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Win95 Lifecycle Draws to a Close
Mr_Perl writes "As many Everquest players discovered recently directx 8.1 is not being made for Windows 95, sending stores everywhere into a frenzy to slap little stickers over the words "Windows 95" on game box system requirements sections. Microsoft has picked November 30th, 2001 as the date that Win95 moves into the unsupported phase of it's career, making it even more useless to those who still keep it around for playing the latest games. Looks like Win98 is slated for execution June 30, 2003."
once Win2k is unsupported, it's product activation time for everyone
And I have a still shrink-wrapped 6.22 upgrade...I wonder if it'll ever be collectable....
Are they going to make a scaled down, slightly less bloated version of their kernel that they sell for less and that we can use for all the latest stuff?
That's exactly what I use Windows 95 for.
I put a copy on my Dad's old P-133 laptop so that he could do word processing for his job (he's not quite Linux ready, and neither is the laptop). It runs. And so do the programs I installed on it.
I know what you might be thinking: "that's old stuff, and old stuff is as supported as it gets on 95." Well...
there are still a lot of products out there that use simple Pentium chips and small memories that keep coming out that could use a good Windows API every now and then.
So what is our recourse for "Lite" systems, if not older versions of the software if Windows is required?
I suppose if we wait a few more years, the Windows clone will be ready, and that could replace it...
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Questions
It always takes so long to execute criminals in this country...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Well DirectX is a high-level interface to low-level drivers, so it's quite possible that the kernel interface for such things is different. Afterall, win98 has to be different somehow, right? Like, besides USB.
While perhaps this isn't the most apropos place to say this, Microsoft's software support track record isn't too bad. I mean if you dig deep enough you'll find Internet Explorer 5 for Windows 3.1 which runs three times as fast and with ten percent the crashes as Netscape 3 (forget about NS 4 on a 486). And as much of a power grubbing monopoly they are, they still support an operating system most people haven't seen in three years.
Face it, the opportunity cost of maintaining any product in the 9x/ME line will continue to rise in the upcoming years. The fact that 95 through ME were essentially the same product with performance tweaks, bug "fixes," and feature additions made it easy(er) to spread DirectX willy nilly. But now we face Windows 2000 which looks like MS already wants to kill and XP, two projects that (supposedly) share minimal common code with their older brethren.
I'm sure most properly designed software that runs on 98 through ME will still run on 95 for years to come. You just won't see the latest gaming patches for it. And who runs Quake IX on Win95, anyway?
MS OSes will be unsupported:
:-)
MS DOS x.xx (December 31, 2001)
Windows 3.xx (December 31, 2001)
Windows 95 (November 30, 2001)
Windows NT 3.5x (December 31, 2001)
Windows 98/98 SE (June 30, 2003)
Windows NT 4.xx (June 30, 2003)
Anyone else find it odd that MS will be supporting DOS, Win 3.x and NT 3.5 a month longer than 95? I mean, seriously. I can count the number of people I know that have win 3.x system on one hand.
I only wish I could do that for people who use 95.
I wonder if Microsoft is not trying to rush the "abandonware" concept. I mean if they can get rid of everything except for their next iterations of WinXP and .NET server, they can probably make up a ton of lost profit from people who don't license "every" copy of Windows they are using. That is the motive behind this in my opinion, I wouldn't be surprised if they accelarate their "unsupport" policy.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
Point taken, however you're missing some critical pieces of info in your argument.
The biggest one is that the Win32 API has not changed since it came out with Win95. The system organization and a number of other things have, but that's stayed the same. That's why all the stuff that says "Reuqires Windows 98 or higher" on the box will all still run in Win95. There are a number of applications out there that require NT or 2000, but I believe that's more for organizational/security reasons rather than API incompatability and many of them you CAN get to work on Win95 with a bit of hacking. Linux, however, has had MANY feature changes, evern major revision of the kernel, and therefore supporting new apps on the old version would become increasingly difficult.
The other point is that Microsoft is a HUGE worldwide monolithic monopolistic corporation (not slamming, just using the words that best describe it) and also has great profit margins and INCREDIBLE sales. The amount it would cost them to support old OS'es compared to the profit they make on new sales is fairly insignificant, especially considering that to have a support contract with M$ is prohibitively expensive for any OS they make/have made. Linux is supported and developed by a worldwide loosely knit group of developers and hackers that has constantly shifting membership. Many OSS/Linux projects do make at least some attempt to support multiple kernel revisions/etc. but for many of them the effort would be just way too much, i.e. grokking 10,000 lines of code someone else wrote 3 years ago and didn't comment at all.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
Until I upgraded my computer, I still had Windows 95 on it. When I replaced the 300 MHz K6-2 processor with a 450 MHz one, I was surprised to see that Windows did no longer run.
The problem was well-known; K6-2 processors of above 350 MHz were incompatible with Windows (or surely, it's the other way around?). A patch was available, but guess what? It only applied to Windows 95 release 2 or later. We poor souls still running the very first Windows 95 release were left in the dark.
After throwing out Windows, the following years were a happy multiboot-story of Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD and DR-DOS. Windows is not missed, other than the occasional urge to play Need for Speed again;-)
Completely untrue -- This is a post regarding a bug in Linux 0.01. And here Linus assigns the maintainer of the 0.01 Kernel. That beats IBM's 7-year maintenance policy.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Your analogy is flawed. What MS is doing is more the equivilant of not making parts to upgrade a '95 Mustang to '02 specs.
Ford makes parts for '95 Mustangs because, (A) They make a profit by selling them, and (B) The market for the parts is there because the original parts have worn out.
None of your Windows 95 code has ceased to function because of wear through use.
Now, I don't happen to like what MS is doing here, and my turn will come when they drop support for Win98, which I have no desire to upgrade, but my Win98 OS will keep operating.
Now when the PC manufacturers stop making hardware it will run on, THEN I'm screwed. I only retired my 8088 Compaq transportable running DOS 5 a couple of years ago. Not because it didn't fulfill the functions that I required of it, but because I couldn't find a replacement for a floppy drive.
KFG
Microsoft is trying to establish the idea that they can kill their products even when people still are using them.
When this happens with Windows XP, you will no longer be able to change parts in an old computer, because doing so would require re-activation, which Microsoft won't make available after a date the company picks. This is a way of forcing users to pay more, not only for software, but for hardware, too. (Microsoft's big customers are hardware manufacturers.)
I really, really don't like Microsoft's abuse. I don't like things like the Registry, which is a database that frequently has errors that cannot be fixed with the tools Microsoft supplies. All settings for most programs are contained in the registry, and if there is bad error, it can be necessary to start over completely, and re-install all programs. For some people with a lot of programs, this can take 20 hours.
I don't like the artificial limitations which cause Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME to crash even though there is plenty of memory available.
I don't like the sloppiness and built-in weak security. This has caused billions of dollars of grief for people all over the world.
I don't like the fact that the operating system re-configures itself without any notice to the user. When there is a problem with a connection, as there often is after a computer is moved, there is no notice that something has changed.
Monopolies are not necessarily bad. Abusive monopolies are terrible.
I am very much looking forward to the time when Linux configuration and documentation are good enough that I can stop supporting Windows completely.
Why does a man who has 70 billion dollars feel that he has to squeeze money from people? Why doesn't Bill Gates relax and make a good product? Does it really make all that much difference to him to make another billion?
--
Senator Biden (and Osama bin Laden) say that the Saudi government cannot continue without U.S. support: What should be the Response to Violence?
Bush's education improvements were
Well, similarly, there are a whole lot of people out there who have a Win9x OS installed, and a bunch of apps that work reasonably well with it, and they'd be quite happy to keep using it. But M$ has decided to discontinue support for Win9x, so in effect, they've decided for the user what they should use.
I'm sorry, but this is totally ridiculous. How are they deciding what the user can't use? It's not like Win95 is not going to work anymore (well, whether it worked or not in the first place is debatable, but that's another post) once it's unsupported, it just means they're not going to patch it anymore. You can use Win95 for the next 50 years if you like, they're just not making new stuff for it.
Sega hasn't "supported" the Genesis/Megadrive in six or seven years, but I can fscking well still play it! Or should they be obligated to keep making new stuff for it, as you seem to be insinuating Microsoft ought to be doing for Win95? Considering how outdated Win95 is at this point, I'm suprised they supported it this long.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Lets have a minute of silence for Windows 95. A quick win32 hack that has been a thorn in Microsofts side ever since. It will be sad to see it go, since after 6 years of bugfixes it was just starting to look really good.
Win95 was the last version of Windows I could make work the way I wanted it to.
It's also the last version I will ever have bought.
I don't blame MS for moving it into the dustbin of history, but I believe they should be asking themselves what it is about their later products that people would still be using Win95.
If Microsoft, as a corporation, were capable of asking themselves such questions, they wouldn't be Microsoft.
Newer! Slower! Bigger! Less Modular! More Microsoft!
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
why would something work on one win32 distro and not on another?
You hit the nail on the head, actually. The base API is the basically the same across versions. So something like, say, a word processor should run on any win32. But it's the "bells, whistles, and included driver support" that prove to be the sticking points... a lot of the fun stuff (games and other multimedia) uses these bells and whistles, as does anything that accesses the hardware directly (drivers, cd burning, etc etc).
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
I haven't seen a registry corruption in years (not since win95, actually). And the reason for that was me mucking around in regedit before I had an idea of what I was doing. Otherwise, smooth sailing all the way. In my mind, the registry is better than a pant load of .ini files. Everything's in one place, so you know that if you need to find something, you just have to fire up regedit (and the trees are generally setup pretty logically, though you can't fault Microsoft for idiot third-party developers).
Without those "artificial limitations", it's likely Win95 never would've seen the light of day. See, much of Windows 95's vaunted instability was due to Microsoft buckling under the pressure of their ISVs. Microsoft had actually removed most of the 16-bit code, and many nasty bugs. However, many ISVs told Microsoft that they weren't going to develop for Win95 immediately, since they felt that their Win3.x apps still had some life, and many OEMs and partners told Microsoft that they would not upgrade to Windows 95 unless some app (depends on the company what app that would be) was available. Thus, to be able to make Windows 95, it needed to have much better backwards-compatibility. Which meant re-introducing lots of nasty 16-bit code and a number of bugs that win3.x developers had come to rely upon. Was it wrong for them to do that? Yes, probably. But when you're a business, making money is important. Had they not, no money would be made. QED.
Erm, choose the OS family you're speaking of. Yes, win9x had very weak security, and for a good reason -- it's a home system, and at the time win95 was written the internet wasn't so popular. Now, if you want to make the "billions of dollars" argument, you'll have to refer to NT, which is not win9x, and has some pretty impressive security features. Yes, there were problems, too (note that IIS is not considered part of the OS), but a lot of that (I'm not saying a majority, but a lot) came from admins who had no clue what they were doing when it came to NT security. My point? Pick one or the other -- either you're talking about win9x and the weak security argument holds up, or you're talking about NT and the "billions of dollars" argument could make a fair case, but not both.
I'm assuming you're referring to the fact that Windows networking defaults to DHCP. Don't you think the same thing would happen on any other OS that uses DHCP to get an IP address?
Either you're very naive and have no clue how publicly-traded businesses work, or you're deliberately trolling. I'll assume the former, as it's up to the moderators to decide the latter. Okay, quick lesson in the economics of a publicly-traded coporation: That money Microsoft makes does not go directly into BillG's pocket. Microsoft is responsible to its shareholders to continue to be profitable. It does that by releasing product. In the cycle of product development, there comes a point where you have to call it "good enough" and release it so that you can sell it and a) recoup your R&D costs, and b) hopefully make a profit to keep your shareholders happy. This is what Microsoft does. Yes, Microsoft, just like any other group of developers in the world, would love to sit on a product until it's 100% perfect. Doing that, however, is economic suicide. I'm not even talking just the loss of a monopoly position. Microsoft can survive without that. I'm talking about disappearing off the face of the free market. You can't run a business designed around selling product without releasing product. It's just not possible.
An awful lot has changed in the Win32 world since Windows 95 premiered, not the least of which is the latest switch to the NT kernel for the consumer OS as well as the "pro" OS. This I think is the main reason Microsoft is abandoning Win95 support--it makes sense to stop supporting the crashy Win9x kernel as quickly as possible, now that the home version of the OS is built on NT. Let's face it: Win9x is a huge pain in the ass and support nightmare for average joes. They're always mucking something in that delicate little ecosystem up, and needing help. Compared to Win9x, WinXP is practically uncrashable and much harder for home users to screw up. The sooner Win9x is retired, the better for everyone, not just MS. And that process begins with retiring each release in turn.
Also, even within the Win9x world Windows 95 is a nightmare. The original release doesn't even support USB and can be a pain just to establish a net connection. It has drivers for, well, almost nothing beyond very bland generic basic hardware--and home users aren't very prone to updating drivers manually. Which reminds me, in the original release, no functional Windows Update to get the system updates for most people. Plus, there are three distinct flavors of Win95, and just try asking a home user "Well, is it Win95 A, Win95B, or Win95C? Well, right-click on 'My Computer' and select 'About this computer', then read off the very very long number..." And any recent USB devices can be very flaky even on the Win95 versions with USB support.
And even non-USB hardware may not work on Win95. Some hardware vendors have abandoned support for Windows 95, long before MS is abandoning it. Just try to get supported Win95 drivers for a brand new ATI video card if you isbelieve--their website explicitly disclaims all support for Win95; so, maybe Win98 drivers will work, maybe not.
The problem is made worse when considering WinME, and how the subtle changes made to ME to keep average joes from seeing any DOS underpinnings broke some drivers and code. Consequently, that leaves a hardware vendor or software maker with supporting Windows 95's lack of all features and libraries in later versions, Win98's much better "completeness" of libraries and features and compatibility, WinME's not-total-compatibility with Win98 thanks to its stupid "features", Windows NT which is even more archaic in terms of compatibility and libraries and worse to support than Windows 95, Win2k and its quirks, and finally WinXP which is the new standard in the MS world. Or, they can require Win98 or Win2k minimum, as many are already doing. A lot of hardware and software makers probably don't even test on Win95 anymore even if they do claim Windows 95 will work with their product, since most of the time it *probably* will, in one way or another.
So, I think it's great that MS is dumping Win95 support at last, and not releasing new packages like DX 8.1 for it. Now, I'm all for backwards compatability--in a recent post, I even lamented that nVidia doesn't seem interested in either including rudimentary Glide support in their drivers or releasing what code they can for the Glide API, for the sake of continuing to be able to use a few great Glide games that are out there. But that's a far cry from dumping support for a 6 year old OS when Win98SE runs everything Win95 can and a lot better. After all, would you expect a Linux distro compiled in 1995 to run most apps compiled today perfectly? No--libraries have changed, and a whole lot of code everywhere has been updated since then. Win9x has always strived for compatability, so the situation is much better with Win95, but surely it's time to drop any official support.
That said, I went to the MS support download site about a month ago to download all the Windows updates to keep handy, since I have copies of all flavors and like to set up archaic OSes in VMware, and I couldn't find most of the Win95 updates. There was a download for administrators of all of them, but the link is broken now.
So, offhand, can anyone think of a place to easily obtain all of the Win95 updates at once?
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
This is so goddamn true, and has never even occurred to the mainstream press. Or it has and they are just ignoring it. Sometime in the future, probably after the 2003 "end of life" for WIn98, WindowsXP .NET will appear, and MS will say "We no longer reactivate unsupported products" - i.e., Windows XP.
This is the reason I am going for Windows 2000 because hopefully by the time games are no longer made to work on it, say by 2003 or 2004 (whenever the future .NET/XP codebase splits from the 2k one irrevocably), Linux will be mature enough to be a true alternative (playing catch-up with Win32 by KDE and GNOME is not my idea of an alternative, unless you are a MacOS freak who thinks that running Office 98 on MacOS really is "Thinking Different").
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
It makes sense for Microsoft to do this. Other companies do similar things. It isn't free for Microsoft to keep supporting old software.
Microsoft has big labs full of computers, and testers who work in these labs. If they support DirectX on Win95, that means they need to run tests on Win95, which means they need computers set up and running Win95, and they need to pay the testers who will run all the tests on Win95. When the testers find bugs, the DirectX developers need to fix the bugs, too. None of this is free.
It's not that Microsoft will be going out of their way to make sure things break on Win95; they just won't pay any attention to Win95 anymore. Stuff might even work, especially since MS will still be testing against Win98, which is similar to Win95.
One of the things I like about HP: they have an official policy that they support their products for five years after they stop selling them. Microsoft seems to have chosen a similar guideline of about five years after they stopped selling stuff. That's not bad.
It's true that when everything older than WinXP is dropped, that you won't be able to buy any non-activated MS software new. By then I expect to be running 100% Linux, including games, so I'm not worried about it, but even if I were there is a huge pool of Windows software out there at swap meets, on eBay, etc. It will still work as well as it ever did.
MS isn't doing anything evil or unexpected here. Support can't last forever.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I'm not being sarcastic here (although I do shake my head), but they are a company that makes money. The way they used to make money was by releasing their OS in increments (... 3.*, 95, 98, 2K, ME) every few years. But it's getting ridiculas as people own one of their OSes for a year before the new one comes out. Their customers sit on their old versions for years before upgrading ...
...
... for now ..
So how do MS make sure that they have a sustainable income? They create an OS that is ever changing, "Rent your software!".
Ok, if they had come up with that idea in 1995, then they would have achieved their sustainable income (with minimal effort) and be on easy (easier) street. But they have to get rid of these older OSes that people won't upgrade. How do they make people go to XP? Start cutting out support of course!
So in a few years, XP will be it, MS can maintain their income with minimal effort and the hardware industry will we happy supplying new PCs for an ever growing OS that will make older PCs whine and cripple under its fluffiness
I guess the point is that it's business. That is the whole deal with capitalism. I'm not a communist, I'm just baffled at everyone's amazment at this issue. It's a dog eat dog world and MS the fattest dog
"Yeah Tommy, before Zee Germans get here
"
When it's as simple as checking a box during installation (or 5 minutes on the phone, if don't have an internet connection), sends no personal data, and is very non-intrusive (you have to do some major hardware upgrades to force a re-activation, and XP doesn't need the customary yearly re-install like the win9x line), what's the proble
m? It's simply a company protecting their IP.
"
Advance the clock five years. Windows XP is now 'unsupported'. You have a hard disk crash and need to reinstall your operating system. How do you intend to do that when the phoneline has been shut down? Suppose you upgrade your PC after support has been discontinued - new OS for you.
That's not protecting their IP. That's disabling software I purchased.
Do they have a number I can call to register the transfer of my software when I sell it or move it to a different computer?
Secondly, scale this up so every application you have needs to be registered before use, and every audio CD has to be registered against each of your CD players, every book has to be registered against your ebook device. Now, if you think it's a hassle dealing with the insurance company after your laptop got stolen think how bad it will be now after you have to get each and every application reissued to you and disabled from someone elses use.
How does this improve the world we have today?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
Having developed under windows a bunch, the worst part is: There's no one Windows - All the different windowses have various subsets of the Windows API that they support. Win95 was always the least featured of this set. Under Win95 you can't assume that there even IS a web browser or directx (though NT4 has the latter problem too, but it did have OpenGL). Despite their claims of non-OS integration, MS used IE as an excuse to add a bunch of functionality in kind of surprising places, so a Win95 out of the box install (not OSR1 or 2) is missing some really handy stuff. For instance, what standard folders (eg, Desktop, Program Files, Documents & Settings, etc) you can query the location of depend on whether you've got IE installed or not. Anyways, developing with Win95 in mind has been a big pain in the ass for a while. I, as a developer, encourage MS to 'force' people to upgrade.
It's like trying to develop for 5 different unixes, but you can't use the preprocessor since it has to all be the same binary.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Windows95 was a huge step for the Windows world (note I didn't say computing world), and I bet most Windows people's memories for their OSes aren't even 3 years long. It's going to go out without much of a funeral, which is interesting, because it helped a lot of people "get into" computers, myself included.
Don't forget your roots.
I've reinstalled Win98SE twice because of registry rot, and now again there are weird things happening that are impossible to localise. You could assume I'm a moron, of course.
In my mind, the registry is better than a pant load of .ini files. Everything's in one place, so you know that if you need to find something, you just have to fire up regedit (and the trees are generally setup pretty logically, though
you can't fault Microsoft for idiot third-party developers).
So as long as you only install MS products you'll be fine. I CAN blame MS for creating a system that crashes if you dare to install products from other companies.
I'd MUCH rather have a pantsload of ini files. Then I can sort them by date and find the most recently changed ones and fix/delete/restore them. I use an installer tracker and find the average large app inserts hundreds of entries in the registry, many just cryptic strings. It's beyond human understanding.
The irony is, of course, that while Microsoft has been learning on the job and shipping outdated software, customers have been financing their learning experience and suffered from frequent, incompatible upgrades to boot.
A dial-in product activation is already common on many pieces of software that predate WinXP. 3D Studio and AutoCAD are two common examples that come to mind. And web-based authentication is common too - look at any Macromedia product.
In all these cases, if you write down the number the person on the other end of the phone gives you then you can reinstall later to your heart's content.
The XP authentication will use the same number if there aren't hardware changes. Hence your written down response number will work and you wouldn't have to call.
Furthermore, Microsoft *will* keep a database of registration and activation and if you call back in 5 years I'm sure they'll still be able to look up your pertinant info.
David Coursey over at ZDNet actually approached Bill Gates on this "deactivation" concern at a special dinner surrounding the XP launch. Here's a quote from the article:
WILL WINDOWS XP EXPIRE?
"Nonsense!" was how Gates responded to my sharing the concerns of some readers--this is the urban legend I wrote about last Wednesday--that Microsoft plans to use its activation technology to turn off copies of Windows XP when Microsoft decides to stop supporting it.
This idea was so far from left field that I had to explain it a couple of times before Gates responded and then reminded me he doesn't license his software that way--you get to use it forever, and Microsoft has to convince you to give them more money by offering new innovations.
While I agree with Gates that the fears are unfounded, there are people who believe this nonsense, which I've already tried to debunk once. So, remember the words of Chairman Bill: "Once you buy it, you have the right to use it forever."
There you have it from the man himself. "Once you buy it, you have the right to use it forever." I especially like the fact that when asked about this it took Bill a couple of times before understanding what the question was. The idea of "deactivating" users honestly never crossed his mind.
So....when support is no longer provided for XP in the future, you may not be able to get updates, patches, etc., but you will deffinately still be able to run it. That wonderful legal agreement called the EULA protects your interests too you know.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
If you live in brasil.
Our consumer laws says that a company must keep support for a product up to 5 years after it's dicontinued.
Since win95 were discontinued only in 1998, they must keep support for it (at least here) until 2003.
What ? Me, worry ?
You're missing the point: It's none of their damn business.
Once they sold me the copy, the business relationship is at an end. Who I am, whether or not I install it, my hardware configuration, and any future hardware upgrades are my business and mine alone.
Even if you're not an adherent of the classic value of MYOB, I simply don't trust them. Microsoft has shown again and again that it is not a trustworthy entity. I don't trust them as a business, and I don't trust their products to not defecate all over themselves at the first opportunity, destroy my data, or cede control of my machine to a hostile third party.
Now they're insisting that I offer to them as tribute my personal information (what, the $200 they soaked me for wasn't enough?). The justification for this is to thwart "piracy," to which they claim to "lose" billions of dollars a year. Yet, somehow, the company continues to post record earnings quarter after quarter.
Sorry, I'm not buying it for one nanosecond. Their alleged excuse doesn't stand scrutiny and -- even if it were legitimate -- it doesn't change the fact that it's none of their damn business.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
My old Nintendo won't play Luigi's Manson, and my old Playstation won't play the Playstation 2 games, and don't get me started on not being able to play Gameboy Advance games on my original Game Boy.
You die too easily.
Ho hum.
I don't have the Karma around to burn on this, but there are about a thousand different things wrong with that description of the situation
And before anyone tar's and feather's me for supporting Microsoft, note that I use Debian for Everything - I have 2K hidden on a partition that's getting dusty in case someone releases a cool game.
Now:
So the sad, truth of the matter is that yes, Microsoft sucks. And yes, I will never install XP. But to call it bloatware because it takes 1.5 Gigs to install (and then to refer to that as a "windowmanager") is somewhat misleading.
-- South African and not-an-expatriot [rare]
Well, it's not going to features. Take wordpad for instance- the win95 and win98 versions allow you to save as a word document- the winXP version only lets you save as rtf or text. I guess the new hardware isn't good enough to support all the features a 386 with 4Megs of ram could.
Yay, innovation.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Now the standard run of the mill /.er takes a lot of stuff for granted. Yes, we can peek and tweak our systems so they run acceptably regardless of the OS. But I know for a fact that trying to do tech support for older machines running w95 can be a complete PITA. Especially with people giving their "hand me downs" to family members. Amazing on how these days when we do a broadband install, how many people have slower machines that really can't appreciate the bandwidth that they are getting. Not even to mention the fact that online shopping (which is a big seller in the rural area we cover) doesn't really work with the 3.0 browsers.
Now before this gets modded into oblivion, just think about how fast the web is changing everything. People (other than gamers) aren't just using their computers for word processing, it's all about email,browsing,home finance, online banking, shopping. As the websites get larger and more complex, they suck up more space and memory on the computers.
Luckily windows 3.1 dialup support died for us Dec 31 2000, so we didn't have to worry about Trumpet winsock et al. anymore.
Windows 95 can be a major problem when working with a newbie who still thinks that the mouse is a "foot pedal" like that on a sewing machine (yes it's true, I actually had a call like that). I mean the Internet Setup Wizard is a piece of cake, but the majority of the people who are hip enough to navigate the web have allready moved on to 98/ME/XP/2K whatever.
This can actually help out ISP's by not having to worry about support for computers that were "given" to people without the CD. (ever try changing DUN settings or reinstalling Client for MS without the CD on an "upgraded" system where the CABS weren't installed?)
I've experienced this first hand with "Why is the internet so slow?" check the settings, and the person has 8MB o RAM running w95 and someone gave them a CD with I.E. 5.x and somehow they got the thing to kinda run. By the time they have to go out and get SIMMS enough to run the browser du jour (Opera notwithstanding) they might as well go out and get a whole new system for $700 USD.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't think the way MS handles things is correct, but at some point the lower end of the bell curve of internet users has to catch up to really experience everything the web/net has to offer.
Look at dialup, without updated modem drivers/init strings, the cheap HSP modems
won't maintain a connection. If the computer starts losing memory, the winmodems die. It doesn't occur to these users who think that computers just magically "work" that it could be their own system, and not the network and support that the ISP offers.
But I still love all the phone calls I get because the default error message states "call your network administrator" everytime something happens... NOT!
So I guess in closing this is going to be a way to keep people happy in the long run.
I mean hey I still have netscape 2.0 running on a 1MB RAM Macintosh, but other than email, what good is it?
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
I've reinstalled Win98SE twice because of registry rot, and now again there are weird things happening that are impossible to localise. You could assume I'm a moron, of course.
No wonder everyone here hates MS so much--the article talks about Win95, you're using Win98SE. Trust me, THOSE SUCK. Win95 sucks, 98 sucks, 98SE sucks, ME is probably the worst of all of them. Try 2000 and you won't have to worry about all those problems. Not that 2000 doesn't have any problems, but it is a much, much better OS and the problems are fewer and farther between.
Even if you actually decided to buy the OS, the $100 or so would be well worth getting rid of the frustration of 95/98/etc. A guy here at my work uses 98 and it is nothing but trouble.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
The lifecycle on their products is relatively long and overlay a great deal. As such, even though Windows 95 is officially unsupported, they still must support Windows 98, which was compatible with Windows 95 nearly completely. They are still stuck with the win32 API. When 2003 rolls around and Win98 is axed, then WinME will carry the support, then when ME is axed, XP will be supported, etc.... .NET strategy, leveraging the Desktop dominance to get more major companies running .NET servers...
Though they can make minor changes, but for now backwards compatibility prevents them from axing any backwards compatiblity.
The problem for Wine remains the same, the API is huge and not well documented, and while not deprecating calls, they are still adding calls every release. As far as releases not being made with Win95 in mind by 3rd party companies, that has been and will remain their pergative. Some already say "no, we don't support that" Others will continue to test against it even if MS says it's unsupported.
Wine is catching up really fast, and the Win32 API is changing slowly (not a bad thing). I doubt MS sees Wine as that much of a threat right now. Wine is only useful for Desktop-level applications, and MS's only real threat is in the server arena, where all applications are run natively and thus wine becomes a moot point. The relatively small segment of Desktop linux users doesn't cut much into MS's bottom line. That's the whole deal with the
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The hardware underneath has not changed much. A month ago they celebrated the last of the 16 bit code again. That chunk of code could have run on an 8088, just like MS DOS 3.2 can run on my AthlonXP. The hardware folks have gone to great lenghts to maintain compatibility. In the same way I can move Linux hard disks around the room from a 486 to an Athlon and have it boot.
Where's the software improvement? Can anyone out there name one thing that I can do in XP that I could not do under Win3.1 or DOS? Movies, check, audio, check, ethernet, check, IP suite, check, instant messenger, check, dancing icons and goofey sounds, check. All of it was possible, despite the artificial 16Meg RAM limitations, under their dinky single user non multitasking software. Today, their dinky single user non multitasking softare acts much the same, but it's a little faster thanks to hardware improvements. Win 3.1 flies on the same hardware that 9x chokes with more code than it takes to fly the space shuttle. If bloat is improvement, OK, there has been some real change.
M$ would have you believe that you are a "consumer" of software and that bytes somehow go stale in time. I've never eaten a byte in my life. It's hard for me to believe that their non compatibility issues are anything but planned.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Even with corporate edition there is no guarantee there is no spyware stuff going on. I for fun did a corp ed. install somewhere behind a NATed private network. I logged all attempts by the installing computer to contact any machine on MSes subnet, and guess what, there were about 12 connection attempts throughout the install process, about 8 of which had no warning nor rationale, the others were along the lines of "testing your network connectivity".
I really ought to more officially document it, including tcpdumps of whatever the system is sending to MS and what is in the response, if any, from MS. Just because you aren't sending in for Product Activation doesn't mean it's not spyware. Also, I re-installed the OS later after formatting and both logged and blocked to see if it changed the install at all, and the install performed almost exactly as it had before, except a bit slower in places where it would timeout on a connection and try another IP until the list of IPs was exhausted. So the net connects don't seem to positively affect the install whatsoever.
Don't believe me? Try the experiment for yourself. Being a sys-admin I can toy around with the company firewall and license, but at home you can set up something similar.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
People will bring servers to their knees to get the latest one-line change to the Linux kernel, and yet they'll run a mid-1990s version of the Windows lines and wonder why they have trouble.
Try 2000 and you won't have to worry about all those problems. Not that 2000 doesn't have any problems, but it is a much, much better OS and the problems are fewer and farther between.
That's what everbody used to say about NT 3.51, then 4.0... Supposedly it was going to "revolutionarize the way we do computing," or some such crap, very similar to the XP propaganda.
And you know what? Back in 1998, I tried to install NT on a machine that had Linux, SCO OpenServer, and Windows 95 on it. The Windows installation program wiped out my entire partition table, then said there was some kind of error and it couldn't continue (and it only gave an error code, it's not like it actually explained what the error was).
This product, my friend, is below any conceivable standards of software quality and engineering. I haven't used any MS junk since the above incident, and I've been happily running Linux with 12-15 months uptime on average, and unparalleled flexibility and robustness.
Bush Lies Watch
Which points out one of my real peeves about Microsoft: at a certain point they stop releasing service packs and patches, and start releasing changes to the OS using all sorts of sneaky non-documented methods. If you were an OEM and had access to OSR 2.5, great. But if you were a home user of W95, after Service Pack 1 (W95 SP2 being basically useless) you were out of luck. Same with NT 4 today: where is Service Pack 7?
sPh
I'm still waiting for Windows 95 to make everything I do faster, and more fun. It still doesn't do that.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Try 2000 and you won't have to worry about all those problems.
No, you'll just have problems with Win2k not flushing the write cache on IDE drives before powering off. The "bugfix" from Microsoft didn't fix it.
What did it cause us? Registry problems, incidentally. Win2k refuses to boot because the registry is corrupt. Not even safe mode. And having an ERD or using the backup registry doesn't help; every time you log in the registry changes and trying to roll it back to a recent (2 days ago) backup confuses the shit out of AutoDesk Inventor since they're paranoid about pirated software. Using an old registry also confuses Office 2000. So I ask again, what use is this proprietary, very undocumented, unreadable and practically unfixable single point of failure? Hell due to its very nature backups don't even work!
Give me separate ini files or give me a human-readable, fully documented registry. Ideally, give me all of that and a bugfix that actually works!
Win2k is a lot better than anything that came before. It is not, however, infallable. These problems are experienced on high-end (dual proc, 1G RAM) CAD workstations with mid-end (AutoDesk, Inc.) software. Who do you blame now? Microsoft, for creating a horrendous single point of failure, Microsoft, for not actually testing their bugfix, or AutoDesk for following Microsoft's reccomended programming practises and using the registry for everything and anything?
>> There you have it from the man himself. "Once you buy it, you have the right to use it forever."
This is an strikingly disingenuous quote from a man who has gone to great lengths to emphasize that when you purchase Windows you are buying, not software, but the license to use it.
They've made quite clear that Micros~1 is shifting its focus from selling applications to selling *service*. In other words, you are not buying anything, you are renting -- and have the right to use it as long as you continue to pay up.
It's like saying, "Once you buy a satellite dish, you have the right to use it forever". Sure, you do. But unless you pay for the service, all the dish does is hang off the side of your house.