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Windows XP Starter Edition off to Slow Start
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft may have started shipping its cheaper version of Windows in Asia, but getting support for its low-cost computing vision is still very much a work in progress. It seems Starter Edition has not gained much interest from vendors, nor has it generated much interest from end users." I haven't seen any sort of consumer research, but I imagine people don't like to have their number of possible network connections restrained by the host operating system.
Even better, you are repeating what the original article said. Gives support to the accuracy of your statement.
MS has the starter edition primarily for political reasons, attempts to sell only in poor countries with high piracy rates. As the article said, consumer tend to buy hardware sans O/S and load it with a $5 pirate copy. Unless they can buy the pirate copy of started edition for $3, what incentive is there?
I don't imaging to many of us are going to cry long over MS misfortune in this case. They have plenty of fortune in other cases.
Agreed, when I was living out in Singapore, the tech orientated shopping malls had XP selling for $5, hell, every shopping mall had XP selling for $5. No manual, no packaging box, just a plastic sheathing with the CD inside.
The culture seems to have a fairly healthy lack of respect for 'official' versions. It always struck me as somewhat at odds with the otherwise strict PAP government the proliferation of shops wlling to sell, out in the open, blatantly pirated software.
And from my travels, this seemed to be fairly well reflected throughout SE Asia, thus the lack of ability to sell the Starter Edition is hardly unexpected to me.
The only things not included in home are support for domains and one user level.
That's basically it.
Oh by the way, naming it Shorthorn is just as bad as XP Starter, MS should have the standard Longhorn with fewer features, and come out market Longerhorn as the premium.
Longhorn is just the codename for the next version of Windows, not the final name (atleast I hope not). Just like "Chicago" was the codename for the original Windows 95. We have yet to see what naming scheme Microsoft is actually going to market.
Yes, Longhorn is just a codename; it's named after a mountain, as are most (all?) MS codenames.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Basically?
Remote Desktop too, I use that daily, to get into my home machine from work and on the road.
User security, File sharing and NTFS security is also missing or crippled.
I couldnt use XP Home, its missing too many features. Hell, I had get the crack for SP2 so I could run my P2P programs again!
Of course, you could get a mac and use OSX, its both simple for the average user and unix based for the power users. Having to run Cygwin on XP to get features that come standard on other systems, shows the legacy aspects of windows.
In my view, the biggest problem that MS is trying to solve here is not people who buy pirated software on the street (which is impossible to do), but rather make people who buy new computers get a legal copy of Windows immediately by making the added cost not much at all. So in other words and a short sentence, they are targetting second and especially third tier OEM's, IMO.
Farmix
RedHat != Linux.
RedHat = one of many Linux distributions.
the_other_one could have just as easily been talking about Debian.
Paranoid tinfoil hat crowd say Y here, everyone else say N.
Windows XP SP2 limits the number of possible TCP connection attempts per second to 10 from an unlimited number in SP1. This can affect performance on server and P2P programs that need to open many outbound connections at the same time.
Notes - With the new implementation, if a P2P or some other network program attempts to connect to 100 sites at once, it would only be able to connect to 10 per second, so it would take it 10 seconds to reach all 100. In addition, even though the setting was registry editable in SP1, it is now only possible to edit by changing it directly in the system file tcpip.sys. Keep in mind this is a cap only on incomplete outbound connect attempts per second, not total connections. Servers and P2P programs can definitely be affected by this new limitation. Use the fix as you see fit.
When you are using your Windows XP system as a File-server of a network of system, how many systems can connect (use a shared resource ) at the same time to a Windows XP-system ?
- Windows XP Professional : 10 simultaneous file-sharing connections ( same limitation as in Windows NT4 workstation and Windows 2000 Professional ) - Windows XP Home Edition : 5 simultaneous file-sharing connections ( Windows 95,98, ME do not have a known limit of simultaneous file-sharing connections )
Source of this information : Microsoft Windows XP Professional Resource Kit Documentation Appendix G: Differences between Windows XP Home Edition, page 1539
VNC is just nasty compared to terminal server. There's a lot of stuff M$ has wrong, licensing that tech was something they did right.
Terminal service forwarded over a compressed SSH connection is reasonably usable over a modem, on broadband it's very, very close to being there.
(i.e. I can develop on my desktop without any noticable lag in typing)
VNC is great for an occasional site or to push a file around, terminal service can actually be used to get work done.
Microsoft lost, according to them, over 10 BILLION dollars in revenue due to piracy last year alone. They would be a full 30% bigger if they could somehow eliminate piracy. They have huge charts on the walls inside some of the buildings showing exactly where the piracy is taking place, and the the loss to Microsoft because of it. They track it that well. They have somewhere upwards of 200 people dedicated to thinking about piracy and ways to solve it. You can expect more trial-and-error attempts like XP: Starter Edition because the incentive to fixing the problem is huge. They fully expect to solve it, as with all else they attempt. It is just a matter of time. I am not sure I agree on this one, the forces they are fighting against are also well motivated and extremely hard to track. The only difference between these people (the pirates, not Microsoft, although the point could be argued) and the terrorist organizations is that they don't tend to explode in crowded places. I would think that if Microsoft pushes to hard on this one, it could become violent, given the dollars at stake to both parties.
A most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a bit.
1) Windows
Developed by Xerox, licensed from Apple, and Microsoft was on the market basically last.
2) VB
Copied from Dartmouth basic, everybody else had something at least as good, if not better(eg Hypercard)
3)32 bit OS
Old, obvious idea, Microsoft was last to market
4).NET
A copy of Java which itself was an incremetal improvement of a bunch of older stuff. Microsoft is basically last to market.
As for the stock, the one problem with being a monopoly is that after you already have 95% of the market, it is reall hard to grow faster than the market does. Windows Server is losing to Linux in the marketpalce because:
a) Windows Server is a much crapier product.
b) Windows server is much more expensive
c) Miscrosoft can't buy Linux like they have done, or tried to do every other time that they were outcompeted.
It is hard to see how any of that is Ballmer's fault. He has been dealt a really lousy hand if the metric of success is stock price, and frankly, he has been playing it really well. Any rational company attempting to maximize profit would have switched to Linux ages ago. That they haven't is a testament to Ballmer's powers of persuasion.
I went to Pantip plaza to buy a legit copy of XP for my wifes family, they are using winme. I remember reading somewhere the price would be about $30 which is nothing for an American, dinner for four is more expensive. The lowest price I was quoted was $68. The end of the story is it is far to costly for Thai's, when my wifes siblings make from $200-400 a month at the factory or building construction. I just installed BitDefender and unplugged the computer from the phone.
I now just take parts over and build machines for famly and friends. I leave the drivers for windows and tell them install the OS yourself.
Now if I could keep the bugs and lizards out of the powersupplies.
So you don't have to go searching to find them out, here's what MS says:
:P). Amusingly MS passes this and the below one off as 'features' ("Simplified task management").
1) Three programs at most open at once, three windows per program at once. (This might make tabbed browsing popular
2) Maximum resolution is 800x600. Ugh.
3) No LAN support between PCs, or to share printers, etc. Internet support is still there, but I have a suspicion you might not be able to use a router.
4) No multiple user account support.
5) Maximum addressable system RAM is 128MB. This seems ridiculous - I always though you were crippling XP anyway by running it on anything less than 256.
6) Maximum addressable hard drive space is 40GB. Slightly more reasonable than the RAM, but still pretty bad.
They also claim you can run it on a 233 Mhz processor (300 recommended). It probably won't look that pretty.
So yeah, blatant crippleware. It doesn't surprise me nobody's buying it.
I dont think there's anything about "undocumented system calls" when it comes to remote desktop/terminal services.
VNC is just a lot less efficient because all it does is find ways to compress bitmaps of your screen and send them to the client.
RD on the other hand doesnt just do screengrabs, it takes the system calls to draw the screen and pushes that through to the client. Like an X session. Then the client draws the screen. That's a lot less bandwidth.
Considering there is an RD client for unix which is free (if not open source) then I seriously doubt this uses any "secret" technology. An RD clone should be possible, but with VNC where its at, its overkill. Not to mention commercial apps.
Modern VNC variants do pretty well, but because they are essentially graphic compressors they will use more bandwidth. Over your local LAN you wouldnt even notice a difference between the two.
Your complaints about configuration are largely subjective and I won't bother arguing arguing those points, regardless of whether they're closer to "right" or "wrong". And honestly, I can understand that Linux isn't perfect for everything, and I realize that there is some very weird hardware that probably won't ever be supported under Linux and such problems really outweigh the benefits... But "Too difficult to secure." leads me to believe that you're either assuming nobody will read this post because it's several replies down, that you haven't considered Linux at all, or both.
Whether it's security from local users or security from remote attacks (even though your cash registers shouldn't be exposed to the internet directly...), I find it difficult to believe that Windows is easier to secure. Through the years, I have used a number of Windows computers that have been "protected" in a myriad of ways from malicious users, but I have yet to find a system that isn't trivially easy to circumvent, top honours going to Deep Freeze which doesn't do anything in of itself to prevent you from messing with the computer, but simply restores the entire drive image upon every reboot, with the obvious effect of having a fresh system every time.
Being a security minded individual and running Linux on all of my computers, I would make the guess that setting up a secure cash register that uses Linux would be exponentially easier than the same task under Windows. To just have a barebones install of Linux that simply fires up an empty X11 session with no WM/DE and immediately runs the cash register app you're using is trivially easy, run that session with a nobody user that has write access to nothing and use the database of your choice to control data access, throw on a firewall for paranoia, note that you're running exactly 0 services, hardware concerns aside (boot from a floppy, etc, none of which have anything to do with the OS), and you're all set. With Windows, you're stuck with the majority of it whether you like it or not (IE in particular, but there are many other offenders in this respect), unless you'd like to spend several days attempting to clean things up, and perhaps getting mediocre results (I thought this was about ease in the first place?) I don't see how Windows even comes close to Linux in terms of security.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
The Chen Camp was the thing that made Microsoft the defacto OS, and the reason why people don't defect to other OSes: applications.
Using the Motley Fool's terminology, it looks like the Chen Camp lived in the Stage 2 days and the MSDN Camp is winning out in Stage 3.
I think your post adds to this guy's article and perhaps sheds some light as to what is going on in Redmond. I have to admit I find it interesting that Longhorn has been delayed for so long and that they have until recently totally dropped the IE ball.
Someone has been dealing with the asian piracy market lately (at least in the Philippines) A week ago I noticed a couple of the usual sellers had packed up and replaced everything with a scant few original titles and lots of dust filled cabinets. Today all of them have (visually) cleaned up their act. Not a pirated CD in sight. The scale of it is really suprising - hundreds of shops!
Now it's like buying porn, some hustler flashes a few titles to figure your reaction. (Yes, my (human, biological) wife and I buy porn)
Stage 1 is the Startup stage, where obviously you take a lot of risks and do a lot of innovation.
And what innovation exactly has Microsoft done? Let's see:
I really don't see any innovation when Bill Gates was the CEO. Microsoft, as it has been said many times over both in /. and other places, has an 'embrace and extend' mentality: they take the works of others and improve (or 'improve'!) upon them, stealing the market share.
Thanks to Microsoft, the computer revolution never really came. When we could have 32-bit computers, with true plug-n-play, networking, GUI, multimedia and 3d graphics, we had the abomination that was the PC: CGA graphics, beep-beep sound, a horrible 16-bit CPU, a horrible BIOS, and an operating system that did nothing more than ...use the BIOS to provide a basic filesystem which couldn't even handle filenames longer than 8 characters.
It took Microsoft 14 years to make a usable GUI, even with all the libraries already there from someone else: Microsoft had early access to all the original Mac toolbox, from 1981 (that's why Windows calls have 'Pascal' calling convention: the Mac's API was written in Pascal). Their first usable GUI was Windows 95; 14 years later after the Mac, and they had a good but slow and buggy desktop. Each time Microsoft tried a truly new thing, it has flopped back in their face. Microsoft Bob, anyone?
Aside from all innovation fun stuff, Microsoft is truly in stage 3. They don't know where to go from here. They can't create value-for-money as they used to, but the reason is not their ability or lack of it, but rather the technological equilibrium that has been reached: today's technology covers 99% of all needs, so people are not interested in any new technologies. It's not like 10 years ago, where basic stuff like printing, application installation, plug-n-play, drivers, e-mail and communications, computer stability was problematic. Right now everything is so advanced, when compared to 10 years ago, that there is simply no interest in any 'new' things like a vector-based GUI, a database filesystem, etc. Proof for this is Microsoft's confusion regarding Longhorn: they are not sure if their new and exciting technologies like Avalon, WinFS etc must be part of Longhorn or Windows XP/Server. No company/organization is gonna spend money upgrading their machines so as that secretaries play with shiny 3d icons on the desktop.