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Looking Back on Five Years of Windows XP
david.emery writes "In an article in the Washington Post entitled If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP, post technology columnist Rob Pegoraro points out the 5 year legacy of Windows XP. The article starts 'Windows XP is turning five years old, but will anybody want to celebrate the occasion?' This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP, although it does fail to credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors." More from the article: "Consider stability, the single biggest selling point of XP. The operating system was meant to stop individual programs from crashing the system, and it succeeded. It takes an especially malignant program to send my copy of XP to a 'blue screen of death.' But that's not the only way XP can crash. Drivers, the software that lets XP communicate with hardware components, can still lock up the system. If you've seen an XP laptop fail to wake up from standby, you can probably blame it on buggy drivers."
n/t
Just wish they had taken more time to get it working as "well" as it does now 5 years ago :o Vista seems to be rushed and sadly it will probably be terribly bugged. And oh yea, XP has less DRM so it wins with me. I don't think they are going to have many peopel lining up for Vista since most people with the money to buy it will just get a new Mac (didja see the Apple ad during the CSI premire? Seems like they are ready to fight Vista)
Gates could save a lot of hassle by scraping his Windows model and rebuilding from the ground up, in my opinion, because XP/Vista are so riddle with problems that anything based on them will be typically buggy.
how people are willing to put up with all the bugs that Windows has, and all the restrictions it is now tacking on.
MS will require all PC software & games be XP compatible whether the consumers want it or not, and people will just obey.
Whatever happened to consumers dictating how the market changes?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I agree that it is a sensible review of XP. It summarises the best and worst of XP accurately from an end users point of view. As for Vista, I dont hold out much hope of it being any better .... just fatter and harder to maintain if I have read reviews of it correctly.
The early 21st century saw an unprecedented array of attempts to dislodge Microsoft from its dominant position in PC operating system market share. From Linuces of may sorts to Apple's new OSX, word was, the time for Microsoft's fall was at hand.
Then came Windows XP.
Right away, Microsoft's revolutionary new revision of the Windows operating system was a hit with home and business users. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern computing world as we know it, the innovations of bittorrent, the deep and involving fun of World of Warcraft, the wide ranging social networks of Myspace and Facebook, none of these would have been possible without Windows XP.
From the stylish new interface, to the easy-to-use features, to the vast improvements in security and reliability, Windows XP has proved to be worthy of the title Greatest Operating System of All Time.
I dunno. At the end of the day it worked, but it brought a ton of security holes to light for a server OS. I used to laugh back in the day when I used NT4/2000 and everyone was getting borked with 95/98. It wasn't to much longer and I was getting borked in the tail.
Windows 98 fixed problems with Win95, and was the last version to support DOS. Seeing as I built a massive DOS library in C/C++, I'm ticked I can't keep coding in my DOS mode. If I switch to coding under WINXP, will they obfuscate that too, so my code library will be lost again. I'm just at a loss because I have problems running DOS emulators too.
God spoke to me.
"(1) This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP,
although it does fail to (2) credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors"
IMnotsoHO, these two statements contradict each other. Not making myself popular around there, I'd say that WinXP, about the third greatest thing to happen to PC users (after MS DOS and Windows 3.1). Finally a real operating system for PC's without serious limitations, with enough backwards compatibility for the enormous installed base of Windows software. I can race through Need for Speed Most Wanted while downloading the latest, errr, content plus webserving my site. Without ever crashing. Sure, I have to reboot every week or so with some patches, but that's the price of any main-stream OS. Lunix-ers will have to pay later too... So: Hooray for the Borg! Cheers, Richard
This is correct, but misleading. The main floor of Windows is built of balsa wood with a nice hardwood veneer. It looks solid to the casual observer, but isn't. As for the foundation, styrofoam sure can look like concrete blocks with a nice coat of gray paint.
And as someone else pointed out elsewhere, you're renting this house, and the landlord insists that all you need for a back door is strings of beads, which they add more of every time someone just walks into the house.
The main difference between all versions of Windows is that the house just keeps getting bigger, but not much stonger.
I give my 2 cents with every comment I leave on this site (username ;)
XP had just come out and I "lost" my old account. I figured if it was anything like win98 that I would end up hating it for years to come.....
Thanks for not proving me wrong Microsoft! (Ive used mac's at home since 1999 but by day I trouble shoot windows boxen).
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
I agree. Patching an OS is unreasonable. And the fact that they back up what they patch in case you have to remove the patch is unreasonable (source of the bloat in size). This is why I still run my original Slackware 96 distro. I can't get anything done, but boy it still is running.
For those not wanting all the crud that surrounds the article on the linked view http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/09/23/AR2006092300510_pf.htmlhere is the print view.
How to use coral cache: http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/~oscartheduck
This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP, although it does fail to credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors."
WinXP is little more than a skin or theme for Win2k plus the downgrade of mandatory product registration. Please note that 2k is Windows version 5.0 and XP is 5.1. I acknowledge some enhancements to the OS, but most could have made an appearance in 2k SP5.
Whenever I bring this up I always have someone come back with "But XP is better for games." I've never seen this. To this day I play all my PC games on 2k with absolutely no problems or notable performance degradation.
2k is all the Windows OS you'll ever need on your desktop.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
its dam ugly and thin... >:(
IMHO the best "improvements" that XP has over 2K was the built in CD Burning, .zip support, and the ability to fool old programs into thinking they're running on an older OS. Most of this is a non-issue though because there is good software out there that can remedy these missing features of 2K. When I last dual booted XP and 2K on my system at home I found that with a clean install of each OS that XP would boot faster but once booted 2K actually was less of a hog on the system. Not that 3DMark is the best tool for comparison but I would always score higher in 2K vs XP (no extra services or processes running on either OS). XP basically boiled down to eye candy and the addition of features to remove the necessity for some 3rd party utilities.
I particularly like this from the article:
But could it have known how bad things would get? Could anyone? The review of XP that ran under this byline five years ago never even used the word "security."
That raises a scary thought: What's the ugly flaw in Windows Vista that people will be screaming about in 2010, but is escaping people's attention right now?
A very interesting point.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
I must say that I haven't had much of a problem w/ XP. The hardware detection works fairly well through all 3 motherboards I've used on this computer and when a program crashes, it doesn't seem to take the ship with it. I'm by no means a MS fan, but if I have to chose a Windows version to do any work, XP seems to be it as of now.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
First, remember that the "markedly better" comment references what HOME users were using before, Windows ME. For businesses, XP isn't much better (or is much worse).
But let's look at what OS X has done in the past 5 years (I only converted early last year). OS X has hardware accelerated it's GUI. It has gained Spotlight and Exposé, probably the two best inventions in improving computer use in the last 5 years. It has had little touches like spring-loaded folders. It manages to get basic window use right.
The fact that Apple did the first 3 things (OpenGL GUI, Spotlight, Expose) which MS sat around (really: spent all their time on patches) is just sad. MS has improved things (the wireless handling was abysmal compared to today's XP), but not others. I took a job last month that has me using a Windows box for the first time in a year and the result of having to use it for long periods is jarring.
Let's ignore the lack of Spotlight (which I love). Let's focus on something simple. Something that was in Windows 95. Something that was in Windows 3.1. Something that was there before that (don't know which version exactly, probably 1.0). Let's talk about the Z-ordering of windows.
At least once a day I seem to run into this. Let us consider 3 windows among about 10. We'll use FireFox, Outlook, and Calculator. Let's say those windows are all maximized (as are all others) except for Calculator. Calculator has been buried to the very bottom of the windows (or near). Firefox is on top, with Outlook below. Now click on the taskbar button for Calculator. What happens?
What SHOULD happen is you see Firefox with Calculator on top. That is what happens most of the time. But some times, for some random reason I can't find, doing this will bring Outlook to the front window behind Calculator, so you see those two on your desktop (Calculator on top). You can often repeat this 3 or 4 times before Windows "gets it" and things are put correct. By this I mean you can switch back to Firefox (which works), then click for Calculator and have it happen again.
I have NO IDEA how this happens or why, but how hard is it to keep a Z ranking of the windows I have?
I won't even touch on how hard it is to manage 10 windows with your only tools being the taskbar and Alt-Tab. Exposé is so intuitive and simple. From the screenshots I've seen (I haven't looked hard) Vista only seems to have a graphical version of the current Alt-Tab.
There are no spring-loaded folders (terribly handy for moving stuff around).
Windows DOES have a Cut command in Explorer, something that still boggles my mind about the Mac (how can Finder not have a Cut?)
Windows hasn't really improved at all (other than in security) since 1999 (when Windows 2k was released). Look at the changes OS X has made from 10.0 to 10.4. I'm not even including the cool stuff that's coming in Tiger. OS X even gets faster.
I'm glad to be off Windows for my personal use. And since my job is all Java and HTML, I'm going to ask for a Mac when my current Dell is no longer powerful enough. I think Exposé alone will vastly improve my productivity.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Having used FreeBSD, Linux, Windows XP Pro, and Windows 2K3 Standard, my opinion is this:
FreeBSD for servers, Windows XP Pro for the desktop.
It works very well for me - in fact, well enough that I'm considering trying out Vista when they release that. Part of the reason it works so well for me, is that instead of being locked in to IE, OE, and Office, I have opted instead to use Firefox, Thunderbird+Lightning, OpenOffice, and other OSS tools (like Eclipse). Theoretically, I could swap out Windows XP Pro and barely even notice the difference.
Why don't I? Because I don't feel like it just yet. It's comfortable.
I expect the majority of the replies to this will be along the lines of "zomg wind0ze sux, linux is teh pwn", which seems to be rather offtopic, considering the article is about windows, but so it goes.
This article, though, while balanced, seems to be pushing a bit towards tcpa at the end, which is a bit frightening. I don't believe any OS manufacturer should have the right to dictate the software that is written for the OS, or how much power it can have. The point of an OS is to act as an interface between other programs and the hardware, not to act as a babysitter for users who don't know what they are running. Essentially, an OS should be clean, simple, and secure; all this excess garbage thrown in really seems to be distracting developers from this point. Everything else, like visuals, media players, web browsers, what-have-you, can be added later on and doesn't need to be nor should it be part of the operating system. The fact that the author seems to be suggesting that system admins should not have absolute power over what happens on the machine seems rediculous.
Damn you, Microsoft, why did you force all those developers to ignore your test requirements!?
Again, I don't know why Microsoft forced all those developers to ignore their guidelines! It's all Microsoft's fault!
InstallShield used to do that by default, until they realized developers were often sloppy and didn't put their files in the right places. That led to missing DLL files, missing OCX files, etc. Again, is this really Microsoft's fault? I don't think so.
I can't say much good about the registry, since it clearly should have been scrapped a long time ago. Same goes for Windows Genuine Advantage, it is intrusive and prevents a lot of legitimate users from getting security updates. Service Pack 2 did a lot to improve security. I agree more could have been done, but SP2 was a positive step. Vista sounds like it will have some fairly good security tools built-in (depending on the version) for home users.
I have a tough time believing these articles, mainly because most people I know don't have problems with XP in general. When I go to customers' homes/businesses to fix problems, it's usually a result of them downloading porn or free screensavers. I don't really blame MS for that, mainly because a stupid user will find a way to screw up their computer. I don't think that will change with Vista, and I don't think MacOS/Linux are any different.
This article did make some good points about things XP did wrong, but it threw in enough complaints about minor or non-existent problems that I lost confidence in the article's content.
-William Brendel
I am no Windows "fan-boi", as is the perjoritive here, but I find that 4 out of 5 of the computers in my house do run Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
Clearly, "all computers suck" (feel free to quote me), yet somehow, people find them useful.
For whatever reason, they find Windows(tm) computers most useful.
Beleive me, I'd love some other OS to work for me, but somehow nothing is compelling...
Oddly enough I earn about 80% of my living from customers who want Windows software, and 20% from those who want Linux software. I am the tail, I am NOT wagging the dog.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The early 22 century saw the fall of the Washington principality and its vassal state of Neo-Patriota. When the outsourced nations of new Canada and Greenland launched their massive offensive, the Redmondites placed all their hope in their new integrated Office 2109 communications software, running on Server 2104 with Microsoft SQL Server Warfare edition as a backend. This mighty system would integrate and focus the now awesome firepower of the mighty MS battle fleets into one precise and deadly, continent spanning living engine of death.
But fate was against the principality. And the plans of Emporor William Gates, the fifth of that name were all foiled. For it is said, the outsourced attack came at the very cusp of the next hardware upgrade cycle, and moreover, due to a great ion storm knocking out 802.11zzid coverage over half of eastern EU, the desperately needed hardware upgrades from CzechaMichDellia were delayed by over an entire release cycle.
And so, while the battle fleet was equipped with the latest interoperability software, it ran too slowly on the previous cycle's hardware, and by the time the first stirke was tallied and the volleys made ready, the war was already three weeks over.
And so the principality was defeated, but not destroyed. For instead of destroying Microsoft, the victors instead only broke the kingdom into seperate divisions, each responsible for a different part of their foul business. And, while there was much confusion and compatability issues for many a long year after, still the Windows OS ran deep and black withing the viens of the world; and the kernel source the victors did not take, for it was now completely written in x86 assembly, and had become terrible to behold.
May the Maths Be with you!
Ya, 5 years ago no one outside a few tight circles ever heard of it.
XP brought it to the common man. Way to go microsoft!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The best "desktop" OS MS ever did. All the reliability of 2000 with full gaming/multimedia of XP, but delivered in stripped down, closed down, package. Services has to be explicitly exposed on 2003. IE is locked down to the point of being unusable, which is perfect. I replaced my primary browser as Opera and most of the XP security horrors were avoided. The GUI has the bare, non-sickening feel of 2000, but I can play ALL my games. 2000 can't say that.
I tried the RC1 (release) candidate of Vista.
Very buggy, very bloated, very slow compared to XP, the GUI has been redesigned to hide (even more) the system from you so now you can't do anything even slightly technical without really digging deep.
Also it kept crashing and wouldn't play a lot of my own media.
I used to think XP had lots of room for improvement. I went back to it after 20 minutes with Vista.
Slashdot posted to a story the other day that has a lot to do with MS woes. That was the story about MS not forcing their own employees to run as non-admins.
The home version actually seems to do this a little better then the Professional edition. My parents and my siblings login to their computer with their own accounts and all as non-admins. Of course they don't lock down admin, so they all install all kinds of stuff.
Vista seems to go a long way in stopping unwanted stuff from installing, but with such a mainstream system does is it really going to help? If a user has to switch to admin to install that screensaver that also is spyware does that really help? Does Ms have to be held accountable for Spyware that is purposely installed on a machine. If it comes in through IE 6...sure it is MSs fault.
Linux installers are applauded by most, but I wonder what will happen to them in the mainstream. Commercial software will probably still install with stand-alone installers if Linux where to take off. Linux ( and others ) has standards that adhered to via open source packages, but would another company really put up with it. So a user in Linux goes to run an executable off a web page...they get an error from it saying please be in root mode. If they login as root would Linux do anything to stop them from overwriting system config files? Would we blame the problem on Linux or the author?
The author seems to be misplacing the blame. MS has to be the app cops? I guess in this day and age yes...5 years ago...not so much.
In the long run I think all OS's need to force application to install in virtual file systems. When I go to install a major app I wish that it would just copy a big file and "mount" it to the machine. You wouldn't even need to be in root to do it if done via an API call. The app would be registered with the OS and given a small amount of hardrive space to write it's config files to that only it would have access to. When it goes to save data files for the user the OS would ask the user if it was alright for it to. We can run entire OSs in a VMWare like system, why not applications themselves.
Of course lots of apps, especially in OS use pipes and heavily rely on other systems and libraries. Back in the day when sharing a DLL was needed to save HD space it was a good idea...is it now. Should we require all the apps to include their libraries? This would make code injects a lot harder as well....sorry botters.
The fundamental idea of an App installing needs to be re-engineered. Some OSs do a better job then others, but they all fundamentally invovled the installer coping files around, which will always lead to the types of problems we are seeing.
You must have read those "reviews" wrong. Just off the top of my head their new "imaging" method is very exciting to me. They claim that the HAL will be separated out and won't require you to maintain multiple images for different hardware architecture's. This alone will save me alot of time. Imaging a machine takes some time especially when it's mixed into your daily job requirements. Having only one image to maintain would be a god send. I'm sure there are more usefull features being introduced...not sure how much of this has already been implemented in Linux though.
Yes, I have no doubt that MS could build a brand-new OS that at a minimum would be as stable and secure as Linux, but it doesn't make any business sense to do it. The new OS would just join the ranks of other OSs that aren't compatible with the applications that most people use.
Why pay money for an OS that doesn't meet your current needs when Linux doesn't meet those needs today and it doesn't cost anything.
Exactly, from the article "This operating system has needed a steady diet of patches to stay close to healthy. "
Unlike WHAT personal operating system? Really, that kind of speil is just not useful. He could have done some, oh I dunno, actual work, and rustled up some stats to work out the relative number and severity of patches on the major operating systems as a comparison. He probably would have made a better case, as it may be the case that Windows has required a lot more patches to remain safe and usable. I don't know, I'm not a writer who should be doing that kind of research for his articles.
Also included in that steady stream of patches is improvements and new applications (like other operating systems)... and the deal is that over the course of SP1 and SP2, XP has become a much, much better system, and for $0 more than you paid for it originally. Just touting one other operating system, OSX... how many point releases have they charged for since it came out?
I actually had to just stop reading the article at the point as it pretty much was just retreading the Same Old Ground (tm)
I run OpenBSD (on my desktop too) and apply most patches (except trivial stuff that doesn't affect my system/hardware) but really there aren't that many patches compared to Windows. Why is Windows so patch-happy and yet still unstable/getting pwned all the time? :-)
Maybe I am in the minority, but I have had huge success with Windows XP Pro in installation, management, troubleshooting, and day-to-day operation. If you have installed Windows XP regularly enough to really understand its quirks, shortcomings, and nuances, the reality is that you can have a viable, stable system up and running in literally minutes. Create an unattended install disk, and on a newer PC, you can be online and productive in a very short time.
It's so easy to disparage Windows XP and Microsoft, but compared to its predecessors, Windows XP Pro really has matured into a decent product. The other night, I helped troubleshoot one of my wife's work computers running Windows 98, and I was frustrated by the lack or "mispalcement" of utilities, settings, and system tools that are always and predictably available in Windows XP Pro.
This is certainly not to say that it is without faults, security and vulnerability being the biggest issue. Microsoft should forget about the whiz-bang Vista approach, and re-write Windows XP Pro from the ground up. THAT would sell.
My only real complaint with Microsoft and Windows XP Pro is that they have never provided cost-effective licensing for home users to legally maintain multiple computers. WIndows XP Pro is really the way to go, but at its original $300+ price, it was far out of the reach of most home users. I bit the bullet and purchased multiple copies, but if Microsoft had provided a more cost-friendly option, I would have promoted it and recommended it much much more.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I'm no microsoft fanboy, but a *lot* of the problems with XP aren't because of Microsoft, but because of the freaking ocean of virus, malware, and spyware authors out there that target the platform to death. I'm totally pro-hacker, but these people aren't hackers, they are a blight and pox on the computer community and need to be strung up and shot. Thier garbage software does little to next to nothing to profit them, seriously undermines the reputation of computers as reliable machines as a whole, and wastes untold number of man hours of computer guys who have to try and clean these systems, or wipe them, or deal with this crap.
If you install a fresh copy of XP, no updates, and a very limited amount of software that you have gotten from very reliable and trustworthy sources and from years of experience know it is the best of breed and indispensible, and shun and forbid yourself from doing one-time installs on same said system just to "check a piece of software out", then that light XP system will run fast, and it will run clean, and it will run like a dream, and stay that way, if *no* internet is used on it webbrowsing is done on it.
The problem is all these java exploits, gif and tiff exploits, etc, can get into the system while webbrowsing, so you have to be careful about that.
If you code viruses or spyware, you are not helping anyone, you are not impressing anyone, you are not going to gain anyones respect by your cleverness. Code something useful instead. It takes only a retard to smash a sandcastle which impresses nobody, but someone with real talent to build it in the first place. Be like god and create, only create things which make the world a better place, not undermine peoples systems, frustrate them, and waste computer guys like yourself's time (its them that ultimately have to clean up such messes on their own boxen or others).
yeah yeah - lets bag MS, XP is crap Still - the VAST majority of the public continue to vote with their pocket book that it's preferable to anything else bitch and moan all you like - it's STILL what people are using.
This article is so blatantly targeted at Slashdot, that it makes me this much more sad that you are falling for it.
It's completely devoid of content, and concentrated on repeating familiar "issues" with Windows, that a Slashdotter would eat in a well sized small bites without choking.
Further damning is the section describing how Automatic Updates needed SP2 to become transparent.
I would expect a self proclaimed "technology columnist" to know he could turn Auto Updates on in the original release too, but SP2 makes it blatantly obvious with a wizard and a description along the lines of "turn it on, or else".
Outlook regularly has my XP box completely out to lunch. Sure, I don't see the BSOD, but if I can't use the machine, what's the difference?
-Peter
Gee, could it be that it runs on about 600 million machines with a pile of differnt hardware, operated by clueless drones who click on anything that pops up? I run a few OpenBSD boxes too. They are firewalls. They sit there and process packets. If I parked my wife in front of it, I bet anything she could figure out a way to fuck it up.
"Consider stability, the single biggest selling point of XP."
So, I'd hate to see its single least selling point.
It takes an especially malignant program to send my copy of XP to a 'blue screen of death.'
Windows does that well enough on its own, TYVM
> I have never seen buggy drivers for quality hardware
Not to be mean, but... that you've never seen it is not a proof toward your argument; it is mere proof that you are brand new to this industry, with very limited (and sheltered) experience in it... and probably very little ability to find bugs, to boot.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Try netstat -a on a Windows 2000 machine. XP Service Pack 2 was also one of Microsoft's genuine successes in security.
It has gained Spotlight and Exposé, probably the two best inventions in improving computer use in the last 5 years
I would disagree. TabletPC has my vote. The ability to work with handwritten text and use your PC as a notepad doesn't sound like much until you actually get to do it. That and having a portable wireless lightweight(mines 3 lbs) web browser/game system/ebook reader a little smaller than a standard notepad, but with a 1024x768 screen 10" screen, totally changes the computing experience. A lot of people I've said this to have made some wise crack about handwriting recognition, but that's not what TabletPC is about. The real strength is taking notes *exactly* as you would on a pad of paper and storing them in your own handwriting. No redoing a letter over and over again in the middle of a meeting hoping to the gods that the system interprets it right this time before you fall too much further behind.
I anticipate within 5 years, the majority of slashdotters will agree with this, if not with regards to windows tablet, then in regards to the tablets that will become useable in the OS of their choice. In the meantime, they will be like I was and not want to trust anything M$. I was lucky though and got to play with one before buying. WindowsXP tabletpc edition is in my opinion, despite that I've been labled troll twice for saying this, the most innovative OS in terms of human interface available today. The big mistake I see people making with tablets is buying big fat giant convertibles, instead of going for a notepad size. That and buying without reading reviews. A tablet will change the life of anyone who uses notebooks/notepads for notes and whose primary job function is on computers.
I've been playing around since the good ol' days of DOS and mashing F8 to play with drivers... But XP is by far the best operating system I've used. I've installed Kubuntu and Ubuntu, but Linux is incredibly annoying, and far to fiddly. I've never actually had a problem with Windows itself, only dodgy hardware. TBQH Linux isn't worth the trouble when XP works, and works well.
Pure user mode applications CANNOT crash Windows XP. Bad drivers can very easily crash Windows XP. That's one reason why you're supposed to adhere to the Windows Hardware Compatibility List and WHQL qaulified drivers. MS drivers out of the box don't crash XP. Period. But when you buy that cheap-ass motherboard and that fly-by-night video card and you expect it all to work flawlessly, chances are, you're gonna get a blue screen. BTW, bad user mode apps. crash and present a dr. watson or some such error, and allow you to restart the OS. Bad drivers crash the system. Windows COULD trap most driver crashes, but at that point, memory (and possibly disk) are in an unknown state, and it's SAFER to crash the system than to continue in an error condition and risk data loss.
The "price" of Win2k, to most home users, was the same price as virtually every version of Windows since (but not including) Windows 95: $0.
I say zero dollars, because in my experience, people either acquire Windows "free" with a computer, or they pirate it. Seriously, those two modes of acquisition have to be the largest two. Very few folks actually buy a retail box of Windows. They either use what comes on the computer, or they get somebody to 'upgrade' it for them, more than likely with a downloaded ISO.
The only version of Windows that I ever saw 'Joe User' run out and purchase was Win95, and I think that was more due to the media attention than anything else; that level of attention/media-circus has basically never happened again.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Not everyone uses a computer as a glass typewriter. It depends on the software - some of the very expensive commericial software people use in my office has never run on a Microsoft platform and linux on basicly 1U gamer godboxes is the cheap way to use it. To look at the displays you can use Hummingbird Exceed on MS Windows or just use linux instead with a faster X windows as part of the standard install. To print on plotters you can spend many minutes and wasting metres of paper trying to get the page setup to the correct size in MS windows applications (if you can remember which application to use for a specific graphics format so you don't run out of memory) or on a dozen kinds of *nix you can just tell it to go away and print the thing or even just dump the file in the plotters memory by ftp if you want. As for network printer setup - someone went to sleep at MS that day.
As for compatibility - some new machines where I work had Windows98 installed on them so that old stuff developed expensively in house over many years would run (so yes - there is some redesign and recoding going on - and it will run on a lot of platforms), as well as things like expensive A/D conversion cards which just don't have drivers for newer versions of MS Windows. We even have to keep a DOS machine to get some stuff around - possibly buggy and incorrectly written to a poorly documented API but there are a lot of old programs that just will not run. A lot of scientific software was written in VB back when it was basic, then pascal and now it is java instead - so a lot of stuff really has to be rewritten from scratch even if you stay purely on the MS platform. If some guy has spent three solid years working out how to do some brilliant method of manipulating data in a certain way to solve a scientific problem you don't want to have to find their notes five years later, teach someone in their field how to program and get them to redo it in on a different platform - you want to just run the thing.
One last thing - having a single standard OS to rule them all is the stuff of meglomanic fantasy and ignores the idea that people want to do different things with their computers.
Why, would you give her a root or power user password to enable that?
I love that... just because a user has a good experience where another user doesn't it's always the cry of "you must not be as experienced". That's a fucking troll if I've ever seen one.
I've used WinXP for all of that 5 years and it's been a productive platform for me. I've edited and processed video, ran a digital audio workstation, built web pages, wrote documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Photoshopped, Skyped and played the hell out of Half-Life 2 and Eve-Online. Even made a few java apps. BitTorrent is my window to the world. I have actually had Windows Restore save my bacon a few times.
My computers talk to each other, and with liberal application of Kaspersky's finest, I haven't had a single bit of virus damage on my home wireless network. I can open a link to my network at the office and it also has not been taken down by virus or spyware, thanks to a moderately small application of care. I go more than a month without rebooting regularly and haven't had to reinstall the OS since 2003.
Although it costs about 150% of what I think it should, so does my car and iPod. I don't like the way Microsoft does business and I hope the Zune goes right down the crapper. I'm extremely apprehensive about Vista, and the WGA has been foul in the extreme.
But Microsoft made a pretty good OS in Windows XP.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Maybe I am in the minority, but I have had huge success with Windows XP Pro in installation, management, troubleshooting, and day-to-day operation. If you have installed Windows XP regularly enough to really understand its quirks, shortcomings, and nuances, the reality is that you can have a viable, stable system up and running in literally minutes. Create an unattended install disk, and on a newer PC, you can be online and productive in a very short time.
It's so easy to disparage Windows XP and Microsoft, but compared to its predecessors, Windows XP Pro really has matured into a decent product. The other night, I helped troubleshoot one of my wife's work computers running Windows 98, and I was frustrated by the lack or "mispalcement" of utilities, settings, and system tools that are always and predictably available in Windows XP Pro.
This is certainly not to say that it is without faults, security and vulnerability being the biggest issue. Microsoft should forget about the whiz-bang Vista approach, and re-write Windows XP Pro from the ground up. THAT would sell.
My only real complaint with Microsoft and Windows XP Pro is that they have never provided cost-effective licensing for home users to legally maintain multiple computers. WIndows XP Pro is really the way to go, but at its original $300+ price, it was far out of the reach of most home users. I bit the bullet and purchased multiple copies, but if Microsoft had provided a more cost-friendly option, I would have promoted it and recommended it much much more.
I can make XP force me to shut down in 2 minutes if there is anothing network related running at the time I connect and disconnect from the VPN client. This is the internal VPN client.
To those who say Microsoft shouldn't be blamed for the failings of driver vendors... ...what law of physics says that the only way to add support for new hardware to an OS is by writing kernel-level, privileged code?
If Microsoft's OS model requires that vendors write bug-free code, their model is deficient.
Sure, this is common practice... just as it used to be common practice for personal computer software to give application programs full access to all of RAM... but it's not the only way it can be done.
This is not a particularly good counterexample since most OS X hardware support involves kernel-level coding, too... but, for the record, my company uses a non-standard, vendor-specific SCSI interface. As it happens, only a limited number of applications, which we supply, need to access our devices. And it turns out that Mac OS X has all the tools for us to do everything we need, with adequate performance, at the application level. So, that's how we do it. It's a great development convenience, too, because we can use ordinary debugger tools to debug our code... and I don't need to wait for a reboot every time I have a silly bug in my code. (I know none of you ever have bugs in your I/O code, so that's not an issue for you...)
Mac OS X is not designed in such a way that hardware vendors never need to do kernel-level coding. Most hardware vendors do. But it is an existence proof that it is possible to have a situation where new hardware can be supported without using any privileged code.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It was basically a derivative of VMS 5 called MICA; for a while, NT and MICA were patch-compatible; Microsoft hired many of the key Digital people (there was even a lawsuit about this) & still couldn't make it anywhere near as tough or secure as VMS routinely was.
So... even with such a blatant head-start, Microsoft couldn't make it anything but rattley.
No change there in decades.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I meant, "MS will require all PC software & games be VISTA compatible whether the consumers want it or not, and people will just obey."
Addendum: I sure hope that MS doesn't so completely lock down the market that the pathway out of their grip leads us into mass adoption of remote server services (like hosting the OS and major apps remotely; that rough beast has almost made its way to Bethlehem already).
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
When I bought my first ATI All-In-Wonder video card I was warned about buggy drivers and just scoffed at the notion. I could not see how a major vid card maker could possibly have bad drivers with any frequency. I spent more time trying to fix ATI bugs than anything XP ever did. And lots and lots of other people can tell you the same thing.
Well, anonymous troll, I run OpenBSD as well (though only on servers and firewalls), and my windows machines have never been 'pwned'.
Probably because I am as diliagent about maintaining/monitoring those systems as I am with my OpenBSD system. Including installing software from unknown sources. BTW, windows includes a lot of software by default that are you need to install from packages/ports on OpenBSD (stuff that isn't audited as well as the core system, and is always a risk) so it's not suprising from that aspect alone that windows needs more patching. I'll agree that the windows code is a tangled mess compared to the OpenBSD core code, but it it's size alone compared to the OpenBSD code should tell you that it's going to need a lot more patching then OpenBSD.
Then again, you knew all that and were just trolling.
I believe it's actually a design decision on the part of Apple. The traditional way to move or copy files on a Mac has always been to use the mouse to drag them. This isn't hard at all when you have a decent sized screen and you can simply stagger the source and destination windows then drag from one to the other.
It is interesting though because dragging files is really something someone needs to be shown. My experience has been that people don't just pick it up without at least some minor prompting. Once you show someone on a Mac they seem to understand it quickly. However, I've had a hell of a time showing how to do it on Windows PCs. It just seems that people can't get their mind out of the one maximized window mindset and it's rather hard to drag from one maximized thing to another. Of course, you can drag through the task bar but that's another learned behavior, one that doesn't make that much sense compared with a normal drag.
This, I think, is one of the major shortcomings of Windows. Microsoft has basically crippled the UI to the point where it's nearly impossible to run more than a few apps with more than a few windows open. Unfortunately, it seems that Vista doesn't really fix this shortcoming. They have a cool looking alt-tab replacement but it's just that, cool looking.
It would be very hard for Microsoft to move to the Mac model here. Part of the Mac model is that the menubar switches with the app you're using and that all the toolbars and pallets disappear when the app is not active and switch when you switch which document you're working on within an app. Contrast this with the Microsoft style of putting giant sidebars on all four sides of the document area within the window. It makes the windows too big to be sized anything other than maximized on many screens.
Of course, some people have a preference for the Windows way. They say it "looks cleaner" because they only see what they're working on. Maybe some people really get distracted by having portions of other windows behind their active one still visible. Funny enough, that aspect of OS X never bothered me. I found it relatively easy to get used to the idea that windows generally exist on the screen and don't try to own the entire screen. To me it seems similar to the way one stack of paper sometimes obscures another on my real desk. I never stack everything neatly in piles and grid them out like tiles. I've got one pile of papers that's half covering another so I can see at least part of what's under it to know it's there. This way I can put a lot more crap on my desk and still know where it is. Now I know I'm not the only person whose desk looks this way
Still, can I really blame Microsoft for these things though? Not really. They made these decisions years ago trying to get people to move from DOS to Windows and then later from Windows to newer versions of Windows. The latest trend I'm seeing is for some people to get dual monitors on Windows. This way they can have two apps maximized, one maximized on each screen. I ran dual monitors on OS X for a while but lack of real maximization (and no desire to have it either) means you wind up with a good sized worksurface with a huge line in the middle of it. I've since decided that Apple is defiitely on the right track with the bigger displays. Particularly if you have the 23" you can begin to see how it completely changes how you want to interact with the computer. You're not going to maximize things; even at the smaller 20" size a window would be ridiculously big. What I find myself doing is just staggering more and more windows all over the place. It looks just as messy as my real desk. This, I think, is exactly the point. Apple has taken the desktop metaphor one step further with these huge displays.
And what has Microsoft offered us? More of the same. Compu
Windows 1.01 didn't have to worry about Z order, since it didn't even allow you to overlap the windows! Window overlapping wasn't allowed until Windows 2.03, released in 1987. Here is an excellent reference.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
blah blah blah... OSX and Linux are more stable even tho the apps aren't there. blah blah blah.
If everyone would just convert it would rock!
Please everyone, learn to love mac or linux so we can pat ourselves on the back.
One one hand, yes, shitty drivers can be a problem for any OS, since they are technically part of the OS. Hell, if a hardware manufacturer ships a binary closed blob of bugs, and the user installs it plugging it right into the kernel, there's nothing the OS can do, is there?
That said, it does give Micro$oft a wonderful excuse to shove "mandatory driver signing" (read: MS control of what's allowed + hardcore DRM) down everyone's throat. "But, dear Joe, this is to make your Windows(TM) a better, more stable and reliable experience! Now, please, surrender your media content and don't you ever try to install that virtual sound-card driver that writes WAVs again, or else!"
TabletPCs may be a good solution for a right-handed person, but they're slow and cumbersome for a left-handed person. The few times I tried a tablet, I would mess up any handwriting recognition with the digital version of ink smudge.
At this point in my life, I can actually type faster that I can write. And people can read it, instead of trying to read the chicken scratch I call handwriting!
As far as weight, I have a nice, light Thinkpad that, in addition to being just over 4 pounds, is built around some pretty solid hardware.
Don't worry, it didn't come across as mean but just as someone trying to convince themselves of their own experience.
Trust me, I'm experienced. Data aquitition from self built ADC cards on 286's about 15 years ago... been working with quality hardware (whenever I have a say in tha matter) ever since. VG multisector mass spectrometers with drivers and software running on Sun workstations, HP, Varian benchtop mass spectrometers running on DOS, Win9x, NT and XP systems... NMR instuments on AIX, Win9x, NT and XP... Spectral microscopy on WinXP... etc. etc...
Bugs are critical to someone who's every last datum is examined by government regulatory agencies. Environmental and agricultural analytical chemistry is a very serious business which has absolutley no room for cheap hardware and buggy software whan instrument time and labour can run into the hundreds of dollars per hour. Anyone who is going to connect cheap ass hardware to multi million dollar instrumets is just a fool.
So who was inexperienced again? Let me guess, you sell cheap hardware and are trying to justify it to your concscience that screamed out in agreement with my post... listen to your conscience man, flogging cheap shit is wrong.
I noticed someone mentioned ATI... ATI has always had crap drivers and substandard hardware, I have never ever had an issue with Matrox hardware and drivers.
Its all about quality hardware, quality hardware needs minimal drivers, the more minimal the software driver the less room for bugs, period.
So go try and sound superior to some kiddies over on Digg or something shithead.
I work for Microsoft; So I am really getting a kick out of most of these replies.
Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about.
But trust me.... You don't.
I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you don't know what you are talking about.
This is how bad info gets passed around.
If you dont know about the topic....Dont make yourself sound like you do.
Cos some Slashdotters believe anything they hear.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Some say XP was a new skin and a few improvements to win2k. From what I've heard about vista, it'll be the XP of win2k3. (if that makes any sense)
People like to say "I've never seen my XP box lock up". Thing is, unless you're right there when it happens... you won't. XP automatically reboots after most crashes.
Ever come back to your box the next day, or after a weekend, and think to yourself "Huh - I didn't think I'd logged out"? Well, you probably didn't.
Yeah, yeah, I know this'll get modded as flamebait.
#DeleteChrome
My previous laptop and desktop machines both came with the POS Windows ME installed. The desktop was relatively stable but the laptop crashed repeatedly for no discerable reason. Fortunately, the laptop came with a coupon to upgrade to XP for $10. Due to a mix up, I ended up with several upgrade CDs which I used to install XP on both machines. From that point, I never had a single crash on either machine for nearly 4 years. When I upgraded to new hardware this year, I've had a few problems with the new Dell laptop but my new desktop has been rock solid. Except for the continual need to apply updates (which I do regularly), I've been very pleased with XP. I also own a Mac G4 iBook running 10.3.9 which I actually prefer to use but when I need to run Windows, I can do so without concern for crashes.
XP Home Edition support was supposed to end 5 years after XP's release.
Microsoft has been kind enough to extend it until "2 years after" Vista is released.
XP Pro extended support will end 5 years later. It's uncertain if XP Home users will benefit from security fixes to XP Pro during that time. It would be a public relations disaster if Microsoft played Scrooge on this one though.
Has Microsoft ever provided free security bug-fixes for an OS for 12+ years?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Wow you stupid Nazis, don't you have a joint that you can smoke with your buddies in a drum circle? or anything else to do all day than critique Windows. It's obviously the worlds best os, it's not the most used OS in the world for no reason.
A single standard platform is admittedly handy from a development perspective. No code porting, no re-learning of basic functions, no plug-and-pray hardware support. Windows has kept standard because it sacrifices security for ease of use, so every Joe Bloggs can learn to use it.
However, I don't think a closed-source OS should be in that position. I'd rather the ability to modify my OS, with the possibility of breaking compatibility, than a rigidly compatible closed source OS. Unfortunately, I don't think Linux is currently up to it. What we need is a Windows killer that completely hides the OS from the user, that always favours ease-of-use and a smooth experience over security, that has plenty of eye candy, and has a community that can accept proprietary software.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
In an article about XP, my take is that I can't afford to ditch it, and I need time to slowly learn Linux SandBox Style.
I will be building a DarkBox offline, with a Net screener machine in front of it. I want to pair a KentsField (arguably the best Intel hardware ever) with "one of the last copies of XP", then hang on tight. DarkBoxes can be stripped down more, because they run a fixed set of applications.
Vista is a disaster. All that remains to be seen if whether it is a Train Wreck, or a Tractor Trailer crash.
For Linux, I'm starting to see UBuntu and Linspire emerge as candidates to ease a moderately intelligent user into the Linux world.
--TaoPhoenix
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Is Linux somehow 'magic' in its ability to defend against bad drivers, or would it suffer the same problems as WinXP does?
A bad driver is a bad driver: it can bring down the OS (no matter what the OS is).
Why is this 'issue' considered to be XP-specific?
NOt that MS cares that everyone hates their software. They know most will either use it and the few that don't will buy a PC with a license to it and just not use it (though you can tell a computer store that you refuse to accept the MS EULA and they will sometimes refund it.) I imagine some of them also hate their own software, but uglyness sells. People won't use MacOS because it requires them to purchase a Mac computer which is a lot more expensive, and Mac tends to decide to kill backwards compatability every 10 minutes. Also, Mac has more competition with the other hardware vendors than it has with MS. Until it unlocks its software, OSX will not compeate with XP. As for linux, people just haven't heard of it. Linux now is "desktop ready" with distros like Ubuntu, Linspire, Freespire, XandrOS, SuSE, Fedora, MEPIS, PC-BSD, and Madrivia all being easy to use. The one thing that prevents it is so few have heard of Linux and those that have still have the whole "it is hard to use" myth in their heads. Canoical, Linspire, Red Hat, Xandros, Novel, and Madrivia all need to advertise or something as word of mouth just won't work.
I am a linux user, and I hope linux does make it big. We could handle the responcibilty of being the dominant OS better than MS.
The Gospel according to lolcat
Well, you know. If people had the source code to drivers, and to packages, and had an attitude that favored free software over proprietary software. Then all those problems about driver crashing, cleanup, security, icon placement, would tend to solve themselves wouldn't they?
Now that I got that off my chest, you may now proceed to mod me to minus infinity and wine about a bunch of irritating things in Linux.
"This is (IMHO) a very well-reasoned critique of WinXP, although it does fail to credit XP as being markedly better than its predecessors."
I have heard this claim again and again. Perhaps from a pure stability standpoint it is true (unless you are comparing to win2k which is roughly the same). From a security standpoint I am not so sure. In theory XP is more secure but in practice... In fact, I can't recall anything actively exploited on win98 that approached the severity of the RPC holes. Those holes allowed millions of computers to be shutdown remotely overnight.
Crippled IP stack - There are a lot of features between the desktop and server distributions that are crippled to try to keep people from running servers with the desktop distros. Completely fucking pointless since the real money in server distros is not licensing fees, but the support contracts companies.
In the same strain,
Downgraded network security. I know, they added a firewall. What's screwed up is the SMB in XP Home. It is a downgrade as any share is all or nothing in permissions. There is no such thing as a place in XP home to share my digital camera photos as read only. Anyone with access to network neighborhood can manipulate and delete my shared photos. Even worse, anyone can place a worm or virus in the shared directory.
Needless to say XP home is a client, not a server on my network. I bought a Simple Share NAS instead. It encrypts and supports per user permission access control lists.
The Penguin Computing poster is correct. Tux visits Redmond saying "Good evening Mr. Gates, I'll be your server tonight!".
MS is sending the SOHO SMB server market right to the competetion. I'm not spending 2-300 bucks for a software upgrade of XP Pro when for 2-300 bucks I can get a NAS providing more hard drive space, better security and I don't have to leave a PC on to serve the LAN.
MS dumbed down XP home is why I bought a NAS instead of a second hard drive for the XP box.
The truth shall set you free!
Pasty-white elitist nerd slap-fight at 12 o'clock!!
Ah! the good old duct tape indicator! i think this is true of XP. Of course you may edit media, create websites, code, skype... but the work environment isnt really the best there is. but then again, i sadly have to use it at work, for it is the industry standard... not to add that visually speaking, xp is poor compared to os x or xgl on linux. in fact, win xp, and what i've seen of vista, is clearly...hum... i'll use lacking in quality, to be polite. and, i must add, os x predates xp by 7 months and 1 day to be precise (os x released march 24th 2001, xp october 25th).
in such conditions, i prefer to use os x, but i will need an xp box (physical or virtual) to proof my websites and flash games and apps for as long as MS Windows is the defacto standard.
but seriously, when it comes to a computer, its only as bright as its users, for they are the ones inputing data and executing tasks. i think most everyone i know who use xp could easily learn to do their common tasks (office productivity, web browsing, email, chat) on liunx gnome...
..but then again i wonder if most of the windows users are really just windows litterate and not computer users.
----
the 1st half of a project takes 90% of the time. the other half of the project takes the other 90% of the time.
> someone trying to convince themselves of their own experience
:) They had a serious issue with stencils... the alpha channels often rendered pink unless you specifically coded for the card. It was a big PITA... and they also had memory leaks in some of their resource handlers, and the occasional "nul pointer" dereference issues. Them, and Diamond had... well, you'll probably call Diamond "crap", despite them being the Big Dog in those days. Stealth 3D, baby! Not.
Uh, reality requires no convincing.
> Trust me, I'm experienced. Data aquitition from self built ADC cards on 286's about 15 years ago
Blah blah blah... an 8 bit ADC, probably not even a flash converter, and probably didn't use DMA. Try rolling my own 80 column card for an apple ][, from scratch with no guidance from an adult, when I was 12... and the ][ was "just out". It's good that you got into it so late in the game, though... it's great that you were figuring out PIC masks in 1991, trying to figure out what an IRET was for. When I was playing with 286s, they were "Current"... I wrote a TSR to make DOS3.2 into a (semi-reentrant, with obvious caveats esp. with share) preemptive tasker, complete with support for running code in EMM pages. By 1991, when you were trying to figure out how to latch data into an ISA slot... I was well, well beyond you. Sorry Jack, but in regards to credibility in hardware and software design... you are way outclassed here.
> HP, Varian benchtop mass spectrometers running on DOS, Win9x, NT and XP systems... NMR instuments on AIX, Win9x, NT and XP
Uh, isn't all that junk GPIB? Drivers?? rofl, I rolled some GPIB junk in assembler to help a physics lab in '88, it took me an hour, and the bulk of the time was figuring out how to make Fortran use it. It worked for every device they cared to chain onto it for over a decade, and probably still works today. "Quality Drivers"? And your examples are all GPIB? rofl... and all VERTICAL MARKET, to boot! THOSE are your examples?! Talk about not knowing your ass from a hole in your head...
> Bugs are critical to someone who's every last datum is examined by government regulatory agencies.
No, bugs cost money to such people; outages themselves are typically either irrelevent or inconvenient at most. If that's your biggest problem, then they are NOT "critical". Bugs are "critical" when a failure gets people killed. And guess what... if my productions pop, entire city blocks can actually blow up, along with everybody in them. So no, you do not understand "critical" by virtue of you answering to a bean-counter, nor do you truly understand the stress of avoiding "ANY errors". I'd wager you know little of the actual engineering of a reliable system, nor of risk management; only the following of someone else's directions, someone who'd classify an Exchange server as "mission critical". Anecdotle, at best.
> I have never ever had an issue with Matrox hardware and drivers
Funny, Matrox was going to be my example
> Its all about quality hardware, quality hardware needs minimal drivers
Yeah, if your experience is largely GPIB, then "quality hardware" needs NO drivers. Call me when you get a clue, you useless frickin college lab assistant.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
> just because a user has a good experience where another user doesn't
More like "a user states an anecdote as an ultimate, completely unqualified truth", and someone else calls him on the carpet.
> it's always the cry of "you must not be as experienced".
No, the cry of "you must not be experienced" is because only a newb would make such statements. Or an old fool who cannot learn, but I wanted to be kind.
> That's a fucking troll if I've ever seen one.
ROFL. "USE QUALITY HARDWARE!" Uh, "Define quality hardware?" "QUALITY HARDWARE IS THAT WHICH HAS NO DRIVER BUGS!" Uh, "And *specifically* which hardware would that be?" "TROLL! TROLL!"
Yep, big troll.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Windows XP is the best windows yet and probably will be the best windows ever. That may not sound like much, but it is the most reliable, useable version of the most popular OS in the world. I still prefer to use FreeBSD when I can, passionately hate certain dumb "features" and DOS-era artifacts in Windows, and have yet to find a Linux distro that isn't a joke. But
as far as Microsoft is concerned, Windows XP was a big step in the right direction. Count your blessings. The next major release is probably going to be as pointless as Windows 98, broken as Windows 95, and one hundred times more bloated.
As a Mac user, working in an office currently that has about 90% Windows XP machines to 10% Macs, I find XP a constant source of wonder. I wonder why people put up with it, day after day. Every day I'm called over to look into some quirky fault or other on one of these machines. Yet the Macs just chug away. Another source of wonder for me is the weird UI design in XP - like menus that have to be clicked to reveal all their options - what's that all about? Whatever happened to menus being "the application's road map"? One that you have to unfold while you're driving doesn't seem like a sensible idea to me. Everyone in the office is also constantly bitching about Norton this, that and the other constantly intruding on their work - and rightly so, it's a royal pain. So why put up with it? But ask these users why don't they use the Macs instead, they're all scared of it "because it's too different". Like they haven't had to relearn everything they knew three times already since Win95, then 2000, etc. And of course the Macs just aren't that different anyway. It's funny how people will use any excuse to NOT use Macs when they are obviously much less troublesome, those that do use them never seem to complain, and manage to get their work done successfully nevertheless. There seems to be some sort of mass denial going on - what is WRONG with you people?!
But I doubt the slashdot crowd will get a Fark.com reference, though there is a lot of overlap.
God is real unless declared integer.
That means I've been using Mac as my workstations for more than five years.
Glad to see that some people are having success with XP, but it's the same way I'd be glad to hear that an insane crack-whore ex-girlfriend is doing well these days. Not exactly ready to re-ignite the relationship just yet...
-- My Weblog.
...Win2k+ nonwithstanding due to me not really giving a damn about them. For all I know, MS loves them to pieces.
Perl, n. A language spoken by Eskimos.
Without decent handwriting recognition, proper conversion cannot be done, at a later date, or any other time without substantial cleanup. As I stated in my previous post, when I had tried a Tablet in my last job, I got the equivalent of digital ink smudge, which in turn produced very poor conversion to text, when it could figure it out. As you replied, it can depend on the hardware, but the sofware can't be discounted, either.
when supposedly stable ext2 read only drivers for windows xp destroyed not only the whole system setup but also alot of data 3 years ago, i finally figured, that this is it. linux became my workhorse, while another isgnificant other (winxp) was merley setup for a ever continuing degrading gaming experience.
I tend to reinstall my OS every 6-9 months. Swapping hardware, testing drivers, the occasional software that just won't uninstall all adds up and makes all versions of windows glitchy and crufty. The Solution? Reinstall the OS.
I refuse to pick up the phone and explain to MS why I should be allowed to reinstall XP. 2k no suck problems.
My reason for sticking with 2K until I am forced to move? General F'ing Principal.
Place a curse on Microsoft.
Windows PCs. It just seems that people can't get their mind out of the one maximized window mindset
Bingo. One thing that I've always wondered about. Why is this unique to the windos world? Every Mac and Unix user I know has their windows scattered around the screen in whatever way makes sense to them, while windos users work with maximized windows all the time. What's a windowing system for if you don't use it? And why is it that only windos people work this way?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Windows NT WAS designed to be attached to a network, and came with networking support from the first version. Quit with the FUD.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Hmm. Many answers:
For a long time it just didn't make sense to run multiple apps in Windows. Win95 was the first with proper multitasking, and the first time PCs were powerful enough. If the windows user is from a DOS background (and many are) then that effect is amplified
Historically most people have run at very poor screen resolutions - 640x480 was commonplace in the office in the mid 90s, 800x600 until the turn of the century. That's a mix of hardware capability, software capability and monitor expense. At those resolutions there just isn't sufficient screen real-estate to run at anything less than fullscreen. Heck, I have 8 windows open at the moment and they're all over 800x600 (and all overlapping to one degree or another).
When people are working on a task (work/play/etc) they prefer to focus on that task. They do one thing. So they want that one task in the foreground, nothing else in the way. If they're working on a computer, it makes sense for them to give as much computer space as possible to that one task, so that they can focus better on it. Although they may have a lot of other applications also running, they don't typically need to interact with those apps - at most they need information from them, which is why you get things like IM popups and WinAmp fitting into a titlebar.
A legacy of the Windows design approach is the MDI window system. Even today office applications are MDI based. The application you run becomes the desktop within which you open multiple windows. There just isn't room for a multi-window MDI app in a small window on your desktop. People got used to running things small screen.
People waste screen space. I work with people that have a laptop. It's capable of 1280x1024, but they run at 1024x768. They then keep the Windows XP default theme, which takes up a lot of space on the edges of their windows. They have a 2-3 run task bar which sucks up around 1/6 of the bottom of their screen. They have a menu bar, two toolbutton bars, a status bar and other UI cruft on something like Outlook which take up literally half the remaining screen height. Running at anything less than fullscreen restricts their viewable text to just 2-3 lines.
Lots of reasons, I'm sure I've missed a few, and I'm not entirely sure I'd split the full-screen user population from the mixed-windows user population on purely OS grounds. But my first sensible windowed OS was X on a Sun, so I guess I just learned bad habits as a kid..
Almost bang on. The thing is it's the fault of the default configuration, not the OS as a whole. I run my XP setup as plain as I can. Explorer windows are as minimal as they can be with the exception of the status bar and a little 'up one level' button I have unobtrusively on the same line as the menu bar. It is natural to me to work with small explorer windows (defaulted to 'list' view) and to drag-and-drop files around the place. It works wonderfully and really does make any other OS's method of doing things appear cumbersome to use. But when I'm asked to do something on someone else's Windows setup it does send a shiver down my spine. How can anyone really think that maximised explorer windows are anything but a pain in the arse?
It's not hard to resize an app to span multiple monitors under windows but you have to do it manually. Speaking personally I've always prefered to either use an app full-screen or just over full-screen, so that any tool windows are in the other screen. This still leaves you with a good amount of desktop space to do whatever with. Another point is that PC users are much more likely to be running a dual head setup with mis-matched monitors than Apple users, and running the same app over two different colour spaces is a pain, as usually is trying to perform colour calibration under Windows.
Well sure, drivers can crash a system, almoust any system in fact. (Unless you have some more exotic ones like Hurd which can have drivers in userspace)
But the point is, most crashes didn't occur because of driver problems, they occured because of a single buffer overflow used to spread worms.
Of course drivers are a problem. But the signature on them won't fix the problem. In fact the only thing that could actually help would be called something named "Communications". If I wanted to write a Windows driver, the only thing I would get is a template. There is no free support, no way I as a developer could tell Microsoft that they have a bug, no way Microsoft could tell me that I have a bug.
This is different in the open source world. There the developers can openly talk to eachother and even help eachother. Plus, there is something named an update. Let me give you one example where it really would have made a difference. I think it was Eudora which had an installer which had a call-back function which actually looked at undefined stack elements. The problem was, those elements changed thus Eudora (or whatever mailer it was) wouldn't install on Windows 95. The solution was to artificially change the stack layout for it. The good solution would have been to just tell the vendor of the programm that they have a problem, and either ship a patch for the programm with the Windows 95 CD or use Windows update to install newer versions of broken programs.
They don't love XP because it is an operating system, not a loved one!
If you feel you need to love an operating system, get therapy NOW!
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
The main reason why Windows is on most desktops is the network effect. And the main reason why it stays there is it comes _preinstalled_.
;) ).
IF (a big IF) the big buyers ( large organisations etc) think that Vista is crap (or not worth it), and get Dell, HP, IBM etc to just keep preinstalling XP instead of Vista, then there is a chance (albeit a slim one) for Windows XP to end up a defacto standard that even Microsoft can't break free from.
Then Win XP would be like "IBM PC BIOS", and MS would be one of the BIOS manufacturers.
Naturally MS does NOT want to be like a BIOS manufacturer, and that's why they keep changing and breaking stuff at a calculated pace.
So if Vista is not acceptable soon enough, then in theory someone could make a Win XP compatible get the hardware people to use it and MS would have some problems.
It does not have to be a perfect Win XP compatibility (even XP SP2 differs a lot from XP SP1). It just has to be significantly more compatible than Vista and for a better price.
It'll be like AMD's Opteron vs Intel's Itanic. Without the Opteron, people would have had no alternative but the crappy Itanic.
Unfortunately I think the odds aren't that good. Making a "Windows XP compatible" O/S is not an easy task (as MS knows
Well if Vista is crap or incompatible enough, perhaps Apple could take over - I think they are getting Intel's best prices. Dell used to get those.
I'm a pretty big FOSS head, but seriously, I haven't found a *nix derivative (including os x) that I like as well as windows for 95% of my tasks.
That said, however, you should REALLY investigate TinyXP, which is light years better than any of the versions put out by Microsoft. You can find torrents of it all over the place, it installs in 5 minutes, and removes all the horse shit that MS seems hell bent on crippling their OS with (WMP, Outlook, IE, etc.).
Enjoy!
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Turns out the only way to get that door happening is for you to wander up and down the street looking for other people in Linux houses to find someone who knows enough about masonry to teach you how to rebrick the area around the door so you have a doorway that works right.
There's no way you'll find Linux users outside. Maybe if you look through basement windows, you'll find someone.
If you have installed Windows XP regularly enough to really understand its quirks, shortcomings, and nuances, the reality is that you can have a viable, stable system up and running in literally minutes. Create an unattended install disk, and on a newer PC, you can be online and productive in a very short time.
Urm, I was doing that with Windows NT 4.0 allready.
It's so easy to disparage Windows XP and Microsoft, but compared to its predecessors, Windows XP Pro really has matured into a decent product.
Which predecessors? Windows 95/98/ME? Because as far as I'm concerned Windows XP Pro was a step back, coming from an NT4/2000 background. The only new thing about XP was activation.
I've always had to reinstall windows every 6 months at least, until XP. My version (service pack 1 with all critical security updates only) is so bug free and stable that it obviously needs to be replaced.
Only once or twice in 5 years have I had a problem that going into task manager and ending the explorer.exe process, then selecting file, run new task and typing in explorer.exe couldn't fix.
And that Windows XP Pro's roots are in Windows NT4/2000, not Windows 95/98/ME is the very reason that Windows XP Pro was a step forward on the workstation side, not backward. Server 2003 was the obvious extension of NT4/2000 for the server side, not Windows XP Pro.
Again, compared to NT4/2000, probably close to the truth, but for Windows 95/98/ME, it was far richer in features, easier to manage, and most importabntly, much more stable.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
The Windows Registry is basically a file system optimized for handling small files. Each such file is equivalent to a few-bytes entry (the name-value pair) in a config (.ini) file. It is a 20-year-old '80s ad-hoc abstraction devised for the original Windows for DOS to replace the config (.ini) files. (that's why Microsoft recommends at most 2048 bytes in each registry entry.)
.ini files is also not the best solution, since setting up individual attributes such as ACLs, or management of the entries, becomes a nightmare, is not fast for parsing or granular enough for quick edition.
:).
.REG files. Registries could be shared by just mounting a SMB share. Very easy to manage centrally. NTFS is able to report file access events just as in registry events.
At that time, storing one config entry per file directly on FAT-FS was an unjustifiable waste of FAT16 entries -- there was a maximum number of 65536 cluster entries in FAT16, which would be rapidly exhausted into configuration entries since each file requires at least one FAT cluster -- and waste of disk space of (at the time) expensive disks -- because each cluster was at least 512 bytes, and in 2GB disks it was around 32KB (so each name-value pair would require at *least* 32KB!).
And storing entry files inside
Therefore, building a file system (REG-FS?) optimized for storing such name-value entries was crucial. Too bad it was an ad-hoc solution, but it's somewhat justifiable if you think that at the time Microsoft wasn't so big and therefore probably didn't do enough research in new file systems (or operating systems
Today, the registry should simply be wiped off from Windows. The original requirements do not hold anymore. Wasting an extra 100MB for storing name-value entries directly on NTFS or FAT32 is not too bad nowadays. Indeed, NTFS is somewhat optimized for accessing small files together with ACLs (see MFT). And accessing them using the cosy file API is priceless. [It would be an interesting project to write a replacement registry api which would just map directly to some NTFS folder.]
Justifying the registry in terms of aggregating 'user' and 'system' configuration in different files is not sustainable. This is equivalent of having eg. two different NTFS directory hierarchies 'user' and 'system', containing each the respective name-value entries as small files. Copying, creating and managing the registry this way would be so much easier. No more that bloated registry API or unimportable
However, there are even better solutions that that to store configuration files.
The best solution nowadays (both for Windows and for Linux) is ReiserFS 4 (http://www.namesys.com/). It was specially developed for this purpose.
From their abstract: " Reiser4 uses dancing trees, which obsolete the balanced tree algorithms used in databases (see farther down). This makes Reiser4 more space efficient than other filesystems because we squish small files together rather than wasting space due to block alignment like they do. It also means that Reiser4 scales better than any other filesystem. Do you want a million files in a directory, and want to create them fast? No problem."
A note on NTFS: "Inside the Windows NT File System" the book is written by Helen Custer, NTFS is architected by Tom Miller with contributions by Gary Kimura, Brian Andrew, and David Goebel, Microsoft Press, 1994, an easy to read little book, they fundamentally disagree with me on adding serialization of I/O not requested by the application programmer, and I note that the performance penalty they pay for their decision is high, especially compared with ext2fs. Their FS design is perhaps optimal for floppies and other hardware eject media beyond OS control. A less serialized higher performance log structured architecture is described in [Rosenblum and Ousterhout]. That said, Microsoft is to be commended for recognizing the importance of attempting to optimize for small files, and leading the OS designer ef
What ewl1217 is trying to say is that we all know that drivers (the software that lets XP communicate with hardware components) can cause OS crashes (lock up the system).
Harald
What I'd really like is the ability to backup and restore Microsoft Windows XP. With my Linux servers it is a quick and easy job. I install mkCDrec, run it and then burn the CD. Bzip2 compression means that even a 3.2 GB install can fit nicely into a 700MB CD. If I want to restore the system (or clone it), I simply insert the CD and away it goes. Woohoo!
With Microsoft Windows XP I simply can't find a way to do this - and I've testing various things for about 3 months now. The closest I have been is trying to restore from a multi-set backup onto the exact same machine, and even this was a pain.
Its such a basic requirement. Backup and restore. Why can't Microsoft get it right?
I used XP on a variety of machines over the past five years, and I have never seen a Blue Screen of Death, so I don't think they exist any longer.
"I'm not a cool person in real life, but I play one on the Internet". Galley
Wrong, all private sector, up to $1200 per sample, often hundreds of samples a day.
So I guess you must be immune to lethal contaminations of agricultural products or your local environment? FDA and EPA reguations often are a matter of life and death. If I have buggy hardware collecting data from an instrument and the result is that lethal poisons in food products are not deteted, people die. Non-critical bugs can often be the most dangerous ones.
Are you done trying to feel superior yet?
I figure you must be selling cheap hardware to stupid consumers to be so defensive about this. I must have struck a nerve on that one. Listen to your conscience asshole.
P.S. ATI still sucks hind tit compared to Matrox. Just take a look at the size of the drivers, ATI has always had difficulty with the most basic of graphics tasks (such as drawing a straight SVG line) They're too busy worrying about games to address real science and business needs.
P.P.S. You'll keep getting modded up because your argument indirectely states that its all windows fault, while my arguement blames buggy drivers on cheap ass hardware shortcuts. Since I am not bashing windows you are the winner on slashdot by default.
You know what they say about arguing on the internet...
In summary; fuck you.
I'm definitley in the LINUX/UNIX camp. People moan and groan about the windows registry, but since the "fanboy" cult of MySQL as continued to grow you can bet somebody would try and replace it by insisting that MySQL should be installed and ALL settings should be stored in a database. :(
I Like databases, but if I can't edit it with vi I don't want it!
That's why being able to use spotlight on the Mac equivalent of the control panel is so sweet. Just start typing ODBC and the relavent system preferences items are highlighted.
MS, Steal this feature, please!
Actually, XP is like an abusive girlfriend. She abuses you, she lies to you, she manipulates you. You know she's bad for you, but you can't leave her, and she knows it.
That's what my shrink told me.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
And then on top of it, were bolted lots of legacy interfaces and technologies that weren`t, and herein lies the problem.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
And what has Microsoft offered us? More of the same. Computers that are designed to run one app at a time on a small screen. The worst thing about it is that a lot of people have now learned the behavior that you only do one thing at a time on a computer.
With dual-core processors becoming mainstream, the best way to take advantage of them is to have multiple applications doing something at the same time. Since most applications are not well threaded ( particularly on WIndows ) most Windows users are trained to not take full advantage of mulriple core processors.
"In Linux, said user will never in a million years open up a terminal, type..."
/.ers is clichés from years ago. Your cliché of a common joe typing in xterm is just as laughable as penguinists seeing BSoDs every few weeks in XP...
the problem with
Use Ubuntu, Suse or others and tell me you have once to type in a command-line except you really want to.
I don't feel like it...
For the love of God, stop crying on each other. You're both elitist idiots. You're just going to have to accept it.
"ENTIRE CITY BLOCKS CAN BLOW UP! YES! MY JOB IS ACTUALLY THAT IMPORTANT! KNEEL BEFORE ME! BLOW UP! WHOLE BLOCKS! ME!".
ahahahahahahahahahahaha
I've run Windows variations since 1990. It allows me to do my job and to play at home with media etc. No issues whatsoever.
Out of interest I have tried to run Linux variations from time to time (maybe 5 times each year) but they still will not allow me to do my job or play at home with media etc. Far too many issues that need experts and/or forum posts where the linux community rarely helps out... Until Linux gets their act together I cannot consider switching.
Main reasons I use XP (in no particular order):
1. It works! It allows me to do what I want.
2. Media support is wonderful and easy.
3. I take simple precautions and have NEVER had a virus etc.
4. Multiple VM's have been wonderful for testing my app development.
5. App development - Windows Mobile - what other OS can you build apps for a mobile device so easily!!
6. All the graphics/movie apps you could wish for.
7. I have yet to see an app that I want to run that doesn't run on windows.
All in all it's perfect for me and probably 99% of the 450+ million people out there running it. There will always be something better (same in other walks of life ie. cars, bikes, planes, boats etc) but if it does the job its got to be good.
MS needs to be applauded for their work on getting XP to satisfy 99% of users (they do the same for developers and thats why MS and XP is so popular).
Lets be honest here - the viruses/spyware are there because its so popular. If any other OS had the same market share the virus writers would attack it too. They may seem secure now but who knows once these hackers start attacking them?
I will continue to dip my foot into linux to see how it's coming along. I hope one day I can install a linux variant and run most of the non-ms dependant stuff I do. Then I may consider running it, but until then it's XP all the way (that includes Vista too!)
Keep a sensible head on when/if replying...
Ok, I think I'm starting to see the problem... namely, you must be responding to something else besides this thread.
> I figure you must be selling cheap hardware to stupid consumers to be so defensive about this.
You figure wrong; I sell nothing.
> So I guess you must be immune to lethal contaminations of agricultural products or your local environment?
Uh, so... after the fact, someone uses your lab to confirm what they already suspect. Yep... that's life and death, for sure.
> ATI still sucks hind tit compared to Matrox. Just take a look at the size of the drivers
Uh, ATwho? When did I mention ATI? Yes, ATI has... "issues" (sometimes big ones), but they are HARDLY relevent to the "size of the drivers". Meanwhile, you continually claim to have proven a negative... "I've NEVER had issues with Matrox! They're perfect!"... and you are on a fool's errand, sir.
> You'll keep getting modded up because your argument indirectely states that its all windows fault
Are you HIGH? I implied that windows becomes relevent, when... exactly? Did I even mention Windows, at all? The ONLY thing I've said is that YOU cannot define "Quality Hardware", rofl! "Oh, that's a CHEAP CARD! Here, buy this $150 joystick adapter, it'll be BUG FREE because of the Quality! Price means QUALITY!" Wrong, wrong wrong, clueless, and wrong. Just how many VxDs have YOU written, boy? Do you even know what the f*** a driver IS? Do you even know the actual difference between Ring 0 and Ring 1? Or are you just a PCWorld reader.
Sorry Jack, but I am not your emotional tampon. Go attach your delusionary statements to someone else's words. While you're at it, show this post to your boss so (s)he can see what a moron you are. And while you're at it, state that you've never had a car accident while driving a Ford, and therefore Fords are immune to car accidents. Make sure you cuss him out if he dares to suggest you're wrong... because, dammit, you've never had a crash while driving a Ford. "All Fords are QUALITY, you asshole! And if people would stop buying CHEAP cars, there would BE NO MORE CAR ACCIDENTS! You assholes!"
I cannot phrase it any simpler than that. You should probably tell your doctor that your meds have stopped working again.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Part of the Mac model is that the menubar switches with the app you're using...
You just hit on the one thing that I hate most about OS X (and the rest of the Apple OS line, all the way back to the original Macs). Apple OS's are the only ones that have ever (AFAIK) done this. My Gnome menu does not change when I open GIMP. The Start menu in XP doesn't disappear when you bring up WMP. Why in Christ's holy name would you want it to?
Maybe some people really get distracted by having portions of other windows behind their active one still visible. Funny enough, that aspect of OS X never bothered me. I found it relatively easy to get used to the idea that windows generally exist on the screen and don't try to own the entire screen...
Contrast that with mulitple desktops. I sure don't, nor would I want to, do all my work on this desk. Maybe I've got one project going that's taking up most of my attention, which I would want on my desk, probably all over hell, in about fifteen piles, as you described. Further assume that I'm trying to file some unrelated papers at the same time. I don't want them next to my project, I don't want them under my project. I want them on the table behind me.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Not to flaunt my SUSE fanboyism or anything, but YaST handles most .conf files very well. A couple of years ago when I first made the switch and was checking out different distros, SUSE was way ahead of the crowd on the control-panel like access to almost all system services and settings.
TCP/IP settings, add / remove users, add / remove software, power management and firewall settings are all available in the same spot. And for the most part the panels they open are easy to understand, offering much more help towards the options than Windows does.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
I haven't been able to find out who coined the term Blue Screen of Death, and to which O/S it first applied. Some say it used to be the Black screen of Death for some older, non-MS O/S, but I have heard it started with the first beta of Windows NT.
Thanks.
A lot of the stuff that's wrong with Windows XP was already known to be wrong as early as 1997, back when Windows XP's precursor was Windows NT 3.51 and the integration of Windows 95's shell was the big obvious change in Windows NT 4.0.
...
As a result, something that should have been fixed in Win 95 -- the way Windows slowly chokes on the leftovers of old programs -- remains a problem.
Something that should have been fixed in Windows 3.1, you mean. By 1997 this was a huge and obvious problem in Windows, and one that we'd already been fighting for five years.
Microsoft also did nothing to make the system registry -- the collection of settings that constitutes a single, system-wide point of failure -- less of a nightmare.
Relacing INI files with a binary encoded version of the same INI files (look at a registry dump some time) was obviously a huge step backwards... in 1994 or so.
Note, also, what Microsoft never thought to include in XP: anti-virus software
Anti-virus software isn't necessary in a competantly written system. The OS and applications should be held responsible for keeping viruses out in the first place, rather than trying to catch them after the fact. In 1997 Microsoft completely blew it, introduced the greatest virus distribution system the world has ever known in the criminally incompetant "Active Desktop" and everything that it's spawned. The only "antivirus" I use now, and from 1997 to 2002 the most important standard "antivirus" for the systems I supported, was "no Internet Explorer or Outlook", and then later (as they started using the HTML control) "no Windows Media Player or Realplayer".
This stuff was obvious years before XP came out. A headline like "If Only We Knew Then What We Know Now About Windows XP" only means "it's not just the political reporters who can't remember what happened a few years ago".
I think the reason you stopped using multiple monitors on your Mac is that the menu bar only shows up on one of them. It's annoying to have to move your cursor away from your document window in order to use the menu. It's utterly annoying to have your document on one monitor and menu bar on another, especially with large monitors. This is particularly bad on Macs because they don't have predictable keyboard shortcuts for menu access, meaning you have to keep moving your mouse across monitors. The single menu bar idea was great when you could only ever have a single app and the screen was 512x340 pixels. Now that you can have dozens of apps and 2560x1600 pixels, it's pretty stupid to have such an important UI element so far away from your document windows.
Similarly, people don't work with maximized windows on Macs because there is no maximize feature. There's a "zoom" button (the green blob, I think), which either makes the window bigger or smaller, but it doesn't maximize. In my experience people like to eliminate distractions. I usually have 20-30 windows open at a time in a seemingly random overlapping layout, and the first thing most people do after they ask to borrow my computer is to either maximize the window they're using or start closing ones they're not using (as if they've never heard of "minimize"). When you click the "zoom" button on a Mac window it should make it fill most of the screen, but there are still icons and junk next to it. I frequently maximize Windows windows because it's trivially easy to get the windows as big as possible. I never use the zoom button on Macs because it never does what I want it to do.
As for "cut", Macs didn't have it because they didn't need it. Each folder was its own window so in order to move files you had to have two different windows open. Now that you can navigate to different folders in the same window, it's far more important.
dom
Looking back 5 years what I can see is : 1) Cant remember last 'unexplainable' blue screen, most blue screens ive seen are due to bad drivers, and for what ive tried linux is as bad as XP (tried to run suse 10.1 on an ATI card and solved the problem switching to a nvidea one). 2) Wireless support is very good in XP SP2. 3) IE still sucks. 4) install procedure millions of milles ahed of any linux distro ive seen. I cant remember doing any linux install that i didnt have to tweak something. 5) unfortunatelly microsoft is still ahead of linux on the desktop market, cheap hardware that works right out of the box (or with a simple cd) is really good with windows. on linux you are doomed ... Dont get me started with MAC OS because supporting 2 flavours of hardware is not the same as trying to support whatever you throw at it.
Give me a fucking break. Microsoft's reputation was already quite well-established 5 years ago. Mentioning some XP problems and then pretending you didn't know there would be problems, is a total joke.
Although stuff like Genuine Advantage wasn't out yet, by 2001 it was pretty clear to everyone who worked with Windows-loaded computers, that serving the user and making the computer easy to use, was not anywhere near Microsoft's top priority.
Anyone who pretends that they didn't know in 2001 that XP would be unpleasant, is the same kind of either stupid or dishonest person who is going to say in 2007 that they didn't know Vista would be crap. They're also the same sort of person who in 1994 pretended that didn't know Windows 95 would be crap. All this, in spite of reality pounding the same lesson into their thick skulls, over and over again: that Microsoft is not your friend and unless you're a large computer manufacturer who sells thousands of of Windows-preloaded computers every day, they don't give a damn what you think about their product. Your opinion has no impact on whether or not they make a sale.
Answer this one question: why should Microsoft care what you think? Unless your name is Michael Dell, can you imagine any possible scenario where your opinion about Windows' quality would change their revenue by a penny? Today, users' relationship with this company is pretty much the same as it was in 1992, after Windows 3.x's place in the x86 market and Microsoft's relationship with computer manufacturers had already become fairly-well established, and the company no longer had to worry about "converting" end-users.
The second-most ridiculous part of the article:
Wrong. The root problem is that XP sales are not a function of its users' experience with XP and their satisfaction with Microsoft's earlier products.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Wrong. Your food and water supplies are tested regularly whether you suspect anything or not.
I never said price equals quality. Often overpriced hardware is worse than the cheapo shit.
Yes I can define quality hardware, If you cannot get over yourself and comprehend that, well that is your problem.
Clearly you are defending yourself by attacking me for some reason, I don't think its worth my time to speculate why.
Attacking the person is always the sign of arguing from a weak position.
I suggest you show this to your boss and then have a good look at the expression on his face.
Honestly, 5 years and only 2 service packs?
SP2 came out 2 years ago.. SP3 isn't due untill late 2007??
I reloaded my wife's laptop over the weekend.. after SP2 I only had to install 80 patches.
If they can't find the time to get SP3 out the door how about a Security roll up pack?
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
Maybe I am in the minority, but I have had huge success with Linux in installation, management, troubleshooting, and day-to-day operation. If you have installed Linux regularly enough to really understand its quirks, shortcomings, and nuances, the reality is that you can have a viable, stable system up and running in literally minutes. Use an existing Ubuntu install disk, and on a newer PC, you can be online and productive in a very short time.
It's so easy to disparage Windows XP and Microsoft, but compared to its predecessors, Windows XP Pro really has matured into a decent product. The other night, I helped troubleshoot one of my wife's work computers running Windows 98, and I was frustrated by the lack or "mispalcement" of utilities, settings, and system tools that are always and predictably available in Windows XP Pro.
It's so easy to disparage Ubuntu and Linux, but compared to its predecessors, Ubuntu really has matured into a decent product. The other night, I helped troubleshoot one of my wife's work computers running Windows XP, and I was frustrated by the lack or "mispalcement" of utilities, settings, and system tools that are always and predictably available in Ubuntu Linux.
This is certainly not to say that it is without faults, security and vulnerability being the biggest issue. Microsoft should forget about the whiz-bang Vista approach, and re-write Windows XP Pro from the ground up. THAT would sell.
Doh, can't really see how to rewrite this one. Maybe "Ubuntu is a bit too paranoid about security, if they opened it up a bit it could be easier to set up in some network applications"?...
My only real complaint with Microsoft and Windows XP Pro is that they have never provided cost-effective licensing for home users to legally maintain multiple computers. WIndows XP Pro is really the way to go, but at its original $300+ price, it was far out of the reach of most home users. I bit the bullet and purchased multiple copies, but if Microsoft had provided a more cost-friendly option, I would have promoted it and recommended it much much more.
Yeah, here also my analogy falls apart. My only complaint about Linux and Ubuntu is that there's no one to invest heavily in marketing, so it's not as popular as it would be if people compared systems on security, reliability, and ease of use.
XP fails to shut down properly with many non-MS apps. The Eudora mail client gets hosed by XP. On shutdown, XP kills the app without saving changes. It's probably just a cooincidence that MS' poor design just happens to trip up competitors and never gets fixed.
If you've seen an XP laptop fail to wake up from standby, you can probably blame it on buggy drivers.
This is common on Macs running OS9 and OSX, with certain processor upgrades or PCI cards, too. Getting Linux boxes to handle standby properly can sometimes be a challenge, although drivers may not be the problem there.
-Rich
You just hit on the one thing that I hate most about OS X (and the rest of the Apple OS line, all the way back to the original Macs). Apple OS's are the only ones that have ever (AFAIK) done this. My Gnome menu does not change when I open GIMP. The Start menu in XP doesn't disappear when you bring up WMP. Why in Christ's holy name would you want it to?
That's the point, the OS falls into the background, but it's still there (the little blue Apple logo and Spotlight logo). I have found that having an application interface that cannot be told to "go away" by anybody very useful. Think of all the times you have wanted to see source code on a webpage (I used to block ads at my software firewall before I had FF+Adblock) but the idiot web designer disabled right click, and made it so none of the useable (file, edit, view, etc) was hidden.
I use OSX at work and WinXP at home, I am hourly but my workplace is very liberal when it comes to their net connection. I will stay here off the clock doing personal online stuff because the computer/apps/OS/widgets "feel" better. I hide anything (taskbar, desktop icons, etc) that makes my desktop at home look like WinXP, because it's static, obtrusive, and frankly just ugly. I have yet to see anykind of commonality when it comes to joe coder VB progrms... In OSX I know where the prefrences are in every program (menubar>program name>prefrences).
I'm noting going to even talk about mention uptime difrences between the two (max=200+days@work and -20days@home). Or the fact that a fscking terminal, not shitty DOS prompt, terminal, is like 4 clicks away (less if you prepare before hand).
XP^^^ VISTA.
Same story, second verse.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Hey... I'm not an elitist. An Idiot... often. But elitist... no :) He wanted to play the credibility game; I simply challenged it. Especially since he starts this entire thread by calling me "shithead". He claims he can assess "quality", probably by the brand name or Tarot cards... yet he's never heard of "soft-ice". "HP is always good!" Sure.
:)
Yeah, I know... stop baiting.
You have to admit, though... his "driver quality" examples being mostly GPIB was damned funny
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPIB
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
...and then you go off with a new lady (linux/osx) and find out that she's got no table manners, speaks dutch, is way to intellectual and to cap it all she doesn't do all the tricks in bed that your last girlfriend did!!
:)
So you decide to go back to your girlfriend after all (XP), since you know her ways, you love the way she lets you do what you want and keeps herself in good shape with a workout once a month (windows update)
That's not quite true. Lady XP insists that I do everything her way, she's overweight, and she keeps coming down with a virus. But, I have gone back to her, mainly because Lady Linux can't cook. She keeps trying to build the oven from scratch. That would be fine, but she never finishes it!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
PCs were more than fast enough to multitask before, they just weren't fast enough to multitask bloated code like windows...
There were multitasking unix variants running on lowend PCs, and the amiga was multitasking with a gui on much slower hardware.
Another problem windows has, is it's inability to size fonts correctly. Any modern monitor knows it's physical size and can communicate this to the host computer, and font sizes are specified in points, points have nothing to do with pixels and actually have a physical size associated with them (72 points = 1 inch), yet windows relates them to pixels rather than working out the DPI of the monitor and thus the appropriate size for fonts.
What this means is, when running at a high resolution the fonts on windows are too small to read (when infact they should be the same size, but more detailed because of the better resolution) and this causes people to run their machines at much lower resolutions than they are capable of.
X11 and OSX don't have this problem.
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Actually, your application menus change, but the apple menu remains the same, which is the same as the behaviour of other environments, except that the menus are always in the same place instead of moving around when you move the app window...
And AmigaOS did it the mac way, having the menu at the top of the screen, but it never had an apple style consistent menu.
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Why not get yourself a mac at home? Noone is forcing you to run XP there...
You can even try a hacked copy of OSX that will run on a regular x86 machine...
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why anyone would use that crap is beyond me
The best way I can explain it is that the menubar on OS X is not much at all like the menubar on other systems but much more like the contextual menu (i.e. right-click menu) that other systems have. It follows what you are working on. As you change apps all of the top-level labels change. As you move around between things within an app items in the menus are disabled or enabled as needed. Of course, OS X also has contextual menus but because Apple has a full menubar with all of the commands in it the contextual menus tend to only have a few well used ones.
If you stop thinking about the menubar as controlling the window and start thinking about it as controlling the specific thing you're working on then it makes a lot more sense. It's funny you should bring up The GIMP since it actually uses the right-click on image gets a menu model. And it's not your typical contextual menu but rather a replacement for a menu bar. That model is almost exactly the Mac model except the menu moves to the top of the screen horizontally and all the top level labels are visible without having to first right-click. Apply that to the entire OS and maybe you can see why it's not such a bad idea after all.
Of course, it does have its problems. If you twitch-click on your desktop or inadvertently miss the menubar by a few pixels you will change the menu to the Finder's menu. To me the simple solution here is to get rid of the desktop entirely. NeXT for instance did this. NeXT didn't have a common menubar but clicking (left mouse button actually) on the desktop brought up the menu which is essentially a GIMP style menu (or is it the other way around?) for the currently active window.
The desktop metaphor sort of made sense in the early Mac days when it was showing basically what was on the currently inserted floppy disk. You double clicked something and it came back to life as a document. Now that we have much more storage space the whole idea of the desktop is broken. I am all for the NeXT model of making the desktop into a workspace where only windows exist and making the file browser just a normal app.
Dom, I think you hit it spot on with respect to multiple monitors. I think you have it wrong about larger monitors though. Even on my 23" display the menubar is close enough (only need to bang the mouse up there with a quick flick of the wrist) that it's still highly usable. Not to mention that being the geek I am I tend to remember shortcuts for things I do often. Also, usage of the menubar can be reduced when drag and drop is available.
I think the reason for not having maximized windows is that it is a multitasking computer and that going in to single-task mode is highly ludicrous for your typical workflows. With that said, the iApps tend to be designed around the one maximized window model. It seems to work for those because they are like their own self-contained bottles (i.e. this is the microsoft model). I don't think that people really want to eliminate distractions. I think that some people are just neat freaks. Of course, using "Hide Others" from the application's menu (the one in bold) will handily eliminate all distractions. Assuming, of course, you don't have a billion icons on your desktop.
With spaces in leopard eliminating distractions will be even easier because one can simply configure a space with only the things they're working on. This, I think, is Apple's answer to the good things about maximized windows. That is, that they eliminate background distractions.
And then the besotted M$ home user noticed the vast Internet, and tried to set sail. Woe be to them, the sea was made of gasoline! Gasoline + styrofoam = napalm. It took about 12 minutes, on average, for each of those brave would be navigators of the world wide web to drown if a sticky flaming mess. So failed the system which was never made to be attached to a network.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
twitter is posting the same thing again because he is apparently unhappy with the troll moderation he normally receives when making his lame "M$" FUD jokes.