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Buy Vista or Else
theodp writes "Upgrade or keep crashing was the tagline when Windows XP was introduced. So how will Windows Vista be marketed? 'I'd hate to see something bad happen to your PC,' seems to be one pitch. Even if new features won't get you to upgrade to Vista, you should buy Vista for the security, urged Windows Chief Jim Allchin. Are commercials featuring Tony Soprano next? Bada Bing!"
Who's to say Vista will be secure? Surely from past experience its safer to use XP which has had numerous security patches then a whole new OS with thousands of vulnerabilities to be found
There are already holes in Vista that were revealed with Microsoft's latest patch. If they keep rehashing a lot of the same coding mistakes, then there is no stopping threats. Vista will flop, and be just as buggy as the current version of Windows, and if you do not buy a new computer - well, we all remember Windows ME.
So, try out MacOS X, or Mepis Linux.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
no one on earth is forcing an IT, CIO, homemaker, graphic artist, gamer or anyone else to HAVE TO BUY Micro Soft's shit.
I have for the last two years officially told people - i cannot and will not help you if you are running Windows. I am too busy accomplishing things (photography, videographic analysis) to be bothered with tools that do not just work. I don't care that there are millions of Windows viruses, i don't care if your webpage doens't work with anything but IE and Active X, i just have stopped caring.
I am getting older - i have a family, and i want to create and do things which are special, and i no longer have the time nor the incination to either myself, or have to deal with others who's job it is to spend all day and night defending computers from themselves. I am the architect who doesn't want to deal with the knock-off cheap Chinese crap powertools and hear all the workers bitch about them, or hear about the foreman that tells me i have to keep taking apart all the power tools and putting them back together again... build the fscking house - go get the tools that WORK - and pay more for them if you have to.
The simple fact is - its totally irrelevant to me if a Mac costs $1000 or $3000. If it does what i need - and prevents me from having to fix my tool all day long - the $3000 tool will be far more vaulable in just a week or two. Theoretical, imaginary, or otherwise fantasmic notions that Macs are just as insecure as Windows are irrelevant to me - i work today, and i work now. (well, its saturday, i'm only working a few hours today).
But the flip side of that is - i no longer give a shit what anyone uses. I don't care. Do not bother me or hassle me or get in my way if you can't keep up with me. My friends and family no longer bother me - i bought my family Mac minis, and my friends are all switching.
The world uses Windows?? I'm fscking George Bush of the Mac - i don't give a shit if every person on earth said "jump off this cliff, its the industry standard"
i'm not a lemming - i have things to get done. Whatever you want to do is fine with me, you're out of my "circle of give a shit".
You run Windows. I'm getting things done.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
I think screenshots will be the selling point for most people.
When they have things like the WMF flaw in the designs (And ended up in Vista as well as XP and 2000...) they are NOT about security.
Security is by design, not as a friggin' afterthought.
This has little to do with MS bashing- it's just that MS doesn't think much about security and everyone knows it (Well, everyone but you, it seems...)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It has little to do with the users these days. It's more about the inept application developers.
I've found a relationship (too bad slashdot doesn't do math symbols):
x = the cost of the software product that runs on Windows
y = the chance the software requires everyone using it to log in as administrator
As x -> infinity, y -> infinity
Seriously though, too much windows software, especially vertical apps or expensive commercial apps, still require every user to log in as administrator.
MS should force this issue, you are right. It should be something like Mac OS X does by default, you shouldn't be able to log in as administrator by default. That would at least send the application developers a message that developing your software to assume admin access is stupid.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Microsoft designed the 9x with the clear conscience that it's not as stable as its NT platform.
Why was it developed? Compatibility. People wouldn't really drop all their DOS and Windows 3.11 programs, so 9x was the bridge that allowed the smooth transition that ultimately brought the consumer to the NT platform.
The plain logic basically was "we have the better platform, but you want compatibility, so here's a compromise".
Now that 16-bit is a thing of the past, the DOS layer could be removed ultimately resulting in a fully 32-bit protected environment that is Win 2000 and XP. Is Microsoft to blame they sell XP as more stable OS?
Could they have success with any other strategy? I'd say unlikely.
Vista is the next step in improving security and it took a lot of effort to develop this OS, the entire submission is a flamebait: if you were Microsoft, would you work 6 years on a new product and give it for free? Yes, imagine, you have to pay for the updates, and yes the purpose of updating is improved security, new features and modern hardware support.
Microsoft isn't forcing anyone to upgrade. It just does its best to demonstrate the benefits of its latest offering, because this is what software companies do with new releases.
Now get over it, and stop ranting.
I guess this is why MS doesn't listen to /. for advice on how to build their new product.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
With the advent of the iPod, I already know of a few people who are considering a Mac as their next purchase -- the everyday Joe who would have never considered a Mac before. With more game and application developer support on the Macs, I think Apple has the ability to eat a large chunk of the Desktop OS market during the switch from XP to Vista. If Guild Wars, Counter Strike Source, and Spore get a Mac release, I'd certainly be one to get a Mac. It would also make my decision between Linux or Mac a bit easier.
This is nothing new . . . we live in an society (post 9-11) where everything is predicated on fear. "Buy our anti-bacterial hand soap or your kids may die!!" , "Buy this ADT security system or you are a failure as a parent" . . . marketers and the government have embraced the ubiquitous power of fear and uncertainty to sell everything from tampons to troop deployments . . .ad nausea infinitum
Personally I am more afraid of deploying Windows Vista than not, and Microsoft can stick the DRM in the orifice of their choice.
..... And by requiring all that, you immediately nullify one of the chief "advantages" of Windows. That is, the ability just to turn on a computer and start using it, without identifying yourself or otherwise taking notice of it. You don't get a screenful of diagnostic messages ending with a bunch of green [OK]s while Windows is booting up, "in case that might confuse the poor user". {As a full-time Linux user who has had to attempt to fix a Windows box, I can say that not having those messages is way more inconvenient for the technician than having them is inconvenient for the user. Users can just ignore them, after all. On that logic, maybe we should start building cars where the oil pressure and alternator warning lights don't come on when you first turn on the ignition.} The default privilege level is administrator; but unlike root on a unix system, there are certain actions that are blocked from even an administrator on a Windows system.
I think Windows with passwords is going to be a bit like a pale imitation of KDE.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
You do realize that the Win95, etc. core and the NT cores aren't even from the same code lines?
Nice FUD, though...
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
MS has failed the user community when it has to say, 'don't keep running the old unsecure shit we sold you last year, buy this new shit. And trust us this time.'
It's pretty clear to me that the main reason that Windows has so many security problems is that there is something inherently broken in its design. Remember: when Microsoft first designed Windows, no one was using the Internet, office LANs were pretty much the most networking you were likely to find. So Microsoft didn't have to think about network security back then. Now that the world of computing is increasingly connected to a high-bandwidth Internet connection all the time, it's clear that the model that Windows is built upon is broken.
I think it would benefit Microsoft to do a fundamental redesign of Windows. Apple did this about five years ago when they made the transition from Classic Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. They designed an API that permitted developers to write software that ran natively on both operating systems (Carbon) and gradually phased it out in favor of an API that was completely native to Mac OS X (Cocoa). At the same time, there were many applications that would only run on Mac OS 9 -- i.e., those that were not Carbonized -- that ran in a (mostly transparent) virtualized environment. Microsoft could follow the same pattern as Apple and redesign their operating system from the ground up with security as a primary focus.
The thing that's going to get people to upgrade to Vista isn't the desktop search or any new multimedia features. It's the security and the performance. Right now, Microsoft keeps tacking on bloat after bloat to the existing Windows codebase. This has the effect of making Windows slower. Also, these "ad-hoc" additions, I think, have a tendency of opening up security holes. Microsoft, it's time for you to reevaluate the design of your operating system. Instead of focusing on devising as many different editions as you can for Vista -- which, by the way, baffles the hell out of a lot of your customers -- it's time to wipe the slate clean and start over.
I know we've all said at one point or another, "if I'd known then what I know now, I would have done things completely differently." Well, Microsoft, you do know stuff now that you didn't know 20 years ago. It's time to do things completely differently. Your model no longer works; find a new one.
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
Laptops will start shipping with a secondary LCD screen that's accessible when the machine is closed. So you will be able to do things like checking the status of your e-mail, IM, stocks, weather, whatever -- without taking the machine out of sleep mode, spinning up the hard drives, etc.
That sounds to me like something outside of the operating system otherwise there is no point.
- Tablet PCs will have touch screen functionality in addition to just pen-based input. In addition, the handwriting recognition will "learn" from the files that Vista has indexed on your hard drive -- so if you're a doctor and you're always using words like "phenylketonuria," it will pick that up and recognize those words more readily.
Touch screen is again a hardware improvement; indexing your files to pick out common words for recognition is very clever though.
- As I mentioned in another post, Vista will ship with Windows Collaboration, a Groove-like networking feature that lets wireless users quickly form ad-hoc network and share files and even screen real estate in an easy way.
This just scares me!
- Microsoft will stop talking about power states like "Standby" and "Hibernate" when Vista ships. There will only be "on" or "off." When you hit the power button on your laptop, essentially it goes into Standby. Meanwhile it will be writing out a Hibernate file. After it figures out you won't be coming back, it sinks into Hibernate mode. But (and I'm a little unclear on this) even then it will still be sending a trickle of power to the memory only to keep the memory alive. The idea is that fast on and off will be a way of life and people won't be rebooting their computers all the time.
Isn't that simply removing functionality? I'm sure it will be great for novice users but removing the ability to switch a computer off is not a 'feature' I'm all that keen on.
- You will be able to associate with a new generation of LCD projectors wirelessly. No more showing up to a meeting and fumbling with monitor cables etc. Just find the projector and route PowerPoint through it.
Again this seems more like a hardware improvement - and more of an improvement in LCD projectors than anything else.
Sorry if this seems all very negative but the only positive feature I can see in Vista is the ability in non-admin accounts to enter the admin password to complete admin functions - such as installing software. Hopefully making them usable for the first time in windows.
Laptops will start shipping with a secondary LCD screen that's accessible when the machine is closed. So you will be able to do things like checking the status of your e-mail, IM, stocks, weather, whatever -- without taking the machine out of sleep mode, spinning up the hard drives, etc.
What?? - Explain to me how one is to interact with a machine in sleep mode. Either A) M$ is only turning off the primary LCD, Touchpad, Keyboard, etc. off and calling it "sleep mode," OR B) The machine continuously displays info on the second LCD. With A - That's a sucky sleep mode, and with B - that would drain power all the time, which is even worse.
Tablet PCs will have touch screen functionality in addition to just pen-based input. In addition, the handwriting recognition will "learn" from the files that Vista has indexed on your hard drive -- so if you're a doctor and you're always using words like "phenylketonuria," it will pick that up and recognize those words more readily.
Ummm... I thought that the whole point of a tablet PC was that it had touch screen functionality. The second idea is good, although rather old. ANY handwriting recognition software uses previous recognition data if there is any room for data storage at all.
As I mentioned in another post, Vista will ship with Windows Collaboration, a Groove-like networking feature that lets wireless users quickly form ad-hoc network and share files and even screen real estate in an easy way.
First off, ad-hoc wireless networking is not new in any sense of the word. File sharing protocols (zero configuration, no less) have been around for a while. Remote Desktop viewing/controlling applications are both old ideas that have been implemented--even on Windows.
Microsoft will stop talking about power states like "Standby" and "Hibernate" when Vista ships. There will only be "on" or "off." When you hit the power button on your laptop, essentially it goes into Standby. Meanwhile it will be writing out a Hibernate file. After it figures out you won't be coming back, it sinks into Hibernate mode. But (and I'm a little unclear on this) even then it will still be sending a trickle of power to the memory only to keep the memory alive. The idea is that fast on and off will be a way of life and people won't be rebooting their computers all the time.
"Standby" and "Hibernate" are not new to Windows either. Most laptops have this feature that activates (wait for it....) when you close the lid. Microsoft's "Fast on" sounds more like a "wakeup" than anything else. [given the confused explanation of this "feature", it's hard to say exactly what they mean]. The other point about this "feature" is the lack of an ability to turn off the laptop with the "off" button.
You will be able to associate with a new generation of LCD projectors wirelessly. No more showing up to a meeting and fumbling with monitor cables etc. Just find the projector and route PowerPoint through it.
Apparently Microsoft has managed to coordinate a zeroconf wireless LCD projector standard without anyone knowing--or is this simply support for bluetooth screens.
Vista is going to be a major, major upgrade... way more than anybody is giving it credit for yet and enough so that Apple should definitely be looking over its shoulder. Maybe Microsoft still won't be able to offer customers anything to compare with the iPod experience on a Mac, but business users in particular are going to be all over this.
On the iPod note -- did you miss Microsoft's press release about their "iPod killer" this week (or was it last week)? As to the "Apple should be looking over its' shoulder," please see the definitions of FUD and vaporware, as that is all that your argument seems to be based on.
Congratulations, you've discovered several of the little men behind the curtains. In particular, the "new printer technology" is in order to break CUPS and Samba based compatibility Windows printing. I'm sure they'll "embrace and extend" parts of them, but I'm also convinced they'll deliberately make them incompatible with existing tools in the process.
Second, the "user mode drivers" have a rather obvious use: coupled with the plans for "trusted computing" style authentication of software, they provide a robust means for digital rights management of both software and hardware. The plan seems to be to require authenticated software to access CD and DVD readers and burners. And by integrating it in at the trusted computing driver level, the drives can be designed so that they cannot be used without the vendor's signed software, disabling all access to the content except with the vendor's approved software.
It's a logical consequence of the "trusted computing" approach to software, and you'd better believe that it's being pushed for if not already directly integrated into Vista.