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Microsoft Extends Product Lifecycle
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has decided to extend product support on business and developer products effective June 1, 2004. Mainstream support remains unchanged at 5 years, extended support is greatly extended from 2 to 5 years and Online self-help support is extended from 8 to 10 years. I have to say kudos to Microsoft on this one."
Their Business leadership team is here
Their Board of Directors listingis here In case those links act up, scroll down using your arrow keys or whatever you use to scroll.
*sigh*a /
Try trolling with a newer link:
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhelorfedor
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/
So that's about 1 VP per 300-400 employees (not sure if that includes all international divisions).
Corporate VP's are usually junior VP's in charge of an individual division.
Senior VP's manage a group of divisions (say all the Windows product development divisions). There are about 20 Senior VP's at Microsoft.
The Group VP's are the big honchos who manage, say, all of product development, or marketing. Look like there are three Group VP's.
You can bypass the XP logon screen by booting from a boot disk with NTFS read/write support and replacing the logon screensaver file (%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\logon.scr) with the executable of your choice, such as cmd.exe. Restart and wait a few minutes for the "screensaver".
Have you ever used Lotus 123 for DOS? It has a GUI, not Windows but a GUI, though in earlier versions text driven (i.e. you open the menus by typing the first letter), but you could also use arrow keys. Mouse support was added later, before Excel I think. It was able to make all kinds of charts from a very early version. Anyway, I saw no basic difference with Excel and didn't bother to change until years after Excel came out.
Most people use just Word, a smaller proportion use Excel, a few percent use Access. I can't even remember rhat the fourth is. (Outlook? Publisher?)
That's why it has been so successful.
I rather think that it was the bundle (Office) cost barely more than Word alone. Pricing, marketing, bundling and OEM sales drove it to dominance.
I work in web management services in a government department in queensland, aus.
I use a pc running 98SE - so does everyone else in my department.
And yes, it is sad.
You remember incorrectly. Bill Gates wrote most of Altair BASIC, with the help of Paul Allen, who was busy writing an Altair emulator for the DEC PDP-10. Some sources, should you like ;-).
I have to say kudos to Microsoft on this one.
If i remember correctly Qdos was how the whole Microsoft OS thing got started. So no more kudos for them now, ok ?
* XP doesn't hang when shutting down (at least in my experience)
Two patches and Win98SE hangs on shutdown are not a problem, either.
* Multi-user profiles
are a PITA! The easiest way to transfer something to another user is to drop it on his desktop. Drilling down through endless layers of heirarchy to locate the correct desktop is easy? Have you tried copying My Documents from one user to another? Or duplicating the desktop for two users? Silly XP copies all user rights with them, requiring extra work to make them accesible. Trying to install software and make it accessible to many users on one machine is still an exercise in futility. All the XP machines in our shop run users as Administrator because of the software we use so there are no security advantages. Overall, MS doesn't really get multi-users yet.
* Built-in USB 2.0 support (SP1?)
and what devices in a business environment doyou use USB 2.0 for?
* System Restore (buggy though it can be, it's better than nothing.)
I turn it off on the XP machines at work. More often than not, I find it rolling things back at random times and destroying whatever I last installed. I find it simpler and faster to use Drive Image and image the entire system to another part of the hard disk each time I update the machines. This also has the advantage of allowing me to roll back Windows updates, which don't always work as they were intended even to the point of removing themselves! Buggy as it is, System Restore is not better than nothing!
* MMC
No comment. We can't use it in our environment (NT4.0 server and lotsa win98 machines).
Most of the advantages in XP seem to be meant for home users, not business users. Most of the systems in our shop do not have (or need) speakers, so multi-media extensions built into XP are no advantage.
The main computer use is one user to one machine. If that person is sick or missing, then the only reason another user would log onto that machine is to do the same tasks as that user, and, as I pointed out above, another user on that machine would not have access to the same files and programs as the original user. The only way to do the same job is to log on as the same user! So what good does multi-users on one machine do?
We use NT 4.0 as server, mostly Win98SE as workstations and it works fine for us. Stability is not an issue. The only thing we ever needed from Microsoft was to fix their buggy product! Instead, they keep releasing new versions that don't always work and play well with earlier products and bring a whole new set of bugs. Win 2k is OK on our network; XP Home blows on our network and XP Pro is buggier than Win 98SE! The GUI "improvements", love or hate them, are different and require a lot of getting used to. Upgrading en masse is not an option.
In short, I see one good reason why companies are sticking with NT and Win98SE; it works OK in a business environment. I think that this move by Microsoft is just listening to the market.
MS has probably finally found that this is a requirement for doing business with the US Government (there is typically a 10 year support requirement). A prime example would be HP's support of the VAX version of OpenVMS, while either DEC or Compaq killed the VAX several years ago, HP still has to support if for a few more years.
Look the word 'free' up in the dictionary. You will see that it has two meanings.
- Not imprisoned or enslaved; being at liberty. Not subject to external restraint
- Costing nothing; gratuitous: a free meal.
'Free as in beer' and 'Free in speech' is an attempt to explain this shortcoming of the English language, whereby 'free' has two meanings.'Free as in beer' refers to the 'zero cost' meaning of free. Beer can be free in that it doesn't cost money, but it is not free in that it has liberty.
'Free as in speech' refers to the 'liberty' meaning of free. Speech can be free in that it is not subject to external restraint, but we don't normaly talk about the monetary value of speech.
The Free software movement says that Free software is 'Free as in speech', but not 'free as in beer'. That is, Free software is not subject to external influence but it doesn't necessarily cost zero dollars.
Hence there is no analogy between Free software and free beer. GoofyBoy is feeding you a crock of shit. The analogy is between Free software and Free speech.
The Spanish (and French and Italians) don't have this grammatical problem, as they have different words for the different concepts of 'free as in speech' (libre) and 'free as in beer' (gratis).
As an English speaker, I usually mangle my grammar and use 'Free' (capitalised) when talking about Free software and 'free' (lower case) when talking about free beer.
Hope this helps.