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Microsoft Plans WinXP "Reloaded"
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Microsoft changed their minds and are planning a new OS release before Longhorn. They are calling it XP Reloaded."
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"Reloaded" is just an internal designation. It will most likely be released under a different name in order to avoid lawsuits.
And delayed. Point is, to me this indicates that Longhorn's release date just became slightly more tentative than it was before. Which is a good thing for alternative operating systems like the growing and ever-improving GNU/Linux.
And in the short term it's a good thing for Microsoft, as some people are likely to fork over the $100 (or whatever) upgrade.
... the line of prototype Macs called "project Sagan".
Carl Sagan brought (or threatened?) a suit against Apple.
In response, Apple simply renamed it (unofficially, of course) "project butthead scientist".
Infringement problem solved!
Look, everyone knows (or should, by now) that the only part of XP that really NEEDS overhauling is IE. After the new stuff coming up in SP2 (security fixes, software firewall, built-in antivirus, etc.), that'll _still_ be the only thing that needs an overhaul. A popup blocker in IE with SP2 isn't going to cure the REAL ills of IE, namely, horrid CSS & PNG support. Merely fixing those two things would get me to buy an XP upgrade. As a web designer/developer, that is my number one, EVERY DAY biggest obstacle to computing happiness. Where do I want to go today, Microsoft asks. I want to go to that happy land where IE properly & fully supports CSS 1 & 2 & PNG. Is that so much to ask? Hell, just properly implementing what you started in the original IE 6 would be enough!
Screw Fermat's Last Theorem. MS spending time adding a _popup blocker_ to IE when the PNG & CSS issues remain is the biggest mystery of our time. If they add tabs and _still_ don't fix CSS & PNG, I'm gonna totally lose it.
How old were the machines? Bought new around the time that the respective OSes were released?
It may be a hardware problem - dodgy RAM, something overheating, etc. Seriously, it might be an idea to open the machine up, clean all the fans, heatsinks, etc, and take a look. Actually investigate the problem, rather than just shrugging and saying "Windows, huh?".
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I think oficially it's due 2005, but the smart money is on 2006. I believe those are calendar year estimates, but MS has been in the 2004 fiscal year since June.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
With MsSQL ontop of NTFS longhorn is promising to be even slower than past systems. The hybrid model that i have seen is just adding a layer ontop of NTFS. Not really a new filesystem like ReiserFS but another layer eating cpu cycles and memory. Hardware probably needs to catch up before it can be used in a grander scale.
Since Longhorn seems to be so long into the future and MS desperatly needs their upgrade fix an interim XP sounds possible. Think Windows Me and Windows 98 SE for a clue (lets hope that Longhorn stinks as bad as Windows Me did if that is humanly possible). MS has set themselves up on a 3 year upgrade sell and a step of that cycle is a significant blow to their earnings.
As a side note i dont deem Longhorn that much of an improvement over XP that it is worth waiting for. From what ive seen its just babysteps they have taken. And that is natural, any bigger changes is going to break a lot of applications in perspective of MS merry strife to lock applications to x86.
HTTP/1.1 400
No kidding...
We already have machine images for 24 languages and Win98SE, WinNT4, WinMe, Win2K, WinXP, Win2003.
For those counting at home, that is 144 possible test solutions on just the windows 32bit side of things.
Sure would be nice to get rid of support for Win98SE and NT4. Then again, the IA-64 means we have WinXP-64 and W2K3-64 to test. Comming soon... WinXPSE-64 and WinXPSE-AMD64...
jason
All jokes aside, and with this article it could take awhile, we should at least look at the reasons for MS taking this approach.
If it's free, like most of their service packs, well then great. However if it's just some GUI rubbish like XP Plus! or something equally retarded at least we aren't being forced to download it.
But what if they charge for it? For home users this is irrelevent since they will just get it off p2p or their friends. So really this question goes to the businesses: Will this new release be worth the price of an upgrade? What are the benefits and costs? Every business asks this.
Without knowing what is in this release I can't imagine many people would adopt it. Why? Because the difference between Windows98 and Windows98SE was stability, and XP is reasonably in relation to other Windows releases. So what exactly are they offering new that would entice businesses to spend money? People have said Windows' greatest competetitor is Windows; and they're right. Innovation is a problem for MS, but that's not surprise.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
Here's an exerpt from that page:
I'm still uncertain whether or not the "Classic experience" (Windows 2000 equivalent) will be available to ALL Longhorn users. Microsoft's slideshow at WinHEC (May 2003) seems to indicate that a "Windows 2000 compatability mode" will only be available to "enterprises that desire this option." Here's that slide describing the different desktop experiences: Longhorn User Experience
Did you know that for ages, video cards have done 2d acceleration?
My server
Microsoft was already planning on a 64-bit release of XP, and even has a beta you can download and test if you have an Opteron or Athlon64 machine. Thus, my question is: why were you planning on waiting for Longhorn? Was it a lack of interest in paying for a 64-bit version of an existing OS, or just a lack of knowle3dge that a 64-bit version was comming?
s /upgrade.asp
0 03/64bit/e xtended/default.mspx
Honestly though, anyone who is surprised by the anouncement of a XP2 needs to pay more attention: with the delays in Longhorn and the delays of sp2, with the added functiuonality of sp2, I've been expecting a XP second edition to be anounced for over 6 months. It's par for course after 98SE and ME. The release of 64-bit platforms just adds another excuse to the pile of reasons to push a new version out the door - I doubt we'll see commercial releases of regular XP for 64-bit now, regardless of the beta program. Oh, and the 64-bit version will be more secure, thanks to the support for non executable memory pages on AMD64 (and later, intel 'IA32e', which is the SAME THING).
64-bit XP download: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/download
Note: its a 'customer preview' (Beta), it may crash a lot, and you may have fun finding native 64 bit drivers for your hardware, so only install on a test partition, don't use it in production or while drinking, blah blah blah - if you shoot your dog in the head with it, I won't be held responsible - and neither will MS.
Windows Server 2003 is also available in a 64-bit preview:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2
Same warnings apply as above.
And no, this post was not spell checked.
man is machine
sounds more like 98SE to me (that one was free, btw).
No. Windows 98 Second Edition was NOT a free upgrade. You could download the fixes and patches, but any new features were only available if you bought the 98SE retail box.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
They're on the site and from (e.g.) Belgium, so they need to click the link...but, if 'the choice has been taken away', how exactly did they get there?
IPv4 address geolocation works ... sometimes. Lindows.com visitors in BeNeLux that don't get redirected to Lin---s.com are legally obligated to click through that link.
Um, that would be longhorn.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Well, I don't know about IE and its "*WE FULLY SUPPORT* ((((about 3% of)))) *CSS1*", but under Mozilla, with CSS2, you don't have to look at flash either. You can replace it with a "click here if this isn't crap" button instead. You can even make it little so things flow around it nicely. It's amazing how many ads I dont even see anymore (and this is all without image blocking either) courtesy of a little bit of CSS.
userContent.css is your friend. Your dear and good friend. Use it, love it, spread the word.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
24 BITS, not bytes. Your 2880x1200x24 screen takes 10 megabytes, 14 MB if you're using 32bit. That's a bit less than 79MB.
XP SP2 includes SP2 for IE. I haven't noticed a difference, other than a little bar about securing my PC showing up every once in awhile. When XP SP2 is certified gold and ships this summer, IE6 SP2 should be available. I have to assume that XP Reloaded* will include SP2 as well.
*Every version of Windows has an internal codename (Whistler? Memphis? Anyone remember those?) so it's very possible that this will be Windows 2005 or some such name.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
This is actually the scheme used, except the third number is the build number. This is a huge number that increments every day, but is exactly what you propose, in a sense: each day sees many small fixes and increments to the code base.
What Marketing calls "Windows XP" internally carries the product name "Windows" and the version number "5.1.2600".
One will note that this reveals that Windows XP is considered a minor release from Windows 2k, which was 5.0.2195.
All weather is caused by the uneven heating of the Earth by the Sun. Global warming magnifies the effect. Hot spots get hotter, and do so faster, causing a larger temperature differential. Higher temperature make water evaporate faster, causing more clouds, which causes even more uneven heating.
In the short term this causes more extreme conditions -- larger storms occuring more frequently, hotter summers, colder winters, more erratic and unseasonable temperature changes, and so forth. More severe storms disrupt the hydrological cycle, dumping all thier rain in one area, causing flooding in some places and droughts elsewhere. In the longer term it causes major climatic shifts -- changes in ocean currents in wind patterns.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?