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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
It always takes so long to execute criminals in this country...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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
If they no longer sell it, and no longer support it, technically it's abandonware, right?
There is no legal definition of abandonware (nor any legal concept of it).
Have there been any court decisions on abandonware and whether it's legally okay to trade it/hack it/despoil it in general?
Copyright does not require support of the copyrighted work.
Has MS been enforcing MS-DOS licenses?
Yes. SPA and other copyright enforcement goons still catalog and penalize illegal copies of MS-DOS.
If not, will that make Win95 sort of a free-for-all too?
No.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
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
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
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
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
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!
Your argument makes sense up to a point, but it is that point that makes Microsoft such a dangerous monopoly. Microsoft takes its older software off the market to limit the usefulness of said software. What is wrong about this is that it effectively renders useless an otherwise still useful product. The equivalent would be if Ford owned the patent for making gasoline, and then decided to change the mixture in gasoline every five years so that you had to buy a new car every five years. Sure the old car still "works", you just can't find any gas to run it on!
Independent developers design software for MS products because of the platforms' ubiquity. One 'feature' that Microsoft customers are implicitly paying for is the availability of software. By taking away that platform's continued availability to new users, MS dries up the development market for older platforms, forcing users to upgrade even if they have no compelling need for the upgrade through the upgrade's intrinsic changes. Users upgrade to keep up with the newer software and for the continued hardware support, not for the OS itself.
It is a particularly vicious circle. It would not be so dangerous if Microsoft did not have such a chokehold on the software market. I am hopeful that this chokehold will encourage the development of viable alternatives, like Linux. On the other hand, MS's monopoly advantage might be too great for simply the best technology to win out.
The issue raided of "abandonware" in earlier posts is a reasonable one. Copyrights and patents are given so that creators may benefit from their creation, for the benefit of society. When intellectual property rights are enforced to discourage the dessemination of knowledge, as in the case of "abandonware", the intellectual property laws have had an opposite than originally intended effect.
When MS pulls the plug on an OS, they are effectively pulling the plug on all the people who developed software for and worked on that OS. Because these people added value to MS's product, they have a legitimate proprietary interest.
If Microsoft was explicitly renting out their software, their actions would be somewhat more defensible. As they are claiming that they are selling a perpetual license, however, but acting as if they are only renting it, there is a legitimate case to be made for MS's misreappropriation of previously sold goods.
evanchik.net
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.
Windows 95 has the minute of silence built-in with every reboot.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
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.