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Why Vista Won't Suck
creativity writes "ExtremeTech is running an article on the new features of Windows Vista and why it is a must upgrade for all Windows users. They take apart the marketing hype and tell you what exactly to expect in Windows Vista. They specifically pick out less-hyped features like a kernel which has new Heap Management and details on SuperFetch, which is Vista's application cache."
You have to buy a new monitor (basically)
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
If it's true, great, bully for them and well done, but I'll believe it when I see it. My hopes aren't too high for all these cool fixes/features to actually function as advertised. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised, who knows?
...it will blow, in six different ways
Will you still have to run most programs as Administrator in order to get them to work correctly? Everytime I want to burn a DVD-R on my computer, I have to switch from using my everyday limited user account to the Administrator account. That's just wrong.
yes we will.
it does not like my hardware(athlonxp 2400/ati 9600 256mb/1g ram)
it runs like hammered feces on decent hardware
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
For a minute there I was looking for the foot icon.
Oh silly me.
Personally I use Windows for a my Laptop and Linux for a server. When vista comes out I'm going to take a look at it. Unless vista really suprises me, I'm switching my laptop to linux and never looking back.
"really quick read" dept.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
HMMM. The exact opposite of FUD. Who's getting paid here?
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
We know Vista will have a ton of advantages over previous Windows incarations, either by innovation or outright copying ideas that have come along and work, so the question should be 'Why would Joe User -or- Corporate Cathy want/need to upgrade from XP, vs 1) staying with XP (or 2000) 2) migrating to another OS (Linux?) that won't force them to buy new hardware or 3) move to Mac, since they have to buy new hardware anyway.
Oh, and if someone posts, "This is the year for Linux on the desktop" now, well, it'll be foretold.
fak3r.com
1. DRM is good for you. It builds strong bones and healthy muscles.
2. Using half your memory for your windowing tool will impress all your friends.
3. Now you can set the color of your blue screen of death to mauve or taupe.
4. You know the customer support is only going to be better.
5. Collectable virus game built in! Better than Pokemon on crack.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
There already is a "Sleep" or "hibernate" mode, it's called turning the computer off totally. That feature has existed since computers were invented.
Well lets see, I finally broke down and upgraded to Windows XP about a month ago when I decided to upgrade my old PIII 800 Mhz machine. Given that, I figure I'll upgrade to Vista about 5 years or so after it's been out.
From TFA:
Aside from the fact that modern hard discs are supposedly faster than USB 2.0, isn't paging out part of the VM to a hot swappable device just dope-assed? Shurley shome mishtake!
I guess time will tell, but judging by microsoft's past history the only way this will work out good, is if some source code comes out and it gets modified to an extreme extent (in my opinion).
We did a show a short while back when the last article telling us why Vista won't be horrible appeared. I hate to say it, but this one doesn't really give me any more reason to give Vista a second look than that one did.
For every "improvement," they seem to be adding at least two shortcomings: no unsigned drivers, DRM, etc... I've kept both Windows and Linux around for the longest time, but I'm getting the feeling more and more that Windows XP is going to remain on my other partition indefinitely.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Many users view Windows XP (and Windows 2000, and previous Windows versions) as unsafe. No matter how many patches and updates Microsoft releases, the foundation of the OS itself the kernel is designed and built in a way that prevents it from being truly secure. The only solution, it is argued, is to redesign and rebuild the kernel with a focus on security and stability.
Isn't this what linux people were saying more or less all these years and were called zealots by MS fanboys?
More of that "intelligent" pre-loading of programs and files. I want the OS to do what I WANT, not to do do what IT THINKS I WANT.
I read that as "must avoid."
OS X here I come...
Couldn't have said it better myself. hmmm.......Maybe great minds do think a like.
Repeat after me: "NO!"
It is written by Microsoft.
I hope I live long enough to visit Bill Gates grave!
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
I'm sure we'll see some thoughtful discussion.
I've been wanting this for years in Windows.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
Why limit yourself to Windows Vista!?
Windows Me
"Windows Me: PC Health Features Keep PCs Stable, Secure and Reliable -- and Take the Frustration Out of Computing for Home Users" (source)
Windows 2000
"Our primary goal is to improve security and safety for all our customers -- consumers and businesses, regardless of size -- through a balance of technology innovation, guidance and industry leadership," Gates said. "We're committed to continued innovation that addresses the threats of today and anticipates those that will undoubtedly emerge in the future." (source)
Windows XP
"Windows XP is the most secure and dependable operating system we have ever produced." (source)
Windows Vista
"In Vista, it should be much more difficult for unauthorized programs (like Viruses and Trojans) to affect the core of the OS and secretly harm your system." (source)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
There is one reason bigger than everyone else that says Vista will indeed suck. DRM, just refuse the rimjob.
HTTP/1.1 400
Because if Vista rates an Athalon 64, with a gig of RAM and 248MB of video RAM as 4 on 10, I wonder what it expects a 10 to be!
They take apart the marketing hype
It is often at this point in a product's review, when the hype has been carefully peeled away from the packaging, the box has been delicately opened, and the packing materials have been placed in neat piles and sorted according to color or specific gravity or biodegradability, that there is a moment of panic and surreal confusion as realization dawns: the box is empty, and we are left with nothing but ribbon and tinsel and wrapping paper.
I usually try to make something from the ribbon and tinsel and round things up with a few paragraphs about the pretty, pretty paper.
I get the mental imagine of a boot stepped on a human face when I read the bit about foot icon...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
No need to manually defrag anymore according to the article.
It will happen automatically and slow your harddisk to a crawl in the process.
How about creating a file system that doesn't suck instead?
The months are just too short. I can count the number of days on one hand.
Silly Micro$oft gazillion character alpha-numeric serial number replaced with MC\VISA\AMX number and expiration date. (Much easier to type in)
Boot up music replaced by ka-ching ka-ching
1) Your computer breaks.
2) Purchasing searches for a new one, and buys the cheapest one they can find -- a new Dell with Windows Vista.
3) Office envy sets in, and soon the entire dept./company has to have a new Pentium (IV/V) with (256/512) megs of RAM and whatever flashy new screensavers or icons Vista will come with.
At most companies, this is exactly how it works. Greed and envy and laziness mean that 90% of corporate users will fight to stay on the Windows upgrade treadmill as long as they can.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
We're talking about a "must" upgrade here but what about the specs necessary to run it? Sure it's going to be better, but joe-average can't even buy a computer now and be assured that it will even run vista.
sig here
I really like the Performance rating tool. This will help average computer users judge how good their computers are better. Right now you ask a normal person how good their computer is and they tell you that "Its a dell", or they tell you "Its a 2 Giga-somthing".
The ratings could possibly make this easier, and it could help educate people about why their computer is so slow. From a sales standpoint this could help as well. Computers could be advetised with their rating instead of stuff that geeks like us understand, but is too confusing for many others. This could help them compare deals and make a more informed choice about the computer they are getting.
What, you think you're on a WoW server?? WTF?
Installed the Feb CTP on my notebook (generic Tosh Centrino. 1.6Ghz, 1Gb of DDR M50). Really impressed with the image quality. Not impressed with the 7.5Gb base install. Nearly every system change is a complete pain in the ass. Maybe I'm too used to XP, but it shouldn't take, going from memory, at least 6 mouse clicks to turn off window animations. Now running Ubuntu.
uh... looking at that first photo... the numbers for the 'performance rating' are as follows: 4.4 5.9 5.9 5.9 5.8 with the overall rating of a uh... 4 whassup wit dat?
sig goes here!
Many users view Windows XP (and Windows 2000, and previous Windows versions) as unsafe. No matter how many patches and updates Microsoft releases, the foundation of the OS itself--the kernel--is designed and built in a way that prevents it from being truly secure. The only solution, it is argued, is to redesign and rebuild the kernel with a focus on security and stability.
The kernel? Nobody argues that the kernel is insecure. When was the last time the kernel was compromised?
It's the design of Windows that is insecure. Things like making things executable depnding on the filename, or having many applications require Administrator privs. You aren't going to fix that by looking at the kernel.
This stinks of "we've improved the kernel, therefore we are downplaying the kernel in previous versions to make it seem like a huge improvement". This is a tactic used by Microsoft for every release of Windows, for various features. They always talk about how bad some feature is in previous versions and how the new version will be much better. Then they do it again for the next version. And the version after that.
This isn't about improving security, it's about sounding appealing and a big step up from previous versions. It's because their biggest competitor is inertia, not because there was anything particularly wrong with the kernel.
The driver model of Vista has been totally changed.
Again? Fantastic. Remember this, all you Windows trolls who say that Windows has better driver support. This is going to be XP all over again (which was 2000 all over again).
From TFA: The slick new calendar app is a welcome addition to the bundled Windows programs.
So how is this different than outlook? The screeny to me looks like outlook+eyecandy...maybe its just me.
Wah Sig!
Why must I upgrade, though? What will I gain that I want in the first place? Better game performance? Not needed, since I don't do games. The ability to run the latest Microsoft Office at speeds approaching what you could do 5 years ago? Sorry, I already jumped ship to other options. Stronger DRM so that I'll be able to play Sony's next CD/DVD/WhateverD? I'll pass...
What I'd like is some tuning on the current operating system, so that it doesn't need more CPU cycles to do simple tasks, like display directories. And how about fewer holes for virii and worms, without introducing a whole new layer of software to protect the last new layer of software, which was to protect me from bugs in the previous new layer...
Oh, wait... that's Linux.
Perhaps your computer is borked in some other way because Vista runs great on my hardware (Pentium M 760/Go-6800/1gb). Maybe your Athlon XP just can't compete with my notebook processor.
*The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.*
Looks like a forced upgrade for US gov users; if AES-256 and "SHA-2" hashs are really going to be US gov security requirements, the only way Microsoft will support them is by upgrading EVERY windows desktop and server to Vista. (For some reason Microsoft has refused to put AES-256 support into any non-Vista version of its SSL stack even though the rest of the industry has been doing so for almost five years now.)
You say 'why it will be a must-upgrade for all Windows users' as if any Windows users are going to have much of a choice once it's out for a while. Really, how long will MS let XP kick around and be supported by upgrades, and by other sofware houses, once Vista is out?
I wouldn't call it an 'upgrade', Bob.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Someone's getting paid some marketing dollars...
[/sarcasm]
I remember my last intentional switch to Windows (Win 95). It, too, was going to have all these wonderful new features (better GUI, better memory management, multitasking). I tried for 2 years to get the same level of stability I had in DOS, and then went to OS/2. And machines which didn't ship with Win 95 were even more of a beast to get working correctly if you had added stuff to your box.
IMHO, "upgrading" to Vista will be the same thankless task, and it will be at least a year before machines shipped with Vista are going to be "right". Microsoft will rush this job because it's already so late that they almost have to.
Using plain ol' text since 1968
Vista is going to suck all right. It's a huge, resource-hungry, monolithic 1990s idea launched just as we hit rocketing resource and energy costs. Small may be beautiful but if you're Vista then grossly fat is better, apparently.
For many folks, Vista will represent an expenditure they can ill afford. Vista is unlikely to be cheaper in real terms than WinXP; probably it will be more expensive. Then there will be the obligatory AV/spyware stuff for "only" XX bucks more. After that there will be hardware issues, with 1001 sites telling users that they'll need more, more more - more ram, a better monitor, more processing power, yes yes more. And if you've managed to get that far, there'll be the small, haha, matters of DRM and, very likely, an accelerated lack of real support for WinXP. It's boasting and bandwagoning from an industry that doesn't deserve it selling folks stuff they really don't need.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Yes - we must, all of us, rush out and lay claim to copies of Vista for all of our Windows computers immediately! Without this, our planetary orbit will be skewed, glaciers will form, chaos will reign, and Bill's bank account will not be the proper size to counterbalance the Indian subcontinent and Mt. Everest...
I've been beta testing Vista for a while now. After installing Vista, I swear to God - the OS cached every single EXE file on my computer in a folder in the root of Vista's installation drive. Each EXE file is given its own subfolder in this folder, with the same name as the file followed by a unique hash. Each subfolder contains the EXE file and several accompanying files, at least two of which are XML documents.
When all was said and done, this folder took up nearly 5GB on disk. I can't even open this drive in Explorer. I let it sit for about 20 minutes once and my PC slowed to a crawl
Whatever this godawful "feature" is, I hope it is removed for the final version.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
The latest version of M$ Bloat-ware that brings the latest hardware to a crawl, well that has no value to me.
Would it be so bad if they could continue to improve security and performance, instead of making it bigger with more features that 80% of the people will not use?
Linux continues to work on almost any hardware you can load it into...
As far as the next windows goes - it would be better if it would run on Windows 98 hardware, and
run very well on the newer hardware...
"It looks like you're trying to run a program!"
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
"To be honest, we don't know how the security features of Vista will shake out. It's still very much a beta product. The real test of the OS will be when it is delivered into the wild, and every virus, worm, and Trojan writer in the world strives to live in infamy by releasing the nastiest malware for Microsoft's shiny new OS."
Uhh, so it "won't suck" because it -might- not be as insecure as XP? That really doesn't sound too promicing...
I'll tell you why it's "a must upgrade for Windows users." Because Microsoft will stop fixing bugs in your current version of Windows. There are many thousands of bugs listed in their "knowledge base" which state "we know this is an issue but we're not going to fix it in this version." I've been part of a development team which spoke directly with Microsoft representatives on many occasions and when we mentioned Windows 2000 bugs their answer was "buy XP." I quit.
Thanks. But no thanks.
Developers: We can use your help.
http://www.extremetech.com/image_popup/0,1694,s=25 534&iid=127863,00.asp
On the list of worst ideas ever
That one hits pretty high
Will be interesting when people's thumb drives die within a month of using this.
... will it run Linux?
We've all heard it before.
http://outcampaign.org/
...gold shackles!
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
DRM and Windows blackbox security, along with the Ubuntu distro, have pushed me to adopt an OSS only stand. MS will try to cram DRM down everyone's throat. As a Canadian, where copyright laws aren't as rabid as those carrying the American sickness, I don't intend to let MS port American laws into my small piece of Canada. As to security, a thousand eyes are better than a single black box that may, or, may not, have backdoors in place to allow American three lettered organizations to spy on me or pull the plug should their paranoia overwhelm them.
Being a happy later adopter of bleeding edge tech I'm just now building AMD athlon boxes and, on the one I've finished, Ubuntu is doing just fine. Factor in Xen, VMware freeware, *BSD, OpenSolaris and free Solaris 10, and the future of F/OSS is looking very bright indeed.
As are many other /.ers, I'm my family circle goto guy when it comes to PCs and tech generally, so I think it's time to cut the MS cord and go solo with F/OSS as a statement to my small sphere of influence.
WinXP support is set to go on for another 7 years by then I doubt I'll see the need to pay the MS tax just for multimedia, or, maybe, the DRM madness will have been reversed, but I doubt it.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Windows 3.1 (1994)
Windows 95 (1995)
Windows 98 (1999)
Windows XP home edition (2002)
Mac OSX (2004)
The last upgrade has been, by far, the most satisfying.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
Any OS (other than older Windows) installed on a Windows system is an upgrade.
features like a kernel which has new Heap Management and details on SuperFetch
I mean, seriously, "SuperFetch"? It's bad enough when one hypes things that are actually hypable; it's much worse when one hypes that which cannot be hyped, such as virtual memory.
Is nothing sacred?
which version out of the 12 should i upgrade to ;) i think windows vista is likely to do more for linux than anything before ;) i mean what would you rather do, pay for a whole new operating system that is very alien to you, and requires you to upgrade your hardware and alot of software, and is likely unstable (and new so doesnt have a proven usability).. or download a FREE operating system that is also somewhat alien (to windows users), but has proven stability and usablity, also you wont have to upgrade your hardware for it either... oh btw did i mention its free?
i for one am tired of microsoft telling me when i have to drop 2000 dollars for a new computer. your choises are:
A) keep using (and patching) the older versions of windows which become more and more unstable patch after patch
B) keep using the older versions of windows but DONT patch, and then your system becomes more and more exploitable as more exploits are discovered
C) upgrade your hardware, and buy new version of windows every couple of years, (spending potentially thousands of dollars), relearn how to use the new windows, relearn how to use the new office all over again..
D) download a free open source alternative, DONT upgrade your hardware, dont let your upgrade schedule be locked into someone elses marketing plans. dont run the most heavily targetted OS for exploits/hackers. Use open office which seems to be more similar to MS Office than the new version will be. DO enjoy the benefits that come with open source
After using linux for a while going back to windows is extremely painful and youll wonder how you ever managed to use it.
Reason #1: Because it blows
Reason #2: ???
Reason #3: Profit!!
Writable USB mass-storage devices aren't really hot-swappable on Windows or Linux. Both operating systems use filesystem caching to speed up operations on the devices. These caches have to be flushed, usually by unmounting the filesystems, before the device can be removed. So "Click here to safely remove F:" is a necessity either way.
As for speeds compared to hard disk drives, SATA offers a higher theoretical throughput than USB2.0, but the seek times associated with magnetic drives limits this to the point where I get similar performance when comparing my 250GB external drive and my internal 80GB one. Flash memory devices virtually eliminate seek time issues, though. I get better performance with a key fob than I do with a local magnetic drive.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Can you finally delete files/folders without it giving you a stupid "access denied" for no reason? Plase let me delete aging files with no guff. I'm the user at the computer, so do what I say.
Of course, delete the files in CMD(er, DOS), and it deletes them without guff.
Drum roll please
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.
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.
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Because it will blow!
Thank you! Thank you! I'll be here all night.
I read the article and now I really want Vista! But I hate Microsoft and DRM... :'(
What do I do now? my heart is broken
I'm one of those people who generally dislikes default themes in anything. I actually use my Windows with the taskbar on top, and that's not because I'm some crazy fanatic using Apple-ish theme for windows.
Now, I wonder if Vista will be as rigid with themes as Windows XP, and will it only accept "signed" themes from MS, and encourage you to buy the oh-so-useful Plus!. In XP, the theming engine was one of the Big Things that were supposed to make the system better, and more popular, but yet, in order to use just about any theme out there, you have to jump through hoops and "patch" a dll in order for windows to recognize unsigned themes. I understand the need to protect users from unsigned, potentially dangerous themes, but in XP, it feels more like some sort of a crazy DRM, than protection of the user.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
Honestly folks, with the improved security and performance I see no reason to leave Windows. Linux and Mac will be fighting for their pityful 5% market share on the desktop. Hopefully somebody alerts related Linux/OSS developers (kernel, GNOME, etc) about these Vista features.
Vista doesn't suck until the next OS version comes along, then will tell you why Vista sucks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I mean it looks almost lickable!
Just 7 years behind OS X in that regard.
-- Boycott Shell
"Many of us have used System Restore at one time or another, and it can be a real life-saver."
Or a spawning ground for all the viruses in your computer.
Seriously, from what I read in this artical...Nothing really usefull or offerd that I cant live without. Sorry microsoft Im sticking with XP.
well thats all fine and dandy.. but it still costs money.. too much money at that.. its a "MUST" upgrade because you won't be able to do anything with XP anymore.. the one things i've always liked about Linux, besides the fact that its free, is that I can run an application that was programmed years ago.. someone down below said it best.. it seems like the open source operating systems are progressing even more and more as the years go by.. why try to convince a massive amount of users to upgrade to Windows Vista, spend another $200+, and all they do is use the WWW, Email, Word Processing if even, and other basic tasks?? hell, my linux box my complete multimedia center.. it didn't cost anything.. and i'm a freakin retard!! and it actually works!! c'mon.. no brainer..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
DX10 will use much faster dynamic link libraries (DLLs), and won't incorporate older versions of DirectX, as is done today.
Well, I guess we'll see a port of WINE and/or WINE derivatives to Windows, for those old games like Total Annihilation. Who'da thunk it?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Let me guess....because it's actually a vacuum cleaner?
I am so smart!
I am so smart!
S-M-R-T!
I mean S-M-A-R-T!
(see: palladium, trusted computing)
As opposed to authorized programs, like the Sony backdoor, which used Microsoft-supplied methods to create the program to hide from the users.
Great, the new OS is going to be bigger and bloated just from the OS, and now SuperFetch is going to suck up even more free memory with programs that I may or may not load, but that my computer thinks I'd like to be able to access quickly. Like Windows Media Player, and MSN, and Internet Explorer. And Kazaa. Sorry, was that my outside voice?
Oh, so we won't use Outlook any more, that's a plus at least.
Great. Now when your parents get the popup that some application wants to access the network, and are presented with all these options for "finer granularity of which applications can use network resources", they'll just turn them all on and go instead of actually learning the ins and outs of TCP security. That's much more secure.
With the kernel sucking up all my memory by preloading applications, a brand new networking stack, and all these operations going on in the background to maximize my heap, I'll not be holding my breath.
More, more, more, and more performance-sucking and hardware-gobbling "features". I don't know anyone outside of hardcore gamers that currently has a DX9-compliant, 128MB video card - my parents surely don't. I just last month bought one so that I could play Fable on my comp while I'm away from home for a few months. And I guess I better get that double-500G hard drive option in my new computer so that all my SafeDoc backups don't make all my disk space go the way of my free memory used by SuperFetch.
And "noobs" who do know just a little better will give themselves administrator accounts so that they can install software whenever they want without changing roles, completely mooting any "default user level access" security changes being made.
Why do we need virus softwar
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Seriously, this thing is going to be a hog. But its not even that that bothers me, as I've come to deal with XP's size also. Its the games.
Because of the lack of back-porting DX10, its upgrade or quit. Maybe with all the licensing/driver signing, some of the smaller studios will switch to OpenGL, but if Vista's rumored OpenGL support is true (shitty implementation wrapped into DX10 and slow as hell) then the big companies won't go for it. They won't stick with DX9 either, since it probably won't support whatever new feature graphics cards will bring. Will microsoft keep supporting DX9? Hell no. And OpenGL will underperform by default, which is what microsoft wants. So gamers get screwed and will either upgrade to it or quit buying PC games.
Either way, microsoft is trying to win, either by selling you a new OS or selling you a console. At least sony isn't trying to FORCE you to spend money, only hoping you do...
it comes with a vacuuum cleaner :)
... that would be a VACUUM CLEANER!
From the FTA:
The whole kernel has been reorganized and rewritten to help prevent software from affecting the system in unsavory ways.
I personally made up the X.uhoh term for untested software that is released to the public. You might have heard of it.
The dialog box of the defragmenter (who still does this in 2006 anyway?) is still confusing.
What is different from "OK" and "Defragment Now"? If unsure, hit OK.
Media center updates?
That is a separate product, one of the 6 that will be offered.
Audio now does not BSOD? What is a BSOD? Who invented that, and why is that useful?
Better audio fidelity? The ones are pointier and the zeros must be rounder.
I believe Direct X will die in lieu of OpenGL. OS X runs on x86 now, and game developers will probably embrace an open and portable platform vs a proprietary one. Incidentally, in 1996 or 7 a Direct X "upgrade" that hosed my system is when I stopped using windows personally.
Security? I'll believe it when I hear about it. I thought MS was going to charge monthly for security?
The only compelling feature that I thought was interesting about Vista would have been WinFS, but that seems to be missing from this release.
I doubt I will "upgrade" from OS X or Linux despite their issues.
...that adoption will be slow. According to Bhaskar Chakravorti, a smart person who wrote a smart book called the "Slow Pace of Fast Change", new innovations (like Linux and Vista) take a while to get adopted by the broad mass of people. Smaller-sized buyers and sellers tend to hang back to see if the new innovation is going to be a success; third party vendors do the same; until significant buyers and sellers adopt the new technology, thereby pulling others along with them. Bhaskar called it "demi-Moore's" law because the rate of adoption of new innovations usually product performance because everyone is hanging back waiting to see what other will do. So it's called "demi" Moore's law because the rate of adoption is twice as long as (demi) the rate of innovation.
Here's the link for Bhaskar's book: http://www.slowpacefastchange.com/
Oddly, Microsoft might now be in the same shoes as vendors and orgs of open source software: how to get people to adopt the new technoloby? OpenOffice.org LOOKS more like Office XP than will Microsoft Office 12. Vista will have compatibility problems with legacy apps and legacy formats.
Meanwhile, open source projects and vendors have been busting ass to make their code more standand, more compatible, more browsable and more easy to use. This could get exciting.
- It has a headache
- Wants you to use anti-virus protection
- You've already had Windows XP suck
- Can't turn it on
- Not impressed by the size of your computer
- Doesn't like you dual booting Linux
- Windows NT told it sucking is dirty
- Not affected by alcohol
- Wants you to commit to lifetime upgrade agreement
I thought the name stood for the following:
- Viruses
- Instability
- Spyware
- Trojans
- Adware
Now they tell me it's not the case? I'll believe this article when I see VISTA working for a couple of years.
Just because a new version of Windows is a 'must-have upgrade' doesn't mean it won't suck. It's more accurate to say that Windows Vista sucks less. (Hey, if it doesn't suck at all, the statement would still be true.)
Kevin Fox
Because it is a vacuum cleaner from Microsoft!
...
Sorry, could not resist
Check out:t ory/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=12;t=000001
:-D
http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/cgi_direc
OpenGL 1.4 support, emulated by D3D?
Yeah right, good luck convincing slashdotters that "Vista Won't Suck"
the problem with Visgt is it's monolithic archetecture, DRM and MS's driver signing policy for vista.
Linux can be just as easy to use as windows. Depending on how it is packaged.
OF course, the other big difference that if you wanted to, you could fix/change whatever you want in Linux. Not that most people would, but they could.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Besides, I get an annoying Rick James song stuck in my head when I see that name.
Then it morphs into "Ya can't fetch this!" and makes me want to claw my ears out.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Microsoft fanboys are just like the mac variety. Once their favorite corp comes around, then suddenly they've always felt that way.
Fanboys ought to be banned from owning computers. You want to be a fan of something, pick a sports team. This fanboy shit in the tech world is beyond moronic.
Judging from the posts in this thread you'd think the average slashdot reader is 12.
IT IS WRITEN BY M$ THERE4 IT WILL SUCK!!11
You guys are embarrassing.
...or does the idea of a(nother) "ground up rewrite" of the TCP stack fill you with fear, too? All new bugs!
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
Windows CE for mobile devices.
Windows ME for the desktop.
Windows NT for servers.
The Windows CEMENT line of products.
Rhapsody in Numbers
windows vista still sucks.
Suck a lemon?
Every first release of a Microsoft product has been a steaming pile and Vista will not be an exception.
These people are clueless ... really:
...
... Standards and Practices !
"DX10 will use much faster dynamic link libraries (DLLs)"
Oh yeah, I did read that far, I'm slipping
PenGun
Do What Now ???
These kinds of "articles" are generally an uncritical examination of the "new features" some marketing blurb has put out, combined with a demo or demo version. For example, any tech journalist should know or know who to ask to find out that *nix has had its drivers in userland for ages, and that fact should merit a remark in the article (e.g. "userland drivers are state of the art for most other operating systems"). I'm not asking for a full-blown comparison to Linux, but that's just basic understanding of OSes.
Anyone else find it odd that the Athlon FX-25 (its actually a FX-57, its often identified as a FX-25.. go figure) is rated 4 out of 10?
Thats a freakin $800-$1,000 processor.
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME MICROSOFT?
I wonder if this grades processors based on cpu frequencies only. This could cause alot of trouble for AMD - as Intel processors generally run at higher frequencies, and yet don't perform at near the level of the AMD processors.
Anyway, yeah, I'm not going to bother upgrading.
(maybe after Vista SP2)
How many end users care about how fast malloc(3) is? If MS has come up with a great algorithm for malloc, good for them, honestly. That doesn't make it worth the hundreds of dollars to upgrade, though.
Even from a technical standpoint, a smarter malloc is definitely a good thing... But it's not a revolutionary feature. It doesn't have an enormous impact; no one in their right mind would say, "Let's run this on Windows, because its malloc() is so much faster."
"MS is aiming for an easy-to-operate OS that is accessible and reasonably secure" I'm still laughing... wait, were you serious?
- As you pointed out, the unaware user may remove the stick, leaving the app hanging in mid air...
- Flash memory wears out from writing to it. This is not a problem when used reasonably, but it will fry the stick within a couple of weeks if used as a swap device... I wonder whether Bill Gates will use his huge wealth to buy all of us some new USB sticks after he fried our old ones
;-)
- Security implications. What happens if you want to give a file to somebody by writing it to his USB stick? Answer: you will give him much more than the file he asked for
... valuable things such as pages from your applications which just happened to contain important passwords.
Dope assed indeed. But hey, this is Microsoft!"Well, that's exactly what Microsoft is doing with Vista. The whole kernel has been reorganized and rewritten to help prevent software from affecting the system in unsavory ways."
Sheesh, seems like I hear this *every time* ms is readying an upgrade.
It's just you. ;)
There's an ancient law of computers that programs (the OS *is* a program) expand to fill all available memory. This predates MS-DOS, let alone Windows.
"if read fails, stop reading from the device and read instead from hard disk" I don't see what's so "unsafe" with it.
I'd rather be worried by how much is going to last that usb key - flash memory has a limited number of writes you know, this vista thing may very well end up killing it if it's used for cache. But AFAIK it's not used really used for cache. Instead, vista records what programs you use more often, and will duplicate the blocks used by those programs (ecnrypted) in the usb key so programs load faster in startup. I assume you can use raid to implement this in other systems? dunno.
It constantly bitches at you (pops up a message box) when you try to do something that requires root privileges. At least that should cut down on the number of stupid tech support calls I get from my family.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
You see, I happily use Windows 3.1 on my computer at home, and I havent had ANY virus problems. Sure, when I want to use the internet, I have to be risky and use my XP machine, but it's only a matter of time before everybody adopts Vista and people write viruses for Vista. Then, due to the fact that they will break backwards compatibility with Windows 98, I can finally upgrade my Windows 3.1 box to windows 98!
Sometimes it is more helpful to be several miles behind the dull edge than four feet in front of the bleeding edge.
I don't get why posts are limited to 120 characters. Seems unreasonable to me. I mean, just because I like having a real
I've used Vista since a few CTPs ago (MSDN subscriber) and I must say, it really is shaping up. The last release I couldn't get widescreen working (even though it worked the release before) but I was very impressed with that version. I have yet to try the Feb CTP, mostly because I didn't want to keep installing it. I did buy a new hard drive so I could try the new version... but I really have no use for it. Anyway, my experience was rather good. The user permissions dialog was a bit annoying, but it's gotten better and didn't do that much last time I saw. The interface is sleeker and easier to use, in my opinion. The effects and eye candy is very nice, but I'm an aesthetic person. The startup time and programs loaded as well as XP, sometimes faster. I imagine it'll be more optimized closer to release. The control panel was a bit confusing, but switching to Classic view was much better. I never liked the grouped control panel in XP, but in Vista it is so much better. I only needed classic view to use the "Add Hardware" wizard. Everything else was found quickly when I needed it. I'm happy with Vista, and since I have MSDN, I'll get it and then install it when my games can all run. Most of them can, Steam, Guild Wars, and a few others I've tested.
Kamran A
........ Dude his computer only has 256MB of ram, a 5 year old video card and a 5 year old processor. Why do you think your laptop runs better? You have under a year old processor, 1gb of ram, and a kick ass video card. Of cource Vista will RUN A LOT better on your laptop. His comp IS NOT MADE for Vista since Vista needs a $2,000 computer to run on.
LINUX FTW!
-Agentdunken the linux master
Linux, because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
About 200 bones from your wallet.
Oh yea, and you'll probably need to sink at least $500 into your old POS to get Vista installed on it. Or just give up and schlep out another grand and a half for a new system.
For what? Windows Media Player 11? New window dressing on old trash? I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of my wallet bleeding.
The article says that Vista won't suck. What I'm seeing in the article is stuff that should have been in Windows for years. And much of that is stuff that has been in, oh, say Mac OS X for years.
So let's assume that the author is right. Suppose that Vista doesn't suck. Does that mean you're going to want to use it? From what I've seen, Microsoft has made blunder after blunder after blunder with their UI design. I had a chance to take a peek at one of the later Vista builds. They replaced the Start menu with a tiny little non-expanding window. Now, I know the current Start menu is difficult to navigate when it's full of stuff, but does Microsoft really expect us to scroll through a tiny little list -- on a 1280x1024 display -- that could be hundreds of items long to find the one 16x16 icon we're looking for?
And say what you will about Aero glass being pretty, but I've got another name for it: resource hog. Using the 2D graphics acceleration is a great idea for improving the performance of the window server (or whatever it's called in Microsoft parlance) but adding gratuitous eye candy -- which most systems won't be able to handle -- means that Vista will never quite look the same on two computers. And I think the style is, frankly, distracting.
I've been playing with IE 7. I've got lots of problems with the UI, to say nothing of the lousy browser it houses. Why oh why is the menu bar not where it is on every other Windows app? And why did they break up the standard cluster of about five toolbar buttons and spread them all over the place? E.g., why is the stop/reload button to the right of the address bar, when it's been to the left of the address bar in every major browser for over ten years now.
I also don't like the way they've integrated searching. Searching is different from "Starting" (or I guess since the start button doesn't say start anymore, "Windows logo-ing") an application. That's why it makes sense that the Google desktop search goes in the tray, or why Spotlight in Mac OS X gets its own little corner of the screen. Also, that totally screws with the keyboard shortcuts. I'm used to hitting (Windows) > P and then scrolling around with the keyboard for the app I want. I guess I won't be able to do that anymore.
And finally, Windows still gives the average user waaaaaay too much information about the computer. For example, most grandmas I know have no idea what "defragmenting" means. Most other people know that it's a good idea to do it from time to time, but never do and there's never been a built-in easy way to schedule it automatically. So instead of annoying the user from time to time with a "hey, congratulations, you don't need to defragment your hard drive" window, why doesn't the system just do it automatically in the background like Mac OS does? Same goes for virus scanning. Why couldn't virus scanning be more like a daemon that only shows a UI when there's actually something pertinent to report. And no, "no viruses found" is not pertinent information.
Well, that turned into more of a rant than I intended.
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
In my personal updatings, we never actually bought the newest Windows OS; we just bought a new box every few years with the latest bundled OS. First it was Mac OS (7), then Windows 95 a few years later (Gentooed recently, by the way), Windows ME, and then XP. My guess is a lot of people do the same, so the hardware issue isn't so major as long as the manufacturers put together modern hardware to go with their "modern" OS.
Personally, if I buy a new box, I'm staying with Linux or going the Apple way.
Vista's Aero interface uses 3D hardware acceleration to render mostly bitmap graphics. Basically the UI spends some CPU time rendering 2D images, and then uses them as textures applied to 3D objects.
But when you think about it, the 3D hardware acceleration could be used in a much better way: the UI could feed the video card directly with vector graphics. For example, I am thinking about all these efforts to develop Open Source X11 SVG desktop environments: everybody seems to try to do software-only implementation of SVG, but many SVG features map perfectly to typical 3D acceleration features: vector graphics, animation, alpha blending, etc. Is anybody aware of such development efforts (hardware accelerated SVG support) ?
- Article is obviously biased towards MS. It's one thing to be excited about a new product, but not mentioning ANY bad parts of it is just wrong.
- "If that sounds like a bunch of technobabble nonsense, don't worry. You don't have to know what it means, you just have to know that it makes life easier on developers and improves performance. And it doesn't stop with heaps. Lots of relatively little, commonly-used functions have been improved, like procedure calls." That's exactly what I _don't_ want to read in a review from ExtremeTECH. "You don't need to know the specs of the video card. All you need to know is it will make things look pretty."
- Improvements to sleep/hibernate mode? Get rid of them on the desktop please. It's not worth the trouble. I guess it's a nice improvement for laptops though.
- "The driver model of Vista has been totally changed. Many of the drivers that used to sit at the system (kernel) level are now at the user level, which means that when drivers fail, your whole system shouldn't crash. You should also be able to update most drivers without rebooting your system." Well I am biased on this one because I cannot even remember the last time my XP installation crashed. As for not having to reboot for driver updates, blah. I've written about the pointlessness of no-reboot systems before, and it would be redundant to say it all over again.
- The details on "Media Center Improvements" were a little (ok a lot) scarce, so I'm reserving judgment. However, I think Media Center does a lot of things right in its current XP incarnation, so my hopes are pretty high for Vista's Media Center.
- I like the per-application volume controls a lot. Built in speech recognition is really cool too, assuming it's implemented well. Speech recognition is overrated though. I hope there won't be a Clippy type creature constantly asking me, "Would you like to use your microphone to write this email?"
- "Graphics cards will have to produce results within a very small margin of error to be considered DX10 compliant, so developers shouldn't have to worry about the same operation producing different visuals on different cards." I'll believe that when I see it, pun intended.
- "There are lots of backup utilities for Windows XP, and most of the good ones cost money. Vista will offer a built-in backup utility, where you can perform manual backups or restoration of folders or entire drives, or automate backup scheduling. You should be able to backup your files to CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, internal or external hard drives, or even other computers on your local network." If it's better than the one included with XP I'll be happy. Although it sounds very similar to XP's backup utility.
- I suppose Paint will still be included with Vista?
- The UI... ah the UI. Glass/Aero look like they might be cool for a week, but after that it will just be another resource hog. The sidebar might be cool, especially since there will be so many people making widgets. I can't wait for widget viruses/worms though!
- The "Security security security" section had me rolling my eyes. First, the built-in security can't be that great if Microsoft is already planning a subscription-only security service for Vista. There will be viruses/worms/trojans for Vista, plain and simple. There will always be holes. I just hope these new security features won't give people a false sense of absolute security.
- Should you upgrade? Well, you will have to eventually, if you plan to stay in the Windows World. Do I want to? No, not really. I could not wait for XP to be released, because it was such a big improvement over previous versions. But Vista seems, to me, to be a collection of cool little toys that Microsoft is hoping, when combined, will be a top-notch OS. I am considering a Mac for the first time in a long time, and Linux is almost ready for my consideration as my main workstation.
-William Brendel
It's very easy to slam Microsoft but the sad truth is:
-The marketing dollars spent to promote this new case study in mediocrity will far outweigh any objective assessment of the product.
-Every magazine that can possibly figure out a way to cover the launch will and Microsoft will reward them handsomely with ad revenue, "fact finding" trips to Microsoft events in holiday places.
-Many people and corporations will go out and get a new pc with Vista. They'll do it for no reason other than "it's new."
-I for one, welcome the new OS. My desktop support queue will remain steady.
I'll say it again. Microsoft positioning itself to be the one that captures the wealth (dollars) from the rise of Linux. One way is to borrow nifty *nix features and make the consumer pay for them. Guess what? One less Linux convert.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The whole title is Why Vista Won't Suck My Balls.
To all of you who are bitching about DRM in Vista:
How is DRM in Vista any different from DRM in XP? Or Windows 2000? Or Mac OS X?
The answer is simple: It's not any different. The reason is even more simple: Big Media is calling the shots, not Microsoft.
Whether the media in question is downloaded music, downloaded videos, or HD-DVD/Blu-Ray, it is Big Media making the demands. If you're a software vendor, your choices are to go along to get along (Microsoft, Apple, Tivo), do without (Linux), or face the wrath of an army of lawyers (DeCSS, 321 Studios).
The tools and techniques keep changing, but the principle remains the same. Big Media will burn down everything in their path to stop people from copying bits.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Unless I read the last article on this completely wrong, the signing requirement only applies to kernel-level drivers.
MOST drivers (including sound card drivers according to the article) will run in user space which means that they won't be able to take down the system.
Sounds like a very sensible choice for 95% of computer users -- and if you haven't realized it by now, that's who Microsoft is targetting.
ME also introduced an entirely new driver model. I wonder if Vista will do as well as ME.
"Internet Explorer 7 under Windows Vista runs in a special super-low user access mode that gives the browser very little access to the underlying OS, and ActiveX security has been tightened up significantly as well, with most ActiveX controls off by default and set to opt-in rather than opt-out. Hopefully other browsers will follow suit and operate in this least-privileged mode, too."
I'm sorry, that last bit just made me fall out of my chair, other browsers follow suite, like what? Internet Explorer 6? How many browsers can I think of that let ActiveX wreck complete chaos on your system... hmm the list isn't that long.
Glad to know that extreme tech will be able to pay their bills this month and support their crack habbit with the money Microsoft must have paid for this one.
Im.
For applications, heap management is in a library, not the kernel. Actually, the real problem is not heap management for active programs, it's too much crap idling in the background, chewing up memory.
I/O prioritization?
QNX has had that for a decade. It's essential in a real-time system. I'm sure Microsoft's implemention is far more complicated, though.
.. very impressive.
Looks like M$ is up for changing the way we interact with computers (new UI for Office 12 is one example).
Another good thing is that they seem to be putting a whole lot effort into security
new API
setApplicationVolumeLevel(int level);
int WinMain() {
setApplicationVolumeLevel(vlLOUDEST);
}
Yep, I'm gonna like that one.
This article doesn't cut through the marketing fluff, it is 100% marketing fluff. Anybody that thinks that a brand, spanking, new Windows kernel is going to have fewer security issues than the old crufty one doesn't know much about software engineering. The more new lines of code there are, the more opportunities there are for new security bugs. In the Microsoft team is like most engineering teams, dollars to donuts they rewrote the relatively clean code that they could understand, and left all the old, gnarly, indescipherable code because nobody could quite figure out what it did. Windows Vista will be exactly like WinXP except there will be a lot more of it, especially eye candy.
umm... His computer has a gig of ram. the ati 9600 is a 256MB card.
Too busy blowing.
Read my blog.
"They take apart the marketing hype and tell you what exactly to expect in Windows Vista. "
But no mention of TPM... huh?!?
What I do want is a file system that doesn't fragment, better performance on my current hardware than XP, and some hard disk health-monitoring system. I want a media player that doesn't need to connect to Microsoft.com every time I open it. I want upgrades to the built-in suite of apps like Paint, WordPad, etc. I want to make my own skins and use them without adding 3rd party software. I want to have the option to keep transfering files if one fails to copy. I want QuickLaunch enabled by default, and I want a Default User Editor so I can easily edit the system for other accounts.
I don't want a bloody "Automatic Defragmenter" to "fix" a problem that should have been fixed ages ago. I don't want to pay for MS Hotmail to work with MS Mail. I don't want IE7 to save my typed URLs in the already bloated registry, don't want anything beyond my History.
So which "MS Distro" is for me?
the signing requirement only applies to kernel-level drivers
Hmm, I think that means no more Daemon tools.
How much actuall improvement to speed performance of hard drives have we seen over the years?
;)
Okay, so 10 yrs I had a 7,200rpm drive. And today...I still have a 7,200rpm drive. (Er, actually 5,400rpm laptop drive). So the bus has gotten wider, but the truth...the drive can seldom push the data fast enough to fill these new FAST busses.
How fast has Flash memory improved in performance? In five years...do you think you will be buying an 80x CompactFlash card? In truth, I imagine we'll be seeing 240x if not faster.
Furthermore, hard drive performance hits upon a number of mechanical barriers that are extremely difficult to get passed. They can increase density but the performance end of things is much harder to advance. Memory on the other hand tends to improve with density. Performance is steadily increasing. For example, what speed was your RAM 10 yrs ago? what speed is it today? Will Flash memory be what fills Compact Flash cards in 5 yrs or will the new CF cards utilize magnentic MRAM or other advancement. The idea of utilizing a new device for access is to me a very good step in the right direction.
My believe is Microsoft has made one mis-step, they did not push the concept far enough to where I've been wanting to see things go. Or perhaps they have come to the same thought I have and this is a trail run before they invest in it.
I've long said I want a decentralized computing platform. For example, let me have a PDA phone that I can dock when I get to work and then from there utilize a faster desktop workstation processor and monitor. Dock my PDA to my DSLR. Connect my PDA via wireless access to a data storage device. Ride Verizon EvDO to my storage device. Or dock when I am at home or work. Instead of these all being distinct devices I'd very much like to see a composite computing. Where the connectivity allows for the productivity.
It's the future, I know we will eventually arrive there...just a matter of when!
- Saj
Hold on a sec. I'm old and slow but, I thought that dope meant good. Is that not the case? I also thought that assed was bad even though ass, as in poontang or wicked ass or cool ass, means good. So, dope assed would seem to mean good bad? Or is it good good? But, from the rest of the post's context I think you mean it's all bad so, I'm totally confused about what you really mean.
It was a lot simpler when good stuff was cool and bad stuff was not.
It's just me, or the latest slashdot stories don't have many modded articles because apparently people has no mod points to moderate them?
Are the submitters just trawling digg now? Seems the home pages are getting pretty FUCKING similar - with digg running about 6 hours ahead?
~/words_by_grainfed.txt
They have it. It is called DirectSound and any compliant app can have its own volume level, independent of the wave-out or master volume levels..
:)
Perhaps one should try double-clicking one's speaker icon in one's taskbar? Perhaps one should get a DirectSound compatible sound card?
It sucks. Big-time. And I say that as someone who has finally Learned To Stop Worrying And Love XP. (with themes and 90% of the default services turned off, of course).
Take XP, make the Fischer-Price interface even more annoying, throw in SQL server as a REQUIRED service (we all know how much running that boosts performance!), and make explorer windows take up as much screen real-estate while conveying as little useful information as possible.
Oh yeah. Can't wait for Vista to hit the mainstream. It might well finally push the masses into trying Linux on the desktop.
And of course, let's not forget the jolly fun candy-like DRM we'll get shoved down our throats.
Over a year ago, I predicted Vista would give us yet another insignificant change over previous versions, still having the same basic look and feel as Windows 95. And I have to thank Microsoft for once again proving me right.
One of the reasons Vista won't suck is because Microsoft is moving a bunch of stuff out of the kernel and into user space. OK, 10 years ago when Microsoft shipped NT 4.0 they put GDI in the kernel to increase performance, which was a terrible idea as the performance increase this gave was more than offset by stability problems. If Microsoft had been smart they would have kept the kernel as small as possible and waited a couple of years for hardware speeds to increase, as they inevitably did. So basically one of the biggest reasons Vista "won't suck" is because Microsoft has finally decided to undo mistakes they made 10 years ago. Color me less than impressed.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Whee, a GTKY comment! Let's play!
AppleSoft BASIC on the ][+ (computer given back to owner) .8 (IIci) .1 (Gave up on Macintosh)
AmigaDOS 1.2 (A500)
AmigaDOS 1.3 (Amiga 500 dies the death of a dead internal keyboard, amen)
MS-DOS 3.00 (IBM PC-1)
MS-DOS 3.3
MS-DOS 6.22 (PC-1 upgraded to 286@6MHz)
DR-DOS 5.0 (PC Sold)
MacOS 6.0.7,
MacOS 7.0,
AmigaDOS 2.04 (Went back to Amiga with an A2500)
AmigaDOS 2.1 (Amiga dies)
SunOS 4.1.1 (Sun 3/260)
SunOS 4.1.3_u1 (Upg. Logic Board to 4/260)
DEC OSF/1 3.something (Alphastation 3000/300X)
Digital UNIX 4.0 (Sold Alpha)
MacOS 7.1 again (Centris 660AV)
MacOS 8 (Broke up with girlfriend with Mac)
Linux Slackware 2.0 (kernel 1.1.47)
Caldera Network Desktop 1.0
RedHat 5
Windows 98 (back into games)
IRIX 5.3 (Indigo R3000)
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Hooray for wandering for hobbyism.
This is only for operating systems used on my main desktop PCs. Even so I've probably left a lot out. I feel the best way to learn a system is to use it to do all your work; this is how I picked up Linux, for example, back when it was still a PITA because there were so many less resources than now. My trusty 386DX25 w/8MB FPM DRAM, 120MB EIDE disk, and 1MB Trident VGA card would run slackware 2 with netscape (v2 IIRC) and fvwm in 8 bit color. Quite acceptable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
lg3d expected v1.0 end of this year... the beta is looking really nice on this box...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Why Windows will suck less?
That article keeps asking "why should you care", and I realized they were right -- why should I?
The few windows boxes I still have are still running 2000; never saw a need to upgrade to XP. One of those machines (the one my wife uses) runs apps that are available (or have rock-solid alternatives) on Linux, such as Firefox, Thunderbird, IM clients, media players, and address book/calendering. The only(!) app that I haven't migrated her off of yet is Quicken, and that's in progress. The other machine is running audio recording software that's out of date, and will probably be replaced by a mac soon.
So why should I care?
because there are no lips on the floppy drive
Steve is trying to show you just how much sweat he put into creating Vista! By the looks of those armpit stains I'd say it was at least a couple gallons worth.... http://www.ntk.net/media/dancemonkeyboy.mpg
As we should have learned from the Simpsons, it won't suck, it will blow ...
...because it's a vacuum cleaner!
C'mon it's one of the oldest MS jokes out there. I can't believe nobody posted it yet.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
The only way Microsoft Windows Vista won't suck is if it's a new type of vacuum cleaner.
Microsoft should provide a framework for allowing vendors to cryptographically sign their binaries. Then a mechanism for users to verify the signatures and after verification sign the binary with their own signature.
POKE 36879,8
Well, it isn't as bad as all that.
The technology you're talking about is called ICT - Image Constrained Token. When it's on, and there isn't a secure path to the player, output resolution is limited to 960x540 - still a good bunch better than DVD's 720x480. And since that 960x540 will be a nice downscale from the source resolution, every pixel should be just about perfect.
More importantly, ICT is determined on a title-by-title basis. Some movie studios have said they won't use it at all. I'm hoping that ICT won't be used much or at all in the first generation of HD discs, just because it's a big pain for early adoptors. There is a labeling requiremnt (at least for HD DVD), so you'll be able to find out which titles do or don't have ICT before you buy.
My video compression blog
Windows Vista will suck for a bunch of other reasons but atleast this is a better article than that top 5 reasons why to to upgrade to Vista posted a couple weeks ago.
... Vista is going to rock. Vista will be stable, secure, robust, and blow away all things Linux.
So yeah, I personally have thoughts of my own.
Let me guess. Because it will include a vacuum cleaner, right?
The same things about kernels and security improvements were said with XP, then XP SP2, then 2003. Guess what? They weren't true.
I'm sorry if I don't crash to my feet and bow in worship, but I'm a little cynical. And since when is Extremetech an authority on kernels or security? Sounds like contrary to what they state, they've gotten sucked into the hype a little too much.
LMAO..... funny but don't a lot of those "improvements" sound like things that Linux has offered for years ????????? hmmmmmmmm
What makes you think that there won't be user-space storage drivers?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Prior to the commoditization of computing we had the 5 Biggest Lies:
1. The check is in the Mail.
2. Some of our best friends are jewish.
3. Hi! I'm from the goverment and I'm here to help you.
4. It's only a cold sore.
5. I promise. I won't cum in your mouth.
Having worked in IT for a while I can see that the list needs an addition.
6. The latest version will solve all your problems.
Here we go again folks.
and everything will HAVE to fit in the C: drive on the first partition.....
HAAAAHAHAHA! Nice one guys...way to stick it to the man.
Wait....you're serious?
"...but the seek times associated with magnetic drives limits this to the point where I get similar performance when comparing my 250GB external drive and my internal 80GB one."
A better test would be an internal 250GB versus an external. The newer 250GB drive has a much higher bit density than the 80GB drive. Also most 250GB drives have larger (8-16MB) caches than an older 80GB drive. You would want to make sure the RPM speed is the same as well.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
The "New Heap" has been around since Windows 2000 SP5 - the Low Fragmentation Heap - which provides about 10% performance improvement in common business apps - just wasn't enabled by default. In Vista, it's become the default - nothing new there.
Dan
I work in a school, with an obviously limited budget, and cheapo Dells as the main workstations. They work fine with XP, and run everything very fast. No complaints. Will they run Vista? Will they bollocks. You're talking about £10,000 of hardware per ICT suite, and we have 7 suites and about another load of machines knocking around in various places (totals about 300). I'm sorry, but we won't be splashing down £70-90k (and the rest!) to buy a whole new load of PCs just to run Vista on. A lot of these new features sound like the biggest waste of resources ever, and they all seem to be taking the Gnome^W^W route of adding things in that they think people will want, then removing the options to stop it.
What the hell is the deal with this "hibernation" mode they're talking about? The DEFAULT option is to NOT shut the computer off? In this day and age with our up-and-coming energy crisis, and MS are going to make all these new 500W+ PCs NOT shut down? Who was on the crack that day at Redmond when they decided to make that the default option.
In my home life, my next step is a Mac. I've "upgraded" from DOS, to 95, then 98, then straight to XP, then an experiment with Linux ended up removing my XP partition.
Not having the reinstallation disks, I've been a happy Linux user for 4 years now. (Though I did get around to reinstalling XP, I never use it - managing 500 XP desktops at work is more than enough XP for me.)
Ie, able to participate in RAID sets and/or upgradable to dynamic disks, or (praying real hard) maybe as bootable volumes? I would wet my pants for a bootable OS on a removable drive.
but as an above poster said, it's only $250 to get a driver signed. It may prove a hinderance to a very small number of daemon projects, but in general it should cause more good than harm.
I got a chuckle out of the security "fix" they recommend to non-MS browsers. From TFA (emphasis mine):
Gee, and I thought Firefox already had ActiveX "off by default," requiring a plug-in before ActiveX is even the least bit usable. It's a bit funny the late-comer to the browser security game is making suggestions that everyone else has already implemented.
"How about some built-in speech recognition? That's right, Vista will include a built-in speech recognition engine, and new and improved speech synthesis. Assuming it works as well as it should, you'll be able to dictate emails or give voice commands for web navigations without buying additional speech recognition software."
macs have had built in speech recognition and synthesis system since the 90's (introduced in version 7 point something?). OS 9 had a feature use your voice as a password... of course it sucked horribly. Open apple's version of GNU chess and a little microphone thingie is still available to execute your commands. I'm not sure if osx still has the option to let you control your computer entirely by a bunch of voice activated scripts... but if so it's hidden pretty well.
It's pretty disappointing how bad it used to be though (disclaimer, I had a really bad microphone... one left over from an LC2). It was pretty entertaining as a kid to mess around with the voice systhesis and recognition systems, but then you'd realize that no matter how you said something, the computer wasn't going to pick up on it and execute your little script. Very frustrating.
It's about time that the bazillion dollar OS leader implements the security, speed, and stability features that OS X (and BSD) have been enjoying the last several years. Wow, offloading graphics to the GPU? Running drivers in user space? Audio drivers that won't crash your system? A firewall that works? Running normally without admin rights?
Too bad they're not doing anything about the hundred or so services which start up by default and WANT to take orders from the internet, but I guess that's what the firewall is for.
I just installed OS X 10.3 on a 1999 iBook clamshell (pink), and it's running fine with the built-in Airport card, 3GB hard drive (really!), and 256MB RAM. With transparent windows that >>squeeze smoothly into the dock when you minimize them. I look forward to running Vista on our five year old Dells at work. What? We have to buy new systems?
Way to keep up, Microsoft. (Even assuming that, against historical evidence, the hype is true this time)
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
From TFA:
...Yeah, and what about the USB 1.1 bottleneck? What would be even cuter would be if that could steal 224MB from your 256MB PCI-E videocard and use THAT for superfetch.
SuperFetch also takes advantage of external memory devices--plug in that spare 256MB USB key (any size will work, really) and Windows can cache a lot of the working set to it. It's not as fast as your system RAM, but it's much faster than randomly grabbing small bits of data from all over your hard drive.
Lots of hype, but I bet it's going to flop and make life difficult for everyone. Windows PCs are slowly but surely going the way of the "everything's integrated, just plug it in and it works" mindset that Macs use. Sure, that's great if you're a numbskulled end-user, but if you're a developer, look forward to a whole lot more red tape.
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Microsoft has decided that they will now blow. They carefully avoided this after the release of ME, but now feel confident that this is the way to the future.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Who do you think is a member of these consortiums? Who do you think is going to provide the vendors with their embedded certificates? Microsoft of course.
As soon as MS closes the loop they'll have the monopoly both from the end user and from the manufacturer ends. You're screwed but just too ignorant to know it.
I dont understand why so many people winge about Microsofts approach with improving windows.
"Why should I upgrade? I shouldnt have to. Microsoft should have made the "perfect" OS years ago or patched my current system so that it is. Why haven't they done it already?? They already have a massive market share why would they want show product development and compete in a growing marketplace?? why ?? why why??.... oh well.. it doesnt matter anyway, I run a misconfigured linux box and I am a stuffed penguin owning guru... sux being u u MS n00b!"
Seriously. All parts of computing are evolutionary just like other things in life. You dont get the "perfect" OS overnight, you may actually never get it. What you will get is something that is a product of the environmental factors affecting its parents.
Vista will be a free upgrade, right?
I'm mean, after all the faulty crap they have put out in the past, it would be a nice gesture.
...but Bill Gates will for 20 Billion.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've been thinking for years that it would be really convenient to have a USB or firewire 2GB RAM module.
Sure, it's slow as mold, but in Linux you could make it into a swap and set the priority to just greater than your disk swap, if you even have one. USB2.0 is in the range of 400mbits/second, right? 40 megs per second for a swap is reasonable.
At one point I was talking to my friend who is a USB developer about helping me put one together for fun or maybe profit. I figured it would be more functional to have an IDE or SCSI interface to a stack of DIMMs than USB in a production environment, but USB is still an option.
The prompting for this is that DIMMs are cheap, but my laptop maxes at 512mb. I sure would appreciate 8GB of RAM over USB so I could stop swapping when I have Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office and decide to watch a movie!
didn't you get the memo? the correct term is "brokeback"
Somebody gimmie an a-men and mod this muuhfugguh up
All you need is lurv.
No, that bit of "FUD" is completely accurate. A virus will work just fine on any unix. If Bob the moron runs a virus, it can still go right ahead and mail itself out to everyone else with an email address on his system, just like with windows. Unix does not have any magical way to divine what is good code and what is bad code, it runs what the user asks it to. And users are dumb.
Viruses are very much dependant on marketshare. If there aren't enough people running a platform, then it won't spread well, the odds of finding new victims is too low.
Dyson already has the patent for the vortex system used on vaccums. And they would not let Microsoft license it. :)
95, 98, NT, ME, XP, Vista. It's all the same busted-ass promises. If you're still buying into all this bs, you deserve a sign that says "dumbass" in place of your t-shirt. Oh - and you may as well forgo any money on future upgrades and just route your entire savings to:
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399
Phone: 425-882-8080
Fax: 425-936-7329
Give them a call if you need postage, they have operators standing by, just for you if you act now.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Right here.
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
How does Aero fare with intel on-board graphics and shared memory? A lot of computers ranging from the low-end to the mid-range use this system. I wondering how I should plan future computer purchases. I don't have good feeling about this.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Not all releases have been improvements. MS-Windows NT 3.51 was their most stable; since, MS-Windows 2k and MS-Windows XP have not been close to the general stability of 3.51. The UI improvements have been incremental, and certainly nothing to write home about.
Active Directory was certainly an improvement over domains, so they score one there.
The point of the original post was this: all the hype surrounding each version of MS-Windows has been just that: hype. Although each version has been an overall improvement (except MS-Windows 2000 and MS-Windows ME), the overall improvement leaves something to be desired.
Near as I can tell, Vista is just like the others, in that the biggest improvement is the hype.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
... "you should also be able to update most drivers without rebooting your system."
They continue to improve the security and stability of Windows. WE can debate if it's to a point where it ought to be, but that their new versions are better than their old ones isn't a question. I remember running Windows 98 for game reasons and how damn much it crashed. My system just wouldn't stay up longer than a week (I left it running 24/7) before something went wrong. These days, well I hardly ever see a crash. Last crash at home was related to my pro audio card that I dumped a couple months ago. At work, I have not yet seen a system crash.
Security has likewise improved. The 9X OSes gave essentially no thought to security at all, in any sense. All users were admin, no file access controls, little memory protection, etc. Now there's a robust multi-user system, amazing file controls (maybe too much, NTFS has really fine grained security) and with XPSP2 there's now starting to be a "deny by default" kind of mentality.
I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm not even saying it's as good as it should be, I'm saying that they haven't been lying when they've claimed their new OSes were more stable and secure than their old ones. Hopefully Vista continues this trend because, like it or not, people are not going to switch to Linux en masse and Windows will be the dominant operating system. It benefits all net users if it's more secure.
We've heard it all before folks. At least, on the security and performance claims. The rest of it? Well, Superfetch is something new....but pretty much every other Vista feature is an attempt (in most cases, a poor attempt...probably all cases actually, but I'll be generous) to catch up to Unix/Linux features. So why should I use a poor, knock off imitation, when I have the real thing? Why should anyone upgrade, when they can have the real thing?
"Okay, so 10 yrs I had a 7,200rpm drive. And today...I still have a 7,200rpm drive. (Er, actually 5,400rpm laptop drive)."
Drive RPM speed is only one aspect of hard drive speeds. Keep in mind that 10 years ago you had maybe 2-5 gigabytes of data on the hard drive, today you have up to 500GB. The bit density per platter (bits per inch) has risen dramatically. This means for the same inch of hard disk traveled by the read/write head of your 10 year old drive, your modern drive is able to read/write much more data. So even still running at 7200 RPM, the drive is capable of reading way more data per rotation.
Bit density is probably the simplest thing that increases drive read/write speed. There has also been a lot of improvement in how the data is written to the disk and how it is retrieved. Things like non-sequential retrieval of data so the drive can pick up the bits nearest to the head as it passes and reassemble them in cache before passing them to the computer, reducing seek times.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
It can be that great if you still have to defrag it.
People get mad at MS for having no warnings because newbies do dumb things, but then get mad at them when they do have warnings. Well, which way do you want it? The OS can't predict for you what's good and bad, that takes either a level of intelligence that doesn't exist or a level of control we don't want.
Remember MS DOES have a solution to that problem: TCPA. Take admin way form the end user, in essence. If a real, Orwellian TCPA style system was implemented, viruses would be a thing of the past. Why? Well computers would only exectue code signed by MS, and viruses would lack that signature or a way to get it. There would be no worries about evil software sneaking in via e-mail or things like that.
However I don't know about you, but I don't want someone, anyone, telling me what I can and can't run. I'll be the sole authority on that and if it screws up my system, well that's my fault.
What I find funny is that people who are so against things like warnings for net access or program execution, seem to bill privlidge escalation as the magic bullet. They only do so because MacOS and Linux have it where Windows doesn't because when you think about it, it's the same shit in a different package. It pops up any time something needs system access, which is a lot. Thus it's just a hoop to jump through for users that don't care, they'll give the password without thought. Hell I've even witnesses a Mac user that got that and said "That's odd, this shoudln't need admin"... while entering the password. He noticed it was odd but didn't care enough to look in to it.
So while I don't think things like popups for outbound net access help clueless users, they are nice for more advanced users and are not useless.
Does he mean the Vista will crash as much as OS X 10.0?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
It certainly sounds exciting - all that new stuff. And ExtremeTech has once again proven their ability to quote press releases.
Now that I think about it, Windows 95, Windows 2000, and Windows XP sounded almost as exciting at the time of their release. It's what they didn't tell us about those OS's that sucked.
I wonder what were're going to eventually find out about Vista? It's a shame extremeBlech didn't did deeper than the varnish. Is it a DRM nightmare? Will the improved security turn out to have some gaping oversight that can't easily be fixed?
Stop focussing on the shiny bobbles folks (espcially those drawing their paycheck from Micro^h^h^h^h^hExtremeTech) - let's get to the real issues.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
I can already see some hardware company, like Intel, striking a deal with MS to bump up its rank in "performance rating" window and maybe add a few banners at the bottom of a page as part of "System Performance Advisor." How in the world would Microft come up with a rating for every piece of hardware that may be plugged into the system? Certainly not by testing it...
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0
That's just what everyone wants! Plug your fob full of precious data into Vista and it will fill it up with binary bullshit. If you thought pulling your fob out in 98SE, 2000 or XP was dangerous, just wait for Vista. Combine that with YET ANOTHER POWER MANAGEMENT SCHEME that will take your computer long past the traditional 14 day instability zone and you get devices filled with crap. What will be really funny is when it boots over and automatically clears all it's swap space.
Great move guys!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
because it'll be too busy BLOWING CHUNKS...
Everybody will run out and buy new hardware and throw their "useless" hardware away, which then becomes my hardware for free to install more Linux on. I'm seriously getting to the point where I can just start building Linux machines and sell them for $100 apiece on the side. Go get Vista, everybody! (-:
Because you're not going to pay for it anyway!! ;)
Everybody knows Vista is copying Mac OS X, from the Media Center interface, to the audio subsystem, and to the selection of built-in apps. Well, the author also admitted it, in a special way:
Why doesn't he say it in this way:
Oh, yes, the author is also ignorant of the Desk Accessories concept in early Macintosh.Instead, we continue to have Microsoft ripoffs pushed in our face, while you're lucky to even hear about Elive in your lifetime, let alone get your hands on Elive in a timely fashion (they don't even have a server; it's bit-torrent or nothing!). So it boils down to that there are four - no wait - five things that have any affect at all on which system is the most used: marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, and last but not least: marketing.
If I had the money and I was *that* bored (and starved for sick amusement), I could launch a massive media campaign combined with legal-industrial blitz to convince all of you that Tom's root/boot floppy was the best/most desirable system to run with the best features. And it would be bundled with every sold machine! The Internet would move back to Usenet and FTP! People would heckle you if you used anything else! What the hell would all of you public people know any different?????
then we discovered that the much hyped improved dos support was still piss poor compared to 9x and the only real advantage over 2K was the boot time.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
>over time will develop profiles of the applications you use. "These profiles include fairly complex patterns," Aul told me. "It learns that you can use different applications on weekdays and weekend days, for example, and tracks [PC] job and computer use changes."
This is going to make forensic studies of a Windows workstation even easier.
And it doesn't stop with heaps. Lots of relatively little, commonly-used functions have been improved, like procedure calls.
Okay, I admit that I'm at a loss here, and the article's lack of technical information really doesn't help. How does Vista improve procedure calls? A new calling convention? Or are they talking about something completely different?
I'm glad that MS improved their VM algorithms -- it had to be one of the *worst* things about earlier versions of Windows. WINE's biggest performance benefit over Windows was usually in loading programs or files -- and this was because Linux's caching and VM simply worked much better. I'll be interested in seeing how significant the improvements are and how Windows' new VM system stacks up to Linux's current one.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Because it'll blow! Har har har.
I'll be here all week, folks. Be sure to tip your bartender.
But that trick never works...
This time for sure!
Vuja De: That sinking feeling that this is going to happen again. Often occurs in meetings with Product Managers.
You seem to be saying that Microsoft is just throwing stuff together, rather than integrating it.
You can run cygwin.
Good point. May I add that only an idiot would use a flash drive for caching. With a limited number of rewrites, using a flash drive for caching will blow it out in a few days. The author of TFA just blew his credibility with me.
Apparently, Microsoft has decided not to include a vacuum cleaner.
Pity. Think of how much more useful it would be if it had one.
Count me in!!!1
(psst... what's heap management?)
I made my USB flash drive a swap device on my system. It sounded like a good idea, but it wasn't. The memory stick was an order of magnitude slower than my hard drive, and system performance lowered. After doing the experiment, I did some research into the nature of flash memory, and I discovered that using it as a swap device is perhaps the worst conceivable thing. Seriously.
I had to stop reading when I hit "so hopefully we'll see almost no viruses or Trojans"
Yeah, and maybe there's an option in the control panel to enable world peace. The author either has his head so far up his butt that the lack of oxygen is getting to him or microsoft is giving extremetech some sort of big ol handjob.
away with such rubbish!
ôó
I'm working on a program to map drives to smells instead of letters, it originally mapped them to "objects that refer to or have reffered to the artist formerly known as Prince" but I couldn't get a good grasp on the cardinality on the set.
My list of multiplayer
Oh, Linux, Linux! *fapfapfapsplort*
Linux won't be able to play HD-DVD or Blu Ray discs that are protected (meaning, all commercial discs) at all, even if you have an HDCP monitor.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
is it so difficult to create file system that doesn't fragment a harddrive as part of its normal operation? i'd have much more respect for windows, any windows, if MS could just get that right.
Sound card drivers still run in the kernel. But most of the audio processing done by them is in user mode. For UAA compliant drivers (USB and HDAudio for now), the driver won't even be invoked during the rendering path (the audio system renders directly into the adapters DMA buffers).
This means that there are several orders of magnitude less kernel mode code involved in the audio rendering path (in XP everything involved in audio rendering was done in the kernel), but it's not ALL gone, there is still some kernel mode code involved in rendering audio.
Folks are talking like Vista's support for more DRM technologies means it'll be able to play less media than XP. In fact, it's the other way around. Vista will support every monitor and every display that XP does. All the DVD ripping software will still work, VLC will be as good as XP ever was (and they could add DX10 support for better yet). Nothing is lost.
What's different is that Vista's new DRM support means it can be certified for new kinds of input not previously supported. What's already been announced includes:
Comcast PVR support
DirectTV PVR support
CableCard support
HD DVD support
Due to the content vendors security requirements, none of that would work on XP. So, from the consumer perspective, Vista will be much more capable than XP. You don't lose anything, and you gain a lot.
Yes, if you try to use a CRT monitor via VGA, and the the content uses the Image Constraint Tag flag, it'll be downrezed. But the same content WOULD NOT PLAY under XP, or Linux, or Mac OS X, or any PC OS other than Vista anyway. Downrezing is obviously not ideal but it's better than a big black rectangle.
My video compression blog
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Or they will be cracked by someone in a country where stupid shit like the DMCA doesn't apply.
And kept out of the United States by President George W. "War on Terra" Bush's rumored Great Firewall of America.
When I was younger and bought software, it was mine. To do as I wished! It ran on a simple system, DOS, that did not keep dates of 'access', times it ran or duration of use. If you wanted to use it, you did and nobody was keeping records so that they could swindle you. Then came the word definition re-interpreter who stole the word 'piracy' out of context and perverted it to mean plagiarism before blowing it all out of proportion. After all, the megacorporations that own all the IP in the world pirated, stole, or swindled it from somewhere so have a perfect right to all your money don't they... by virture of the fact that they stole more than one man or group of men could ever spend.
Vista will suck because it is intrusive and takes control of equipment that you the customer bought and you the customer has to repair. It then 'allows' you to use it a little bit as long as you obey them. If your equipment screws up and you have to fix it, then you have to beg these blackguards for their merciful sanction of a 're-authorization'. Later these re-authorizations will cost money or not be available at all. It is possible that these systems could be allowed to blackball a computer operator using this system from being able to use 'his' computer at all! DRM is really all about restricting....YOU. You are a sucker if you buy it! You are a fool if you have any faith in it after you buy it! And you will be bankrupt as soon as any business you conduct using it draws the attention of any competitor having the money and the connections at microsoft to access the back doors that microsoft is building into this system as it has built them into all other systems that microsoft has sold since 1995. For example the 'default shares, x$ , assigned to every storage device in your machine under Win2K and XP that allow outsiders with microsoft master passwords however obtained, rented, or bought to read, write, and modify and deny you access to material on your computer that you paid for. You cannot eliminate these default shares as they are always present. Attempts at deleting these default shares will seem to succeed, but that is only an illusion. The 'shares' will appear toreturn on the next reboot. In reality they never were deleted. Windows computers are like fifty cent whores on the streets of Bangkok, and just as full of diseases. You are never their master. You WERE the master of DOS computers.
Linux has problems as well, like an obsession with logging that is in its own way just as bad as windows. Without the logging, linux systems would run 500 percent faster and no longer be security risks in case the computers could be physically accessed. Get rid of all the logging and all the so called 'history' and the operating system would have a fifty percent smaller footprint on any given system. The best thing that could happen to computers is if the ability to date stamp files would be made illegal. This ability to date stamp files has enabled everthing else, for no log would sound like anything other than gibberish without dates and times read from the computer's internal time chips. This also enabled businesses to eliminate millions of jobs that used to support families. This ability has also enabled a vast network of marketing for slave labor produced goods by multinational consumer goods monopolies operating out of China and selling these goods into countries without slavery, destablizing thier economies. Vista is just the highest manifestation of this evil handmaiden of 'free trade'.
Stating something like: "you can reload your drivers while the system is running" Which basically means: Yes, thy got the microkernel concept right. This is probably the biggest step ever made by microsoft from the viewpoint of a modern architechture. A whole lot of other Problems are solved automatically in this moment (e.g. they mention that it is possible to prioritize I/O transactions.) ans something like "Hey thy now use your 3D graphics card to make your desktop shinier". in the same tone of voice and guiding the users to the conclusion that the amount of work invested in both is in any way at least to a few orders of magnitude - similar. The truth is that rewriting the kernel and even the most elementary drivers for the hardware used most often must have taken *hundreds* to *thausands* of man-years of highly capable programmers - and a huge will to invest into the future. This does not mean that i'll slaughter the fileserver under linux when vista appears - for something as trivial as serving files the monolithic kernel is ok (and does very well)- but if they did what they claim they have made a huge advance.
So if TCP is Trusted Computing Platform, what does that make IP?
What makes you think that there won't be user-space storage drivers?
The fact that Microsoft wants to make money and hide the gouging from consumers.
This skeptic is not convinced -Reduced Memory fragmentation: already available on linux and mac? check -Sleep mode: what, system standby on another name? check -Superfetch: I'll believe it when I see it, alternatively, just more bloat -Caching VM onto external, unpluggable memory? REAL SMART -Improved network stack: already available on linux and mac? check -Media Centre: hmmm u mean like use any decent 3rd party media app with remote support and OSD? check -3D GUI: unnecessary, won't work on non-gaming rigs Meh I can't really be bothered to keep going but y'all get the drift. What really grinds my gears is how M$ keeps pushing these features as whizbang new improvements when they should have been there in the first place. Instead they manufacture cr@ppy OSs with crippleware that causes headaches for decades to come, then sell fixes for the problems they'be caused in the first place. Anyone remember "640k is enough for everybody"? Then again I should stop getting annoyed at this, its all par for the course
** COMMENT NOT FOUND **
After reading the 3 sentences the article devoted to it, I still don't know much about SuperFetch, most importantly, whay exactly does it do and wouldn't it *destroy* as flash drive? It looks like it just uses the flash memory for extra swap space. First, the article claims that reading from flash memory is faster than a hard drive. I don't know what he has clogging up his IDE bus, but I've always found that flash memory is at best 4-5 times slower than a hard disk. Second, writing to a flash memory device too much will wear out the memory, unlike a memory. Oh and by the way, that video card is busy rendering your GUI widgets, because that's much more important than having more usable memory.
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
When all was said and done, this folder took up nearly 5GB on disk. I can't even open this drive in Explorer. I let it sit for about 20 minutes once and my PC slowed to a crawl
;)
This "feature" is the supposed "trusted" applications thing.
All I can do is laugh at the extreme stupidity of this TotalCrap that will never be used in normal computers of normal developers (those with brains that don't buy everything embedded).
If the TotalCrap paradigm is based on copy/paste-ing the executables in some stupid folder and then adding a couple of xml ascii files... how many minutes do you think will take, for some experienced cracker to make the life of all experienced users easier? I guess not much.
Insta_TotalCrapUncrap.exe here we come. I hope it will come as a daemon and run transparently.
The article says that all vista desktops won't turn off anymore from the power button, but only standby (still runs RAM, CPU, etc). Watch the national power usage go up from that, not to mention increased issues with power loss when windows vista is running.
4 ,00.asp
But thats not the worst of it.
Laptops wont hibernate by default when you hit the power button, they will standby instead. Hit the power button on your laptop in the morning and you'd expect it would have juice for after lunch right? Nope, it will run down the battery and when its a couple percent left, then hibernate. Leaving you with a dead battery.
Check the article:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,193191
"On laptops, Sleep Mode works much the same way when you hit the power button or close the lid, except it doesn't take the time to double-save everything to a hard disk. Instead, it monitors battery life in the ultra-low-power Sleep Mode and, when the battery gets low, transfers the RAM contents to the hard disk."
I forsee a TON of people calling about defective batts/laptops because it is dead everytime they try and turn it on.
Oh, Linux, Linux! *fapfapfapsplort*
Yep, you hit the nail right on the head. LOL
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Have been a beta tester since 1994, and this beta is the worst ever. My system runs WindowsXP x64 just fine, but getting Vista to even install on it is next to impossible. Once it's on there's so many things going wrong that I can't even begin to list them. This late in the beta cycle I expect most issues to be closed as 'not reproduced' or 'wont fix' before RTM
Vista is in big trouble if my experience is anywhere near to what end users will experience...
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The only reason Vista will suck that really matters is enough. It undermines the Freedom of software users.
No, really. To say that your bit of software won't suck, or doesn't suck, is outrageously arrogant at best, and an outright lie as per usual. If you admit that your software sucks, then maybe you're on the first step to the path towards less suckage. But if you only grudgingly admit that your software sucks, and only as a marketing platform for shilling the next version, then you are not on that path, and you will never be on that path.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
The vendors will support Vista hook, line and sinker. That way they can sell a new round of hardware. They sold us new keyboards that way when win95 came out - and they'd love to sell yet another round of hardware for the new bloated Windows. The upside to that is that x86 Linux with it's countless hacks and workarounds to get modern day functionality running will seem even less bloated than it does allready. Despite it being something that would have been a nightmare 10 years ago.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
From TFA: "Vista is big. Very big."
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
..is that microsoft might not have your security in mind.
f t-teaching-police-hack
source : http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2150555/microso
Microsoft may begin training the police in ways to break the encryption built into its forthcoming Vista operating system.
The Hype Management feature seems quite nice.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
I'm a lamer end-user in all regards - still, the most exciting thing I found in that article was the kernel improvements. =] Will Linux keep up the pace?
Other people have pointed out lots of reasons why you are incorrect, some citing actual people who know what they're talking about. But in the end, it comes down to this: hard drive performance drags as you start to run more and more file-intensive tasks, because the hard drive thrashes as it tries to read and write data all over the disk. Flash has no moving parts, so throughput is more or less constant regardless of which part you're trying to read or write. That means no thrashing. A RAID can attempt to address this problem, but it takes work to set up a RAID correctly, it isn't a complete solution, and in a typical office or home PC, nobody is going to bother. RAID also isn't nearly as cheap as a flash drive, considering that you have to purchase and allocate the hardware specifically for that task. Flash drives are cheap, tons of people have them, and most flash drives sit unused most of the time. That makes the performance gain from flash drives free. To think of it another way, the "I" in RAID may stand for "Inexpensive," but it can't compete with the "F" in Flash. Oh...and don't call me Shirly.
Deamon runs fine in Vista on the beta
I am pretty sure that SuperFetch is a need idea (paging, swap, ...)
BUT IT WILL KILL YOUR GOOD USB Flash Disk FOR SURE VERY SOON TOO, JUST BEWARE
In the past, when MS launched a new OS, Linux-folks (I use the term loosely.) scrambled to keep up. It took them a while, but then Linux surpassed Windows in looks, ease of use and the like, and the MS released new version of the OS, and the cycle started all over again. But not this time. I have seen previews and screenshots of Vista. And while they are clearly a step up from XP, it's nothing we haven't already seen in the various Linux-desktops. And Vista is still over 6 months away!
This seems to be the first time MS is releasing an OS, when Linux-folks are not thinking "Damn, I wish we had that particular feature" (I'm talking about the desktop here). There might be some minor things that are done better in Vista, and maybe some details in the UI are a bit more refined, but that's it. By the time Vista is available, we will be having 3D-accelerated X-servers, GNOME 2.16 and KDE4. And since Vista seems to be more or less equivalent to what we have right now, it seems to me that overall MS is falling behind, and fast. In the last few years both KDE and GNOME has improved A LOT, and that's starting to really show.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
It will suck.
All software sucks, all computers suck and most people (all except maybe me) suck too.
The trick is to suck less then the previous version, and to suck not to much more then the other guy's frelling stuff.
What I cannot create, I do not understand
Package: preload
...and it works pretty well, thanks.
Priority: optional
Description: an adaptive readahead daemon preload monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times.
Right up until your parents call you to say 'we hear beeps whenever we get email, but we can't listen to music'.
"Turn the volume up."
"It's all the way up, whenever we get more spam *BEEP-BONG* the neighbours pound on the walls."
"No, the volume in Windows Media Player."
"Oh, OK - now everything's too loud."
"So turn the main volume down."
"Where's that again? Now I can't hear my MSN pinging...."
I can't be the only one who's already had to deal with people confused by the volume control in iTunes, the taskbar, the laptop itself (volume keys on the keyboard that don't link into the system volume? Thanks IBM^WLenovo) and the external speakers....
Mark
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It actually says that it sucks less than XP
A strange omission, though, is that you can't "mount" network paths in the filesystem. I can't make \\someserver\blah appear as c:\blah. This is quite an annoying special case, since it means you can't abstract away the names of servers to allow eg. moving stuff between servers without retraining users. Companies, including mine, instead use mnemonic drive letters as the aliases.
I've often wondered why Windows doesn't treat network shares as it does everything else: why can I mount one as a drive letter but I can't have one as a reparse point in my filesystem?
I have read this article and well as been in as many deep discussions that the NDA I have w/ Microsoft will let me go into. Frankly I am very unimpressed with how Microsoft is rolling out so many verisions. I ask Micrsoft which version will provide my MPS (dual AMD) support and the same security (as a baseline) that Windows PRO gives me, and Microsoft can't even answer a simple question like that. I was told it may be in the Enterprise line, but an individual can't buy the Enterprise line retail! The Vista Enterprise can only be obtained thru the MS software assurance program! So if you if you are running a dual CPU workstation (intel or AMD) your are screwed when it comes to Vista retail versions!
Also I have seen a lot of claims on how Vista will be so great, the fact is, will all the embedded BLOATWARE that MS has placed within Vista I can foresee that Vista will be even easier to hack and expliot then the XP platform. I have worked on the beta versions of Vista and have not found it any more secure than XP, in fact my exploit and penetration software has bene able to gain full control of Vista in under 15mins and that is under the most secure settings that vista has to offer (on their current beta builds)
So I would give a word of caution not to be so wrapped up in the Vista hype.
IMHO
1. Must purchase DOS v3 2. Must purchase DOS v4 3. Must purchase DOS v5 4. Must purchase DOS v6 5. Must purchase Windows v2 6. Must purchase Windows 3.11 7. Must purchase Windows 3.12 8. Must purchase Windows 95 9. Must purchase Windows 98 10. Must purchase Windows ME (at home) 11. Must purchase Windows NT (at work) 12. Must purchase Windows 2000 13. Must purchase Windows XP Now consider in that none of these EVEN REALLY WORKED WELL until Windows XP sp2 with appropriate anti-virus and anti-spyware products installed. Maybe I'll just skip Vista and wait two years until Windows 2008 comes out.
It'll only take 200 ms for MS Word to load, but you'll have to click 60 things just to search for a file, disable the stupid dog, and wait an hour as it grinds your hard drive (updatedb, Bill?) ... If I see another "assistant" in my Operating System, I'm gonna be pissed. I seriously don't need a dog to help me find files. I just want to do what I need to do. I turn on my laptop at work and be on the LAN without Windows popping up a "talk bubble" (because the old alert boxes were inadequate or something) that doesn't go away, telling me there are wireless networks available. Of course, this is after I've ssh'd into a machine and already brought up Slashdot.
The more my OS assumes what I "need" the more stupid it appears.
Are you an actual registered Vista beta tester or did you just grab a ripped copy off Usenet?
I'm inclined to believe the latter, seeing as how you piss and whinge about something that doesn't work properly on Slashdot before even finding out what the malfunctioning feature is fucking called. Yeah, you're a real helpful beta tester, you are.
Remind me never to take anything you say regarding Windows seriously ever again.
They used to teach operating systems should be modular when written.
As MS can't push out such modularity in practice, and wants to charge all over again for fixed up bits, time to get another vendor or go Linux.
It is disturbing to see more efficient code touted as a feature, rather than seeing the problem as undelivered service packs, and pre-planned obsolesence.
Great, just what I want is to have photoshop sitting in cache in my memory all of the time. I'd rather wait 10 seconds for it to open.
nothing
Can't wait for them to release Service Pack 1, and then I'll consider upgrading ^_^
Yeah, this article is terrible. There may be some great things in Vista, but this article sure made me think twice. I mean where is the discussion of the downside of anything he mentions? Terrible one sided crap. It sounds as if written by MS PR, and if not, this guy sucks (And I am a writer/journalist).
Great (sarcastic) the GUI won't hang up on a busy window, which I consider a minor inconvience, but then will I have spend $300 on a new graphics card or wait ten minutes as my old graphics card renders everything. I mean come on, that is like arguing that you can fix you leaking toilet by putting on one of those Japanese heated toilet seats. They are different problems completely.
DRM, HDCP, minimum HW specs, RAM/diskspace usage, cost, etc...
...is the day they introduce vacuum cleaners.
And how ironic is it that when I click on the screen shot thumbnails in the article that I get error messages?
The truth of the matter is, computers have become easier to use as Microsoft has matured. I don't know how many of you amazing l33t experts actually had to support Windows NT (original flavor) or Windows 95, but they were a *nightmare.* With each iteration of Windows (barring ME, which I'm still convinced was just a really big virus) the OS has become more secure, more reliable, and certainly easier to support.
What is going to make or break Vista is whether it is easy to use, and whether it is easy to support. You can bitch and moan and scream at the new features that you think will suck (and hell, they might suck) but in the end none of this matters. Vista will be released and it won't be until one or two years afterwards that any of us will be able to make an informed opinion on its viability as a new OS. And frankly, if it is more user-friendly than Windows XP, less prone to kernel errors/security flaws, AND easier to support, then it is going to succeed. And until Linux gets to that stage (and it is starting to, but it's still some ways off) it is not a suitable alternative, no matter how badly you may want it to be.
Basic security issue:
More trusted shall not call less trusted.
If the flow is through the kernel, and less trusted code is invoked through the kernel, this would be bad. Very bad.
The only way to do this is to do the whole thing in "user" -- at the less trusted level. Perhaps more trusted than "user" and less trusted than "kernel".
This level can call up to kernel for services. This would be ok.
But, the opposite (kernel calling down) is NOT ok.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
As a business owner and a computer engineer, I'm glad that Microsoft FINALLY took the idea of lesser privileged accounts seriously. It is true that they do allow a limited account, but it's not that customizable and lots of software simply doesn't work well under it. So people are forced to stick with running as the "dangerous" admin user. And this is all if the user knew how to create a limited account in the first place! It's simply a security joke. Unix was built on this concept since it's inception over 30 years ago and has proven quite effective ever since. In fact, the other day I was asked to install a printer driver into one of my customer's Macs, I was pleasantly surprised to see a root password dialog appear before the driver could be installed. In 2006, thats the way it should be!
Personally, I never understood why Microsoft waited all this time. You could patch the system till the cows come home but if your always giving the user full control of a system, then you're also giving viruses and spyware those same privileges! It's just that simple! Perhaps, their view in earlier years was that forcing mom and dad to remember passwords would piss them off? In 1985, I could understand that view. But in the connected world we live in now, I don't buy it. Now, if Microsoft implements this feature correctly, and lesser privileged accounts are created by default (out of the box), then I don't see a reason why virus and spyware attacks shouldn't be cut in half.
Great. Now when your parents get the popup that some application wants to access the network, and are presented with all these options for "finer granularity of which applications can use network resources", they'll just turn them all on and go instead of actually learning the ins and outs of TCP security. That's much more secure.
Are you actually suggesting that it's a Bad Thing that parents everywere are not going make "learning the ins and outs of TCP security" a priority in their lives?
I ask that you recognize that your knowing what "TCP security" is (and even what "TCP" stands for) puts you in the ultra-elite of the world's computer users. Granted, it may be very important, even indispensible, for you in your particular field of work/study, but for the vast majority (say, 99.99999% -- "five nines"!) of the other folks using computers, I will be so bold to mention that they shouldn't have to give a flying fuck about "the ins and outs of TCP security".
Get off your high horse!
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I don't use Windows much, in fact I can't remember the last time I did, probably a few months ago.
At any rate Vista does look somewhat appealing, especially if the Monad command line comes with it. I must say that dictation capable speech recognition out of the box is a Good Thing(TM) and that alone could persuade me to lay down the cash necessary for a box that can run the thing. That said, should the speech system have a Newton like learning curve it could end up being more embarrassing than worthwhile for Microsoft. The rest of the features described though don't seem to be an obvious improvement over Mac OS X, and yes, I know OS X has speech recognition, but you can't use it for dictation.
can I sudo apt-get dist-upgrade?
They're just certifying that you are who you say you are.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
bla bla bla ...
Translated:"New vapourware promisses from Microzone"
...as long as vista is the only thing running.
None of these "issues" are casued by the O/S, it's the applications that give us all the grief. Embrace the bloat, when windows does everything you need to have done and you cease to run apps you will discover that Windows really is best. When was the last time solitare coredumped
- Dual-core processor
- 1G+ RAM
- DX9, 64M video card
That's not much better...This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Yes, but overall we're talking a few ms of performance gain over two decades. That's not much. Where as capacity has increased in magnitudes speed performance has really only improved by a few multiples. If I compare my hard drive from 1993 (100mb) to the current 100g-300g drives of today; capacity is way higher but performance has improved it has not done so on par with capacity nor akin to processors.
;-)
1993: I had a 33mhz
2003: I bought a 2.4ghz (2400mhz)
Basically after 10 yrs processors are approx. 100 x faster. Hard drives may be a 100x larger but they're no where near a 100x times faster. Even in another 10 yrs most experts are stating there will be minimal performance improvement.
Compact Flash, well you already after a few years have 80x cards.
True not 100x times faster more like 15-20x faster than the top speed of SCSI 1 (which that 100MB drive probably never hit) at best on a top of the line single drive. The biggest difference being that the laws of physics don't allow us to crank the spindle speed up on a hard drive - the platters would rip through the unit. Just as CD-ROMs have topped out at 52x or so and those occasionally explode.
Sometimes my arms bend back.