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Microsoft May Delay Windows Vista Again
UltimaGuy writes to mention a Reuters report, stating that Vista may be delayed again, this time by up to three months. From the article: " The research note, released to clients [by the Gartner Group] on Monday, said the new Windows Vista operating system is too complex to be able to meet Microsoft's targeted November release for volume license customers and January launch for retail consumers. A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company disagreed with the Gartner report and it was still on track to meet its launch dates."
don't know what you think the Mac OS X specs are, but my wife is running Tiger (OS X 10.4.x) on a 5 year old 400MHz G4 laptop quite happily. 'Will run on 800MHz' sounds a bit stiff. Although it is relegated to a music server, I also have a 400MHz G3 laptop happily running Tiger with 512MB RAM.
What happened to the argument that G4mhz didn't equal Intel mhz?
We are running Vista on 400mhz systems with 128mb of RAM. (Systems slower than a G4 400mhz. PERIOD.
As for RAM, the more the better no matter what OS. Vista will run on lower than the 512mb of RAM MS recommends. Apple recommends 256mb for the current version of OSX, but the next version Apple has stated will also recommend 512mb of RAM. Even in your post you note you are running OSX on a G3, but state you are using 512mb of RAM.
RAM is cheap, it should not freak people out to see a 512mb recommended anymore.
Vista technically would run on a 1995 Pentium Processor, but who would want to run any OS on such an old processor, even if Vista's legacy compatibility goes back that far.
Also I'm not sure how you got OSX 'Tiger' to run a G3, unless you know of a trick I don't know of. I didn't think it would install, nor function properly without the altivec extensions.
This is kind of a silly debate. I'm not knocking OSX, it REALLY wasn't my point. I was just giving an example that Vista doesn't have that high of tech requirements, truly...
Take Care.
"It's about time Microsoft seriously thought about re-architecting their operating system from the ground up"
Actually that was the problem.
MS did decide to rewrite alot of it from scratch and then the performance and compatibility were not what Microsoft hoped for.
So they decided to use the XP code base and go back to square one and rewrite %60 of the code that was fresh. I knew it would be remade in 6 months! 60%?? Try a year, maybe 18 months? That is just huge.
For more info you can do a google search and slashdot covered it a month or two ago?
No wonder Elchin was fired. To me I would have just used the new code and not reverted back. Get the thing out the door!
So in other words it will use new security techniques on old code that dates back from Windows95 and NT3.1.
http://saveie6.com/
if they can't actually ship a product (even at the already delayed date) they deserve the mass defections that hopefully will be coming.
"Mass defections"?
People (not talking about Geeks, here) upgrade their OS when they upgrade their PC. Not before, and not after.
They don't buy a Mac because Vista takes too long to come out. They don't install Linux because Vista takes too long to come out. They don't install "make XP look like Vista" themes because Vista takes too long to come out.
They run what they buy. When it crashes, or spyware makes it unuseable... Do they reinstall XP? Hell No! They buy a new PC.
If their new PC comes with XP, they will run XP. If their new PC comes with Vista, they will run Vista. Their new PC won't run anything else, because Walmart doesn't sell PCs loaded with anything else in-store (Linspire boxes via their web store matter about as much as Macs do).
It doesn't take much more analysis than that, sadly. You want to know why Microsoft won't sweat this delay? Because it won't affect either their sales or their market penetration by even 1%.
And as for the much-discussed "business" buyers - Working in a job where I would play a very significant role in the decision to "Switch", I can say that Microsoft has nothing to worry about (except that almost no one wants to upgrade to Vista, much less to an entirely different OS). If Vista doesn't ship until 2094, very little would make me happier. Vista will break working programs in exchange for virtually no new features. Why on Earth would anyone want it? We'll eventually upgrade only because Microsoft will leave us no choice - Keep in mind that a lot of fortune-500s (dare I say "the majority of them"?) still run NT4 servers and Win98 desktops, and you'll get the general idea.
Your problem here seems to be with the patent office.
While you're at it, you might want to try and dig up a quote from Microsoft saying they invented "tabbing between hyperlinks".
We've been inspired by the comment that Microsoft's anti-spyware software is "the best product they've ever invented".
Source for this quote ? Certainly a cursory Google search shows nothing outside of that website.
"The user experience is far from ideal but Microsoft has no choice as a result of the defeat it was handed in a patent infringement suit that was filed against the company by Eolas."
Ignoring that the Eolas patent dispute was a complete farce, did Microsoft claim to have invented anything the patent covered ?
Incidentally, it's pretty clear the person writing that is one of those who supports the existing, utterly broken patent system that allows Microsoft and others like them to patent things like "tabbing between hyperlinks".
I am the winner, do I get a prize?
No. You have not satisfied the criteria. Documented evidence (ie: quotes with first level references) of Microsoft claiming to have invented something they didn't.
I mean, if it's as common as you say it is, it should be *trivial* for you to find half a dozen or more examples of quotes from Microsoft saying "we invented $EXISTINGTECHNOLOGY". Something that clealy and unambigiously demonstrates them claiming to have invented something they didn't.
Know why I hate Microsoft? It's really simple. It's because they make crap products that are successful. It goes against the principles of the marketplace, and about what is supposed to make it work. But because Microsoft has gamed the system via exclusive distribution agreements and other legal agreements, their products have succeeded nonetheless.
Now, while I am by no means a capitalist, I nevertheless hold the notion of "quality wins" to be rather important to a healthy market. When crap products like Windows, IE, WMP, Visual Studio, etc. dominate the market, it leads to inefficiencies and hinders growth. Resources that would otherwise be dedicated to advancing the human race are instead focused upon keeping shit working.
I mean, look at Vista. Instead of being able to move forward Microsoft is by all reports merely trying to ship something that will hold together. The list of dropped features for Vista is long and well documented, yet despite this constant drumbeat they nonetheless keep having problems getting the thing out the door.
Meanwhile, Apple has been able to ship something like 4 versions of their OS in the duration. And with far fewer resources, I might add.
Now, I don't know about you but that tells me that the fundamentals of those operating systems are vastly different in quality. And based upon the history of both organizations, I think it would be foolish to either expect either Vista to be high quality or Leopard to be poor.
No, seriously. I'm testing it and it simply doesn't work very well for me. Not on my reasonable high-end system with reasonably standard components. It's unstable, lacks many drivers and hangs quite frequently. The system keeps prompting me for drivers for 'unknown devices' with no obvious way to turn it off. The GUI has so many changes that it's essentially a steep learning curve. Nothing is simple anymore.
The UAP 'feature' is very annoying, and dialogs fall all over eachother trying to warn you for yet another dangerous action that some piece of software is attempting to run.
My opinion: Back to the drawing board.
(System: Antec case, Asus A8N-SLI Premium, AMD64X2 3800+, 2GB Kingston RAM, ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB, 2x Maxtor 250GB SATA RAID-1, Maxtor 80GB PATA)
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Not good enough? How about this:
- New network stack with IPv6 in the core
Already in Linux and probably OSX
- New GUI / window manager in user-space (better stability / new eyecandy)
X11 is user space already and has been for years
- Priority based I/O handling (virus scanner won't slow down your system because it's hitting the disk)
I don't seem to have these problems under Linux
- User Account Control (not running as Administrator by default anymore)
Already in Linux and OSX
- New user-space audio subsystem (better stability, program-level volume control, AC3 decoding, etc.)
Already available in Linux (p.s. I hate it when application have their own volume levels, almost as much as when they change the global volume setting)
- New speech recognition / synthesis engines
Already in Linux and Windows and Mac, expect an anti-trust case.
- New SMB protocol (better performance)
Samba any one?
- Full disk encryption (BitLocker)
Already in Linux oh, and it's open so your not tied into using Linux.
- Built in search
Already available on Windows, expect an anti-trust case.
- Built in antispyware
Already available on Windows, expect an anti-trust case.
- Faster installation
How fast is the uninstall?
- New bootloader
Grub
- Deadlock detection
You missed out,
DRM and trusted paths.
Sounds like there trying to write Microsoft Gnu/Linux with DRM on the side. Given the current fealing about Microsofts bad monopolistic practices I expect they will have to ship a stripped down version of Vista without search, spyware, speech recognition and possibly even drm in a few countries and possibly even Europe.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.