed in with some idiotic thing about linux users looking down their noses at beginners).

I don't know what /. you're reading, but his post is really very redundant. Not to mention silly - if it installed fine, you generally need to learn how to do things like using the gimp - as if learning to use photoshop is substantially easier. Using netscape doesn't change from windows, and none of your standard word processing software is difficult to use (I expect that he's not using TeX).

But oh well. It's hip to bash linux here on /., and then to claim that it's actually dangerous to do so, or at least any more dangerous than to post anything here. Please stop with the calling pro-MSers brave. They might have been on /. three years ago - not now.

Microsoft licensed Trumpet Winsock? Prove it

[joneshenry]

Okay I'll play. I've read quite a few accounts of Peter Tattam's adventures starting Trumpet Software including this and this. I don't see any mention anywhere of Microsoft licensing Trumpet Winsock. Nor is any such thing asserted in the alt.winsock FAQ. The closest I could come is Tattam's comment in the interview: "I had by that time established a good reputation producing internet software and was even offered a job by Microsoft as a consultant at one point. I'm glad I didn't take it up..:-)"

As O'Reilly states, WinSock is more a specification, a set of APIs. Anyone could write an implementation. Several did. It just so happens that Peter Tattam wrote the best for Windows 3.1. Also he wrote a scriptable dialer which back in those days was what a lot of people needed to negotiate the hodgepodge of dial-in methods required by the much less consolidated ISP industry. And Tattam gave his package away as shareware so it could spread very fast.

It gets better though from the perspective of an argument against bundling. There were quite frequent warnings as you can see in the alt.winsock FAQ about having the "right" WINSOCK.DLL installed with all others removed. And with the change to Windows 95, I can remember the huge amount of hype over whether one should go "32-bit". Here's a sample from back then which includes advice to simply remove Trumpet Winsock under certain circumstances.

Unfortunately for the opponents of bundling, the problem with this otherwise perfect example is that it is inconceivable that a modern consumer OS would lack either a TCP/IP stack or a dialer. Trumpet Software had the clear market leader. Microsoft in Windows 95 bundled both its own TCP/IP stack and a dialer DUN. This bundling introduced potential incompatibilities that even led for some to advise uninstalling Trumpet's product. So should the government have had the right to force Microsoft to stop invading this software niche? Should it have mattered that Tattam wasn't the head of a much larger company such as Netscape? Should it have mattered that Tattam wasn't American?

By the way, Trumpet Software is currently developing a new 32 bit OS PETROS.

Windows is easier to use than Linux...or something

[foqn1bo]

To be sure, whenever Slashdot has a story that involves M$ products, everyone gets hot and rustled with the age old "Why the hell do people still use Windows" thread. Primarily I see two arguments that surface:

Windows has better/more software for my needs.

(I would argue with 'better', but point taken).

Windows is and will always be easier to use than Linux.

I am sick and tired of hearing that excuse. And before you mod me down for being a snobbish troll, consider my reasoning first.

Barring great paradigms such as Graphical vs. CL interfaces, I don't believe that there is such thing as a 'More intuitive than another' OS. Obviously Linux has got GUI covered. Face it people, you are good at what you know. The reason that windows users don't think that Linux is easy to learn is because it isn't Windows . When you have spent maybe 10 to 15 years using M$ operating systems, you have grown very used to the way things work there. eg., I want to know the filesize of this document, I rightclick, and select properties. Does anyone really think that a person who has never used a computer before (after learning what a mouse is and does) is going to think "Oh, I think I'll right click on that icon and select 'Properties!" ? Like C++, swimming and Italian cookery, using a particular operating system is a learned skill.

Case in point? I hear that the Macintosh is supposed to be the end-all be-all of OS simplicity and intuitive design. *Yeah Right.* Just ask any windows/other user that is inexperienced with MacOS, and they'll tell you that it is a bloody nightmare. I work in IT at a University and I see this all the time--we have a small enclave of Mac users who are unbelievably frightened of PCs and our PC users are afraid to touch the Macs in fear that they'll cause the dreaded 'OsError' Bomb to come destroy the machine in spite. Not to mention the 'Boop of Death'. (True script involving my friend Renee at the library)

Renee: Ok, I'll just click the...
Mac: 'Boop'
Renee: Ahh! Ok, how about...
Mac: 'Boop'
Renee: Aiee!! I'm trying to close you! Stop Booping!
Mac: 'Boop Boop Boop'


What I'm getting at (and there is a point I suppose), is that making any platform shift is shaky at first. Linux comes naturally for me now, but I spent a good long amount of time in confusion. If we want people to understand computers better and have the ability to make these kinds of migrations painlessly, then they need to be educated about the abstracts of how computers interact with humans, and not through a computer literacy course that deals strictly with an OS. Maybe then ./configure ./make ./make install won't be quite as terrifying.

I won't be watching the Win XP release

[Sadfsdaf]

Personally, I don't give a care weather Windows XP is a success or not, let's be honest here, how will this affect other operating systems? It's just a pretty GUI that you have to buy.. there isn't any massive improvements. Nothing to see here folks, move along now.

What I'll be watching though, is the X-Box release. I'll be HELPING it become madly successful, and I hope all of you do the same. Go out, help out microsoft and BUY AN X-BOX! Why help the Other Side(tm)? Because if X-Box becomes the gaming platform of choice, above Windows, then there IS NO REASON TO USE WINDOWS ANYMORE. Yes, you've heard me right, why do any of us keep a spare windows partition? Yep, games. Windows XP won't affect me, weather I upgrade or not, but if X-Box becomes successful and everyone makes games for it, then i can finally fdisk my windows partition to hell, and so can the rest of you. I can finally convince all my friends to switch over to linux because they'll all be happily playing games on the X-Box.

So Windows XP? What the hell, the masses like it or don't like it I don't give a crap, but with X-Box, you betcherass that I'll be watching closely and helping the MS X-Box movement along ^_^

Re:Windows Xp May Be Ok

[manly]

When I, as a home user, wanted an actual stable Windows OS, I went to Windows 2000, as did quite a few people I know. We did lose some legacy and DOS-based support but AFAIK Windows XP loses most if it as well

Two big problems with this switch:

• Admin'ing Windows2000 is not for the average user.
• Software compatibility.

While Windows2000 (and likely XP) does retain important M$ legacy compatibility, the security model gets in the way. There are still a ton of apps out there (i.e. Turbotax) that require you to run as the Administrator user, or are not even coded to support multiple users (aka profiles).

So in reality, Windows app compatibility remains a problem. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of custom and small 3rd-party apps out there designed for the Win3.x/9x (non)security model. These apps are a pain to integrate properly into WinNT/2000/XP. For a lot of them, you either have to run as Administrator, or loosen up filesystem permissions one by one. Pick your poison.

Re:This is perfect..

[quartz]

It's all about productivity stupid.

I'm SO sick of all this "Windows improves productivity" crap. How the fsck does "rebooting and/or reinstalling every time there's a problem" mean productivity? Let's see, at my company sales/accounting work on a custom application running under Linux, client/server with the clients being diskless computers booting off the network. Time required for adding an extra workstation to the network / replacing a faulty one: 30 seconds. Probability of random isolated errors due to software: 0, because everyone uses the exact same copy of the master filesystem which resides on the server. Everyone else uses Linux stand-alone workstations running StarOffice for office work, and they are quite productive because they have been trained to use StarOffice. Developers' workstations run Linux as well, and being Linux programmers, they're quite productive too. There's only ONE admin who takes care of everything and he's also very productive, since he has an army of shell and Perl scripts helping him. True, he may make more than your average MCSE, but then again, he's way more competent and efficient then an MCSE. Software costs are WAY down, so we can afford more and better quality hardware, any licensing or BSA-induced hassle is totally out of the question, and the average uptime on *workstations* is 3 months. So what exactly are you talking about, when you mention negative effects on end users?

Usability testing

[mattdm]

It's not too late. Have you seen the GNOME usability report from Sun? http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report /report_main.html.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

brain missing?

[Ender Ryan]

A boycott doesn't stop anyone who doesn't want to participate from buying it.

Second, not buying stuff from MS on general principal is perfectly valid, would you buy products from a company owned by Nazi's (or any other evil organization of your choice)? I'm not comparing MS to Nazis, I'm simply demonstrating that maybe there are products you might not want to buy on general principal. Seems a valid reason to me...

disclaimer: "brain missing" isn't supposed to be an insult, I'm just kidding ; )

damn idiot

[Ender Ryan]

Look, I hate zealots, they do nothing but distract from the real issues and make us all look like fools. BUT, you're being a damn idiot, the reason it would be different than FUD is that he would be telling the truth, not half truth, not flat out lies, the plain simple unadultered truth.

Its getting that way for MS Office.

[Nailer]

Seriously, are we approaching the day that windows will cost more than the computer it runs on for most people?

Brand new current model imac - $AU 1800
MS Office:Mac - $AU 950

Its nearly already the case with MS Office.

I Got Your Alternative Standing, Boy!

[Greyfox]

Buy a freaking Imac. That's what I'm going to make my parents buy next time they buy a computer. Apple's got that hold your hand shit the average user loves so much down to a science. Buy hardware, plug it in, have it work. You're not paying significantly more for the box anymore, so why punish yourself?

and you'd be wrong

[Ender Ryan]

with your assumption about me. When people disregard some of the technical advantages *BSD has over Linux I try to find out the real scoop.

The difference isn't in what you could do, it's between what the guy was saying and what MS has done. You were defending MS comparing their tactics to what he was saying, but they are not the same thing at all as MS has attempted to spread blatant lies and misinformation about Linux while he was advocating no such thing at all.

Re:Funny...

[reverius]

Obviously you're not that familiar with multi-tasking yourself... otherwise you'd realize that you have to close a program before you open another one.

RAM isn't infinite, you know.

Wrong info

[rabtech]

I always find it rather pitiful when zealots from any side spew false information to promote their cause... whether it be PC vs Mac or Windows vs Linux, fools on both sides tend to make up more information than they research. For example...

"Linux has this kind of stability ever since version 1.0. Linux separates the kernel from the GUI. Windows NT and 2000 built having the GUI in the kernel. Finally with Windows XP they copy the Linux approach and separate the GUI from the kernel. "

He is dead wrong here. Both in Windows 2000 and XP, the video drivers live in kernel space for performance reasons. But what is called the "Window Station", which takes care of drawing/widgets, et al lives smack dab in user-space, under the guise of csrss.exe, which also happens to provide the entire Win32 API, since the NT kernel itself only has about 200+ APIs collectively called the Executive.

Furthermore, the Window Station has always had both the capability to have multiple desktops, as well as the capability to redirect its output. Why Microsoft waited this long to expose that to end users is a mystery to me.

At any rate, here's how an XP/2K machine works (except for fast-user switching, which is new to XP).

System boots the kernel, loads drivers, etc (XP does nearly all driver loads in parallel following the dependancy tree, and remembers what loaded last time and prefetches that from disk before it is needed.)
Once that process is complete, Window Station 0 is initialized with Desktop 0 -- this is the primary console on which the GINA runs (the GINA provides login/auth, and the screen you see when you press CTRL+ALT+DEL).
Once a user logs in, Desktop 1 is initialized, which is where explorer.exe (the shell) and your programs live.

When a Terminal Services client logs in, a new "Job" is created by the kernel, and Window Station x is initialized within that job space. That Window Station also inits Desktop 0 and 1.

XP Adds the capability to init other Desktops on Window Station 0 as other users, which is where the Fast User switching comes from.

Why Boycott XP? Time for silly consumerism to end

[konmaskisin]

Boycott is perhaps too strong a word - ignore would be more kindly. Besides, you probably can't boycott it indefinitely without significant effort. If you buy consumer computer equipment in the next few years (especially laptops) it will be *forced* upon you whether you like it or not. If the boycott means "give me the choice to not consume this product" and it shakes up suppliers then I'm all for it. I can certainly think of better ways to spend 299$ (US$ .. larger number up here in Canada). Ways that don't involve technology even ... or at least what passes for "technology" in these days of hype.

Hey I'm all for technology, being sort of a geek and all, but it's time for this fascination with truly mediocre and overpriced software to end ... and perhaps with ITC and computers in general. We need to be geeky and technophilic about *REAL* important technology. Shift Magazine's article "Why technology is failing us [and how we can fix it]" will explain:

http://www.shift.com/mag/9.3mag_toc.asp

The stupendous waste of money and capital that was poured into IT/dot.com and that could have gone into more thoroughly revolutionary technology is staggering when you stop to think of it. In reading the Shift piece about Silcon Valley's "non-revolutionary" landscape (traffic jams, malls, SUV's, etc), Ivan Illich's "Ideology of the automobile" and "Tools for conviviality" come to mind: at least there's a place to start grounding technology in human needs ...

In that context Microsoft is not an innovator - it's been proven over and over again; and that just in the area of the IT industry alone. In fact a huge chunk of the IT industry *itself* is more hype than anything else so this makes it even more compelling to avoid spending even more on MS products. Taking into account the fact that, for what we *do* need computers for the free OSes are now more than "good enough" for anything and everything the utter irrelevance of MS as a "technology leader" is clearer than ever.

What Microsoft **is** significant for is its vast pool of capital - which is most likely going to be **horribly wasted** reinventing the wheel, slowly, in a way that benefits shareholders. They are like a huge bank that doesn't have enough loans in play ... IMNSHO the most useful thing they could do now is exit the market intact and redeploy that capital in other sectors (Bill? time to retire!) because there is really nowhere to go but down for a good long while otherwise. But hey, yah gotta love the "free" market: it can't be "free" without vast waste, irrationality, duplication and utterly pointless uses of resources going along with that freedom. We all need to remember *that* the next time some analyst on CNN says "the market" or "the economy" (like they are discrete describable objects) is "adjusting" or that some kind of rational "equilibrium" is being established ...

All the other reasons for "boycotting" MS can be found detailed here http://www.vcnet.com/bms/ - yup, all the bad stuff MS did and then denied while what it really should have been doing was truly innovating. Sorry,.NET and C# are too little too late. It has been proven MS can't play nice and it seems high time to me for them to go sit in the corner for a really long long time.

Meanwhile perhaps someone could buy their cash pool in a breakup firesale and put it to use ...

I just don't understand ...

[Hadean]

After reading all of these comments, I'm really sad to admit that many of them are complete lies (or at least, false accusations). I've been using WinXP since it's RTM last week (being a beta tester, I got a free copy). I'm also a hacker, hardware enthusiast and general computer nerd... So far, it's actually impressed me (and my wife) and am glad to say that I'm quite happy with it.

There seems to be a lot of complaints about the UI: You can turn off the cuteness! There are tons of compaints about the WPA: I changed the motherboard, CPU, RAM and CD-ROM (to DVD-ROM) and still haven't had to call anyone. If I do later, then, presumably it should only take a few minutes... And, plus, we all know it's been cracked already: if we're such enthusiasts, we can crack WinXP so it doesn't complain anymore. The speed? I just finished Max Payne, and it was running at the same speed it did in Win98SE (on my Duron 800, 192megs PC133 system).

Sure, I love Linux. It's a great hobby operating system when it comes to home use. It may be powerful in the business world, but for my uses? It's far too clunky and lacks a huge number of features and utilities that I need to work with. The answers I get? "It's coming!" or "Make it yourself, it's open source!". Those are both silly, considering I'm using an OS only the paranoid will steer clear from that has everything I need, now.

If you're going from Win2k, then yes, here isn't a huge difference and may not be worth the extra money (yet), but I honestly thing it's worth the upgrade from Win98... (of course, I didn't pay for it, so it would all depend on your financial position... rent would be more important, for example).
*shrug* Basically, I'm just getting sick of hearing the same complaints from so many people who haven't even TRIED it yet... (quoting Beta 2 stats and misinformation, such as WinXP Home not supporting dual monitors, is annoying, to say the least).

BoycottXP.com: wrong approach

[screamager]

From the main page of BoycottXP.com:Windows 2000 is the first stable piece of crap that microsoft put out and it isn't that bad.

As long as the people that run this site allow this kind of speech on their main page, they will never be taken seriously and will never get the media attention they're after. What a waste...

Gatesgamel

[phee]

"Papa Geek! Papa Geek!"

"Yes, Geekette? What is it? You're blue with exhaustion!"

"I had to run from the evil Gatesgamel! He shot flying Rainbow Disks at me, labeled with evil symbols like 'XP' and 'Do not make illegal copies of this disk'! He sent his Ballmercat after me! I was nearly geeked to death!"

"Great geek in the morning! Gatesgamel, so close to Geekville? Quick! Everyone! Geek for your lives! And hide your little geeks! Don't let them listen to his words! They'll follow him and never geek again!"

...and that's all I gots to say 'bout XP.

Re: Mathematica

[mj6798]

There are lots of tools like Mathematica. Maxima will do symbolic math and general programming. OCAML, Haskell, and a bunch of other functional language give you the functional programming part of Mathematica. R is more numerically and statistically oriented. Python with VTK and several other packages is more than competitive for numerical and visualization applications.

You can't get exactly Mathematica, but you can get better functionality overall with different open source packages.

Congratulations!

[mj6798]

You just spent $130 for the privilege of learning a proprietary system. Because you will now invest months and years in learning that system, you'll then basically be forced to spend thousands of dollars on the full version once you graduate, since you will already have sunk the cost of learning something.

Are there open source alternatives? You bet. No, not quite the same bundle of functionality, but overall better: Maxima (symbolic math+functional programming), OCAML and Haskell (functional programming), R (graphics, interactive numerical programming), Python (graphics, 3D visualization, interactive numerical programming), and many others.

Immenent death of Microsoft predicted!

[xixax]

I can't find the original article (work's pR0n filter deems ESR's home page to be grossly offensive) but I recall Something along these lines being said about the last Windows release as well. It all reads just like predictions of the death of UseNet.

Windows 2000 will be either canceled or dead on arrival. Either way it will turn into a horrendous train wreck, the worst strategic disaster in Microsoft's history. However, their marketing spin on this failure will be so deft that it will barely affect their hold on the consumer desktop within the next two years.

Is there an echo in here?

Xix.
P.S. I apologise if the above links are broken. I can reach cached copies, but not the pages themselves. Blame the PHBs.

Re:Funny...

[reverius]

What I meant wasn't "closing one and starting another"... it was "closing one once in a while".

My experience with Windows' multitasking varies widely depending on Windows version, but one thing holds true regardless. The number of programs that can be open simultaneously is not infinite. You must close one once in a while, or you tend to get "low on resources" or "out of memory" type errors.

Also, ram is not infinite. Swap file is also not infinite, being defined by free hard drive space, and also by the limits that Windows puts on swap file size when it's done automatically - usually a few hundred megs, depending on the size of your hard drive.

That amount of space can easily be used up if you've got Word, Excel, Outlook, two Internet Explorer windows, a Network Neighborhood browser, Norton AntiVirus, Winamp, RealPlayer, WindowsMediaPlayer (all in the system tray, mind you...) running simultaneously.

I never implied that you should only run one program at once (although that is the safest way in Windows :)) but that you should keep in mind the amount of RAM you have when opening more and more programs recklessly.

Re: Boycott ?

[GreyPoopon]

We'd better expend our time improving free software rather than Boycotting others (if the product is overpriced, it would not make a good sell anyway)

The product is not overpriced -- at least not if you only look at the cost of purchasing it. However, the intangible costs are a little high. Let's see....

• You have to register through the internet (or phone M$) to get the product working....
• If your hard drive dies or Windows XP manages to corrupt itself (like all the previous flavors), you can't just re-install. Instead you get to call M$ and try to convince them that you really are trying to install on the same (albeit repaired) system.
• Don't add memory, a new CD-ROM drive and a new hard drive to your computer -- your XP license will stop working and you'll have to again call M$ to try to convince them that yes, this is the same computer, just upgraded.

No, this kind of crap gives the vendor way too much control over how I use the product. Big brother can just go away. This is just one more reason why I never upgraded the only Windows machine I use at home from the Win 95 installation that was shipped with it.

Please, somebody correct me if these statements no longer correctly reflect how licensing works with Windows XP.

Re:Top 10 reasons XP kicks ass

[Shimbo]

Got me there, I wouldnt know of any other commerical OS that would let you hotswap processors or anything...

I believe you can on high-end Sun boxes now, and high-end Alphas soonish. Powering off and replacing failed redundant units, without halting operation, has been around for years on fault tolerant systems.

I don't get it.

[hawk]

I followed the windows RG link a few days ago when someone sent it to me. In the interests of honesty, I don't and never have used windows. It launches some games for the kids (ok, and an occasisonal game for me). I went from unix to mac and back to unix when I found LyX. So just how is this RG supposed to be different from the current version? In that it takes slightly longer to crash?

I tried everything it displayed; I just can't see the difference. I suppose it's a joke along the lines of Dogbert's new operating system . . .

hawk

Re:Top 10 reasons XP kicks ass

[jallen02]

Hehe, It was sarcasm. I know it has been around. I was just saying. Gee, like that hasn't been doen before. My whole post was a "move along, nothing to see here tone" :)

Help make Microsoft's life miserable!

[Guppy06]

You need two computers for this to work:

Get a retail copy of XP, so they can't complain about EULA violations.

Install it on one of your machines. Register and validate it. Then wipe the partition.

Install it on your second machine. When prompted, call Microsoft and have them re-validate your install on this machine now. Then wipe that partition and re-install back on the first machine.

Repeat hourly until you start getting busy signals when you call their number.

We're going about this the wrong way.

[Dwonis]

We're attacking the Microsoft platform from all the wrong angles. We're trying to tell the public that nobody needs Windows for anything, which is utter crap.

I run Debian most of the time. Occasionally, I boot into Windows for the odd Blizzard game, but that only happens about twice every two weeks. I actually don't mind running Windows at home, because my Windows partition is expendable, so if anything craps out, I just wipe and reinstall. ( Also, since I barely use it, it tends not to break. Go figure.)

Many Windows users' biggest fear is that something will happen that will cause all their hard-worked-on files to be wiped out. For me, this is not a problem because I don't do anything important in Windows.

Rather than telling people that Windows should never be used for anything, and that Linux is better for everything, we should simply tell them that "these are the things that GNU/Linux can do better than Windows, and for anything else, feel free to use Windows if you want." Eventually, that list will grow, and with more Linux users, there will be more Linux-native apps. That, my friends, is how we shall take over the world. [laughs evilly]

Re:Windows Xp May Be Ok

[ncc74656]

hrm.. looks like I still have to get nero though. I can't burn a vcd or svcd.

VCDImager works pretty well for producing BIN/CUE images of (S)VCDs. It's even free (as in speech). You can then use FireBurner, CDRWin, or any other program that handles BIN/CUE images to burn your CDs. I've used VCDImager and FireBurner to make a couple dozen SVCDs...things are really kicking in to high gear now that I can rip video from my TiVo.