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More Details on Cut-Rate Windows OS For Asia
glawrie writes "The BBC is carrying a story that Microsoft is to launch a (very) cut down version of Windows XP to combat Linux in Asian countries. According to the story, 'Windows XP Starter Edition' will be limited to low-res graphics, limited networking, and will be hobbled to prevent more than three applications running concurrently. It remains to be seen why anyone in target countries would choose this over Linux, or the widely available pirate copies of 'full' Windows XP." We mentioned this in June.
As "Torrents," the BSA Copyright Weasel sez, "even absurdly hobbled but copywritten, paid-for software is way cooler than that yucky pirate and OSS stuff, kids!"
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
Without crazy colors
Lets sell a hobbled, half assed version of an operating system when the person can buy the same thing for less than what they're going to charge for the half assed version.
Hmm. Suddenly I'm not so worried about the Microsoft marketing machine.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
What defines an application?? If you start something as a service, does this mean it's not an application? Surely there must be more than three services running at time.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
Except that you're paying for it...
This idea is sure to succeed because those horrible, evil, open source zealots would never think of this idea.
3 Concurrent programs? I don't even think you can successfully update your system on Windows without running more than 3 programs.
On a side note, laughing my ass off about why anyone would choose this sideshow over better, more robust, and free products. They'll probably lower the price down to $50, which is $50 too much.
Read the only personal Runyon page out there.
before some enterprising Asian hacker merely removes the constraints from the crippled software?
But given the low cost of a pirated copy of Windows I still think this is a strategy doomed to failure!
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
'Windows XP Starter Edition' will be limited to low-res graphics, limited networking, and will be hobbled to prevent more than three applications running concurrently.
That will give new users a taste of how bad XP is, before making the choice between Linux (full res, full net, great multitasking) and XP (low res, limited net, 3 apps).
I thought Microsoft was just going to cut out programs like media player and solitare, not completely cripple the OS and make it practically useless.
Given that Windows without Media Player and Solitaire IS useless to many people that'd be the same, m'kay?
Cool, so you just have to open 3 programs and no worm could be executed?
Aren't there more processes running when windows starts?
Move Sig. For great justice.
Why would you pay for a crippled, low functionality product, regarless of how "cheap" it is? There are full function, feature packed Open Source operating systems available for free. I don't see how lowering the capabilities of their software, regardless of price, will make it MORE attrative. Perhaps the shoe is on the other foot now. Microsoft will know how Netscape felt trying to compete with a "free" competitor in an emerging market.
Remember the old registry hack from the NT 4 days? How much do you want to be that all you need is a kernel32.dll from a real XP install, and a suck=no entry in the HLKM\Screw\You\Microsoft key?
This is dumb on MS' part on so many levels - people will try it, see that it sucks, and go with $Localized-Government-Sponsored-Linux instead.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I also read on heise.de that it will be limited to a screen resolution of 800x600.
Given the fact that most modern websites are designed for 1024x768 and all the recent games require at least 1024x768 I wonder how useful an OS is that is limited so severe. Your nextdoor Linux distribution is 10 times more powerful than "XP Starter Edition". I would continue to pirate if I would be presented with that kind of joke.
"Microsoft's new software - dubbed "XP Lite" - will feature lower resolution graphics and limited options for networking computers together." So basically it's like Windows98?
...and will be hobbled to prevent more than three applications running concurrently.
:-/
Sounds like any other version of a Microsoft OS.
While parent is probably trolling, there is some truth to his statement. Windows just doesn't do so well when you load it down with programs (active or not). "Cache Thrash" is simply a way of life for Windows users; even those with gobs of memory. I've known people who have completely disabled the Windows cache because of these problems. Microsoft needs to rip out their VM and threading system, and redesign it for modern computers with 128+ megs of RAM.
The Unixes do it much better, but the programs do take slightly longer to run. I remember the first time I used a Solaris box. A puny Ultra 5, and it was absolutely kicking NT's ass on parallelism! I could have 7 or 8 "busy" programs, and my desktop would never become unresponsive! Mac OS X has made use of the same concept, expect that the window is double-buffered. The end result is that you never see an ugly unpainted window. Now if only Apple would fix the 101 ways to lock up finder.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Microsoft isn't the first to offer a discount for certain countries. $40 or $50 over there is probably worth more than $300 here in the US. Microsoft could give it away for $10 and still make a small profit. The goal is not to make money in that respect, but to keep countries locked in to their products. If they start using linux now, they'll never get them back.
You're not going to compete with Linux by crippling your operating system, Bill.
This is the PCjr. of operating systems, destined to be a laughed-at memory.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
Commersial program to remove components from Windows XP http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html
Free programs to reduce the size of Windows XP before installation: http://nuhi.msfn.org/ and http://jdeboeck.msfnhosting.com/
And of course, my project that reduces the size of Windows 98 to less than 5MB http://www.etek.chalmers.se/~e8gus/nano98/ ;-)
Actually I think $50 is about $99,950 too much. They would have to pay me to use it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/11/winxp_star ter_edition_announced/
Hmmm, I think that Microsoft is taking a big risk in promoting a cut rate Windows XP in developing countries. First of all, the people in those countries are not any stupider than people anywhere else in the world. They will know that they are getting the dumbed down, brain damaged version of Windows XP. Even if this costs less than a pirated version (which remains to be seen), I think most will opt for the non crippled pirated version. People already knock Windows for its shortcomings as it is, does Microsoft need to add to this? Not only that, even offering this crippled Windows could be taken as an insult.
A slimmed down version of Windows without some of the extra packages would be a lot better to offer than a crippled version. I think that in the end, Microsoft is going to have to accept the fact that in today's global marketplace, Windows is overpriced. In the face of Linux and free open source software solutions, I really don't know what they can do other than lower the price of admission and add more value and true innovation. There have to be really good killer app sort of reasons that make Windows the thing you want to have. Productivity applications like Office are no longer sufficient reason to stay with Windows. Games might be, but the PC games market is losing out to the console market. So what's left?
Finally, even a crippled Windows won't be immune to piracy! As we learned from the web browser wars, it's really hard to sell something that's being given away for free! Linux is free and certainly has everything a small business might need in the way of productivity apps. So how can Windows compete with that in places where it is not the dominant player and limited resources and nationalism come into play?
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I think consumers will be downright insulted by this. Especially if they're not made well aware ahead of time that this is crippleware.
Case in point: Windows 2000/2003 Server "Web Edition." It's a cut-rate server they've made available to hosting companies to compete with Linux. Now and then I've had to help customers with this particular crippleware and hit a brick wall because a feature was disabled. For example, you can't make it a domain controller.
Hopefully this will insult the Asian people and they will redouble their adoption of Linux.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
But then someone let slip that GIMP was one of those hippy-freakout open source programs. They tried to call it the 'Photoshopped' version but were pummeled by Adobe. They now call it the 'Paint' version - eminently confusing but better than the 'Windows Picture and Fax Viewer' version.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I don't care if it's a Starter Edition or a Missle Defense Edition, I still say, the only safe Windows is abstinence.
This side up.
Further, I wouldn't exactly call Linux the most user friendly of environments, its geared toward people who want a lot of functionality and have the time to mess with every little detail.
This, in my humble opinion, is one the big limitation of Linux even with the current SuSE and Mandrake distributions. Configuring Linux to work for each user is definitely not a job for computer newbies.
But there is also another big limitation: Linux currently does not support the full functionality of many hardware peripherals out there, not to mention true automated configuration of any new installed hardware. Think about it: does Linux support the full functionality of the Sound Blaster Audigy card? Can you plug in a digital still camera through the USB ports and Linux will recognize the data on the memory card in the camera and "mount" the memory card with a new disk drive designation?
Hopefully, the people who maintain the Linux Standards Base will work with computer hardware companies and consumer electronics companies to settle these issues so Linux will become a truly viable alternative to Windows soon.
Perhaps the warning bells for proprietary solutions/OS began to ring for MS at least, when the Indian government made public its affection for OSS.
#1The Department of Information Technology has already devised a strategy to introduce Linux and open source software as a de-facto standard in academic institutions, especially in engineering colleges through course work that encourages use of such systems.
#2: Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, met on Thursday with Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to discuss "the ethical issues related to the use of proprietary software," according to the Free Software Foundation of India. Stallman also met officials in the state of Kerala to discuss the use of nonproprietary software in government initiatives. Last year, Kalam spoke out in favor of open-source software following a meeting with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.
So, there is ample reason to worry. Now wonder why they'd have a strangulated version of OS as a low-cost option?
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Why do I always see articles explain Linux as a 'so called' open source software. They make it sound as though Linux isn't really open source and that is the presses gripe about it. My gripe is about the 'so called' industry journalists not know what they are 'so called' writing about.
Here's a sneak preview of the OS... Windows RG (Warning - requires flash)
Now I understand why /. has this horrible color scheme.
The "Hobbled Version has" been around for years. Here is what my use has been like. If you try to run more than 3 programs, the OS grinds to a near hault, and often crashes. If you badmouth MS at any point, the machine restarts causing you to lose anything you didn't save. The OS is so hobbled, I am always getting messages when on the internet about being insecure, so I click them all. That doesn't seem to help, so I had better click some more. Oh yeah, and the OS now decided that my '88 Chevy Cavilier is no longer compatable, so I have to buy a new Ford. It is very proprietary.
You remember: MSIE is part of the OS, and as such does not count as an application!
But what if you have Quick-Time resident, Norton-Anti-Virus and the Zone-Labs firewall running? Will you be able to start any additional program?
How can this be a good idea? This program is crippleware? How do they expect it to compete with linux or pirated windows? 3 programs only? after a virus program that leaves two. This boggles the mind. It crippels the network services which is one of the keypoints of Linux.
I keep thinking it's like watching a Histroy Channel show on the last days of Hitler, when his military strategy just went off the deep end.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
that is exactly the point.
If microsoft CAN put out a cheap version of windows, no matter how crippled, then at least *some* people will buy it, and instead of getting $0.00 * 0 revenue from that country, they get $small_amount * x customers.
However, by limiting the functionality, people in the more developed (read: stupid idiots for paying so much) countries which actually are forced to buy the full sized version will not look on this and say "Hey MS why cant we get OUR windows cheap".
This kind of cut down OS would appear to me to be perfect for OEM distributers, supply this cut down MS "product" and pay less M$ tax without losing buddy status.
True, noone on the street who knows the difference would touch it with a bargepole, but for the computer newbie this maybe just the price point they are expecting ("ahhh look, I can save $50 by getting xp-lite").
liqbase
I could care less if Microsoft produced a cut-rate version of their software. I could care less if they give it away. They are a competitor and they have to respond to the market. The market now says "OSs are commodity". Microsoft will continue to capture all the revenue they can from that stream as long as they can. Remember, Microsoft initially wanted to be a computer language company. DOS was going to be the cash cow they relied on to continue their development of assembler, fortran, C, etc.
What pisses me off is that the Thai government is going to HELP Microsoft in spreading the deployment of XP Lite. I know that many Microsoft supporters will chime in about Munich's recent decision to move forward with Linux. This is different than a government making a purchasing decision for themselves and coming up with XP or Linux as the OS choice. Instead, the Thai government is helping with the deployment in non-government settings.
Nothing annoys me more than corporate welfare. The Thai government is supporting one of the richest companies in the world.
Fuck you Microsoft.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
...look at a simple price/volume curve. With one price/volume combination, there's either a) a lot of the market you don't reach (too costly) or b) a lot of the mark-up you don't reach (customers willing to pay more).
The trouble is to prevent resale and competing with yourself (via parallell imports etc.) Basicly, if you could sell for $2 in Asia, $15 in the US, $18 in the EU, how do you prevent the asians from reselling it? MPAA did it with the region coding. Microsoft tries crippleware.
It is the same old story all over again. They don't expect pirates to buy this. They expect those that "need" a legally licenced version to go with this, because their users are already trained so well on Windows.
In Asia, this is more about moving businesses from "Yes, I know we NEED a legal licence, but no matter how you bend it we can't come up with that kind of cash." to "We'll take it, just so we have a legal licence."
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A while ago, I had to look into the Windows VMM to try and explain some odd behaviour we were seeing with two large applications. Now Windows NT/2K/XP will multitask several applications just as well as Linux, BSD, Solaris etc. but the VMM has some significant shortcomings (which along with other Windows shortcomings - such as a lack of good command line tools with the default install - which make it inappropriate as a server).
The trimmer (the part of the Windows VMM which reduces a program's in RAM working set, writing it out to the swap space) *only* looks at pages pointed to by the TLB (if I remember right). The TLB - translation lookaside buffer - is a small cache of PTEs on the processor (page table entries - the things which tell the kernel where 4K pages of virtual memory are at the moment. The TLB just gives you very fast access to a small number of PTEs - it's essentially a cache). IIRC, the TLB has room for 64 PTEs, so the Windows trimmer only ever looks at 64 pages or memory for candidates to write to swap. The trimmer (in the grand scheme of things) doesn't run very often - once every few seconds IIRC.
This normally isn't a big deal. However, servers often have a couple of processes using a lot of virtual memory. Sometimes, you can get the situation where you've got a big process with a large working set - many megabytes - possibly a high percentage of physical RAM, even on a modern machine. This big process might not be very busy - it might not be using much CPU at all. Indeed, it might not even be using many of the pages currently loaded into physical RAM.
Then another process comes along, wanting lots of memory. The trimmer SHOULD have started writing unused bits of the first big process out a long time ago. But guess what - the first big process has been touching pages that the TLB points to frequently, even if it hasn't touched the other 99% of pages loaded into physical RAM. Because the trimmer only looks at the TLB for pages to swap out...it never swaps out ANY of the large process despite the fact most of its pages haven't been touched in maybe days.
So the second big process wants to use up a gob of RAM, and really wants to do things with it. Except it ends up thrashing in and out of swap, because the first big process isn't getting swapped out ever.
This is quite easy to demonstrate if you write a short C program to allocate a bunch of RAM and regularly touch a small subset of its pages - it'll never get swapped out even when another program comes along wanting lots of memory. Whilst we were figuring out what the problem was with our two big processes, I actually did this to prove what I reckoned from reading the book about the NT VMM.
Even early Linux and BSD kernels of the same vintage as Windows NT 4.0 were much better with things like this (and you could look at the source of the VMM rather than taking some book's word for it, and having to write programs to test your theories). I've not tried this on Win2K or WinXP, but I'm betting the VMM still works the same way.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Microsoft could count IE as "part of the operating system" again. Then who would run any alternate browser if it counted against the 3 application limit and IE didn't?
Why do everyone always bash DOS ? DOS means "Disk Operating System", and that's excatly what it is. DOS was meant to give a command prompt and filesystem drivers for 360kB floppies, in machine with 8086 processor and 128kB-256kB memory and leave most of the resources for applications. It did it's designated work perfectly fine.
Of course a filesystem designed for 360kB floppies doesn't work well when used for hard disks hundreds of gigabytes in size. And of course a system designed to run with 128kB memory doesn't do a good task in administering hundreds of megabytes of memory - especially since the CPU switched from 16 to 32 bits inbetween. Tracktors tend to be ill suited for highways too, but that doesn't make them useless.
Despite all this DOS still supports primitive multitasking (I used to ran smartdrv and keyb (the keyboard layout remapper) in the background), device drivers (ansi.sys, himem.sys, CD drivers...), input/output redirecting ("debug < source.asm"), hard disks (and CD drives with a proper driver installed), extended memory (with himem.sys installed), expanded memory (with emm386.exe installed), freely changeable shells, primitive printer drivers ("copy text.txt > LPT"), support for different character sets (via code pages), and even primitive mount capabilities (you can make drive letters appear as directories, and directories appear as drive letters - with commands "subst" and "assign", if I remember correctly). Oh, and it boots in seconds from a floppy in the minimum system (which is propably a minimum possible PC system that can boot up to a command prompt of any operating system) and is rock stable (I've never have the actual DOS core crash - of course the applications are a different matter).
DOS is also very hackable - it is even possible to load parts of DOS into the video memory (can't remember how to do it, thought - but the idea was that since text mode uses less video memory than VGA mode, you can as well put code to the otherwise unused part) to free up main memory. There's even a hex editor/assembler/disk editor ("debug") included in the basic distribution. And, of course, with DOS, every last clock cycle goes to the application - DOS has absolutely no background services running unless you specifically start some. Interrupt handlers are the only parts of DOS that run without the application specifically starting them, and they are easily replaced if neccessary.
MS-DOS is propably the best program MS has ever released - perfectly fit for it's purpose, with nothing extraenous. The only bad things about it are edlin (seriously - who came up with this program ?!?) and using backslash instead of forward slash as a directory separator.
Calling DOS limited because it's ill suited for multitasking multimedia applications and managind gigabyte harddisks is about equal to calling a rowboat limited because it's ill suited for crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Sure, it's true, but that's not what rowboats are for, and I'd love to see you fitting an ocean cruiser to a lake less than a meter deep.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.