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Microsoft Admits Vista Has "High Impact Issues"
EggsAndSausage writes "Microsoft has granted, in a roundabout way, that Vista has 'high impact issues.' It has put out an email call for technical users to participate in testing Service Pack 1, due out later this year, which will address 'regressions from Windows Vista and Windows XP, security, deployment blockers and other high impact issues.' It's hard to know whether to be reassured that Service Pack 1 is coming in the second half of 2007, and thus that there is a timeframe for considering deployment of Vista within businesses, or to be alarmed that Microsoft is unleashing an OS on the world with 'high impact issues' still remaining." In other news, one blogger believes that Vista is the first Microsoft OS since Windows 3.1 to have regressed in usability from its predecessor (he kindly forgives and dismisses Windows ME). And there's a battle raging over the top 10 reasons to get Vista or not to get Vista.
Exactly how is it less usable then XP. They pretty much both work.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Microsoft has granted, in a roundabout way, that Vista has 'high impact issues.
I'm sure they're using the phrase "High impact" in much the same way as the NTSB.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
for a long time, unless you just like to pay to be a beta tester.
It is way too expensive to be a business user and wind up "testing" a new OS with no easy way to regress.
Win XP Pro is going to be an option to install on most PCs for a long long time.
Since when does "one blogger"'s view qualify as "news"? I'm sure at least "one blogger" thinks that OSX sucks or at least "one blogger" thinks that Linux sucks. Would that qualify as "news" as well?
The quality of the "news stories" that slashdot carries has gone downhill drastically in recent months.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
8. Inbuilt undelete
Or, depending on how you look at it, inbuilt rolling backup. Every time you make a change to a file or delete it, Windows keeps the previous version. As a result, the "oh !@#$ I just overwrote my entire PhD with Document1" feeling can be quickly assuaged. Read more...
But the read more link is broken. Maybe they need to restore it with undelete.
This sounds exciting... I've always wanted a filesystem that would act like CVS with each save. I don't know if this is doing quite that, but it's intriguing at least. (I think there's a Linux filesystem called Elephant that does something like this, but I haven't looked into it much.
(The other thing that I wonder why other file systems haven't adopted is NTFS's alternate streams. They seem like they could be really useful for some stuff...)
Ok, announcing SP1 for the second half of 07 is reasonable since all software has bugs. Calling for testers for the first service pack before the turd actually drops from their butts[1] is another thing entirely. If they have known 'high impact issues' they should delay initial release one more time. This is supposed to be a stable commercial product. Fedora would (hell, HAS) hold a release if it had 'high impact issues' and they pitch themselves as more of an early adopter testbed. Vista is going to be forcefed on millions of unsuspecting computer buyers whether they want it or not. Is it really unreasonable to expect the KNOWN bugs to be squished before forcing OEMs to preload it?
[1] No I do not count the corporate edition released in Nov because it was simply a stunt to claim to have shipped in 06. They knew full well no same corporate IT dept would do anything other than begin testing with a version they would consider the 'final beta'.
Democrat delenda est
That's just cruel.
1: It's more of the same. How many times do you have to buy more of the same before you realise it isn't solving your problems?
2: Ubuntu. It's even free.
3: OSX was out in 2000, Vista is 6 years behind the state of the art.
4: Wired for DRM, your computer is no longer fully under your control... muses... Was it ever with Windows.
5: It costs money. See #2.
6: Massive monoculture bad juju. Perfect for virus/trojan/worm writers. Hell, even evolution produced sexuality to avoid monocultures, that's how good diversity is.
7: Retraining costs. See #2.
8: Bad for the environment. Requires another round of system purchases and junking of "old" systems.
Bill Gates: Profit!
I'm sure there are more.
Deleted
Before you mod me troll, RTFA #5. Then mod me troll.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with Vista file transfer performance? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista box for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Color iBook G3, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Vista compatible heavy duty hardware, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Explorer will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Notepad is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on my Vista beast, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Vista machine that has run faster than my old C64, despite the latest dual core goodness and a $400 video card in this Vista box. My TRS-80 color computer with 16 KB (that's "kilo", not "mega") of ram runs faster than this core 2 duo machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Vista is a superior OS.
Vista addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Vista over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Reckon you won't upgrade to Vista until the first service pack is released? That's looking likely to be the second half of this year, according to Microsoft's latest email blast.
.NET-based command line shell with its own scripting language.
The company has put out a call for "customers and partners (to) actively test and provide feedback on Windows Vista SP1 to help us prepare for its release in the second half of CY07 (calendar year 2007)."
Microsoft hasn't released details of exactly what changes will be wrought in Vista SP1, which has been assigned the codename 'Fiji' but some OS components which missed the RTM cut-off will almost certainly be rolled into the update.
One of the candidates for this better-late-than-never brigade would be the Windows PowerShell, previously Microsoft Shell -- a
However, the Redmond clarion call declares that "regressions from Windows Vista and Windows XP, security, deployment blockers and other high impact issues as are the primary focus for the Service Pack."
So, yes, the still not-yet-released Vista has "high impact issues".
Testers will be enrolled in the Vista SP1 "Technology Adoption Program" and "must be willing to provide feedback and deploy pre-release builds into production environments."
In exchange, Microsoft promises they will have "an opportunity to influence product changes including the opportunity to work directly with product groups influencing their short term and long term goals".
Channels of communications back to the mother ship will include weekly LiveMeeting sessions, "onsite events and regular conference calls" with "24/7 production support for the Service Pack throughout the program."
There's also a clear desire to ensure that SP1 is rock sold. One of the goals for TAP testers will be to "validate the stability of Windows Vista SP1 through production deployments" says the email.
"It's important that customers deploy the Service Pack into production environments within 30 days of a milestone release. Issues will surface from the deployments as well as throughout the program as end users test its limits thought their day-to-day activities. The Windows TAP team will work with customers to identify and drive these issues."
If Vista SP1 scrapes in by December 2007 it will have been 11 months since the OS itself debuted -- the same length of time it took for Windows XP to get its first service pack. However, Microsoft is almost certainly aiming for a much earlier arrival, perhaps to overcome the reluctance among consumers and businesses alike to plunge headfirst into Vista. This is most often espoused in the conventional Windows wisdom which suggests waiting until Service Pack 1 ships.
So how do you get invited to sit at the cool kids' table with all the other TAP folk? This isn't a program for mere mortals. Microsoft suggests that interested users contact their" Technical Account Manager at Microsoft to get nominated".
The Chosen Ones will be expected to "deploy pre-release versions of Service Pack 1 into production environments at each major milestone (Beta, RC, RTM) within 30 days of the milestone release, actively provide feedback on all builds made available to them" and also "meet or exceed predetermined deployment count goals for each milestone."
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
The fact that so much people are thinking just like us "I'll wait Vista mature a bit, at least until SP1, before I give it a try" is the exact reason why Microsoft is going to rush out the fastest Service Pack you're ever seen.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
-Vmware still has yet to release a new VMWorkstation (6.0 is in beta) designed to run Vista as the host O/S
-Novell has yet to set a timetable for a Novell client capable of installing on Vista.
-AutoCad 2007 no timetable yet
-Lotus Notes client 7.01 (no Official support from IBM, though seems to work fine)
-Symantec Antivirus (need to upgrade to version 10.0)
Those are the biggies for our campus (that we've found so far....)
No, it's a combination of him being dumb and the interface being admittedly unintuitive. If you look at the left side of the picture there's a button that says "Folders" ... what do you think that does... You only have to click it once, and you can slide it to hide your favorites if you want.
http://www.intelliadmin.com/images/Windows%20File% 20Browsing%20Is%20Broken.jpg
Even the below is single-handedly enough for deterring me away from vista :
5. Driver support -- Key hardware like video and sound is crippled at the moment -- while Nvidia is working furiously to get a stable driver for the 8800 out by the 30th, there's still no SLI support for any of the Nvidia range. And thanks to the removal of hardware accelerated 3D sound in Vista, Creative's popular DirectSound based EAX no longer works at all, muting this feature for just about all gaming titles on the market today. Creative is in the process of coding a layer for its drivers to translate EAX calls to the OpenAL API which is seperate from Vista, but going by past experience with Creative drivers we won't see these any time soon.
not only nvidia stuff, but eax too. horrible as i got a creative xtreme music card to listen to 500+ classic music pieces, not to mention quality gaming sound. what kind of lack of foresight is this on part of ms ?
"DRM -- And to a lesser degree TPM -- were made for the RIAAs and MPAAs of this world, and the even tighter integration of copy protection mechanisms and 'Windows Rights Management' into vista are nothing more than a liability to you, the user."
well, this was the main shit that vista was delayed a few years anyway. im happy with my current situation as it is.
"half the limit compared to XP for Home Basic and Premium on how many machines can connect to yours for sharing, printing and accessing the Internet;"
i can say that loads of small businesses in turkey will be yelling the hell outta ms representatives on this one.
Read radical news here
These are Trouble with a capital "T".
/etc/fstab or via the tune2fs program.
(For those that don't know: a file can have multiple bodies, and a directory can have file bodies too. You can do "notepad C:\WINDOWS:holycrap.txt" to put a stream on the WINDOWS directory.)
Viruses hide in alternate streams. Backup software forgets alternate streams. Web servers and browsers forget alternate streams. FTP servers and clients forget alternate streams.
When next you are running out of disk space, perhaps it is an alternate stream! The file size shown in Windows explorer does not show the alternate streams.
If you really want this load of crap on Linux though... see the user_xattr mount option, which you may set via
Here, now there are two. Please qualify for which N slashdot is allowed to post. Thanks.
Apparently the "Folders" tool on the left is too hard to use. Take a look at his picture, if he just clicked on the "Folders" link on the left he would have a nice, easy to navigate tree right there. Yes, the address bar's drop-down is a sort of history. As for the web sites, mine seem to spawn a web browser (Firefox even) just fine.
Again, the author shows his ignorance. Just click on the breadcrumb of where you want to go, ta-da! you're now there. Granted it's not a button, but it's infinitely more useful. Not only can I go up one level with one click I can go up n levels with one click.
This one I will give him is a wash. The built in search rocks. And personally, I'm used to <Win>+R to open the run dialog. <Win>+R then 'c:' still gets me an explorer window at c:\. Though I tend to use <Win>+E and then using the folder tree to get to the c:\, but to each their own. My major complaint with this is that shutting down has changed for me. I used to use <Win>, U, S, <Enter> to shut down. That's gone now, now I just hit the power button on my laptop.
This one I'll give him. Changing IP addresses is now buried yet another layer deeper. You had to dig enough in XP. This "Network and Sharing Center" is a bit annoying. Though one thing it does have going for it is that you can quickly tell whether you are sharing folders or not, and control it from there. Overall, more of a "meh" than a problem.
And, we're back to stupidity. There is a little box in the upper left hand corner of the Explorer window, oddly labeled "search", it's even visible in some of his screenshots. Type a string of letters in, and Presto! Vista goes and finds any file with the applicable search string (it even checks inside Word, Excel and text documents.)
This is another one I'll give him, copying and the associated network issues are a problem MS needs to fix. For the entire OS to seize up because a network location is unreachable is just stupid.
Overall the author of the article manages to just show that he's only touched Vista long enough to be annoyed with the changes, and not get used to them. I've been running Vista since RC1, and excepting driver support which sucked in the release candidate, but that's to be expected, I've generally liked Vista. Most of the complaints I have heard are either ill-informed or just downright wrong. That's not to say that there aren't still issues with Vista. Driver support still sucks, the network hang-ups should really be fixed (or at least give me a cancel button for when I know I mistyped), changing security and network settings are now buried one layer deeper in almost all cases, and getting used to the security pop-up takes some doing. Though, in defense of the last one, this is something that people have been asking for; just running everything as a local administrator is insane, you wouldn't run Linux as root all the time would you? One thing that Vista does lack in this regard is a non-admin way of viewing settings that should require admin level rights to change. I'd like to be able to view the Computer Management snap-in without running it as admin.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
mabe this is a stupid question, but why microsoft is already working on SP1 for vista? I mean, don't they have a QA department, don't they have people to test the thing? Shouldn't an OS be somewhat working and already have dealt with security issues before they launch it on the public. what makes this so onerous is that you can't get computers with XP, or if you can now, you won't be able to in the near future. they might criticize OSS, but at least a .9 release is a .9. what the hell, I run OS X.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
But the version of OSX that was available 6 years ago was a lot worse than the current one. Apple has made a lot of improvements over the past 6 years.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Apparently the "Folders" tool on the left is too hard to use. Take a look at his picture, if he just clicked on the "Folders" link on the left he would have a nice, easy to navigate tree right there. Yes, the address bar's drop-down is a sort of history. As for the web sites, mine seem to spawn a web browser (Firefox even) just fine.
At the same time, there is still a valid criticism here. First, why change a perfectly working UI by not only moving the previous functionality to somewhere completely different and unconnected to the old location, but then using the old location for something else instead of removing it?
Secondly, why is there a web history in the open/save dialog at all? Can anyone think of a remotely plausable use case where this would be helpful?
Microsoft swore up and down that they would have a new service pack for Windows XP after Vista.
Who cares if Vista is broken? Most computer users will not see it on their systems for years. Windows XP is still "good enough" for most everybody, except... The hours of patching and updating after a SP2 install.
Microsoft: Are you listening? This user wants a consolidation of all the XP fixes into one service pack.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Users, well businesses anyway don't seem to care one bit whether MS WIndows, any version, works or not. That's my observation. Use it and shut up...
My work PC is a 2.8GHz P4. Not high end but typically over 40% of it's processor is taken up doing god knows what security wise. There's "service" after "service" designed to bolt on what should have been there from the start but won't ever bet. Put Sparcos, tinted glass and 20in spinners on a piece of crap and it'll still handle like crap and throw you out the windshield the first time it hits the curb.
So it'll be with Vista evidently. We can whine as we wish- anyone here making purchasing decisions? Anyone here said no, I'm making the decisions here and we're moving this business or University or town to Linux or OSX or anything but? If we're not a position to make that sort of decision in our little corner of the world, we're rocks Vista's going to crush into the pavement.
Frets on fire (Free PC version of GH2) It makes heavy use of OpenGL and gets 1 frame every 3 secs in vista but easily does 80fps on the same machine running XP. After Effects 7 also bluescreens alot I'm not sure f the reason but I suspect it's also related to the Opengl.
It's the ME version of XP.
I'm not a strong believer in the "Microsoft has no real choice" hypothesis. I don't think MS need the RI/MPAA members of the world as much as they need MS. First of all, MS are a part of, and presumably very active, member of the AACS licensing agency. I know this because it says so in the specifications. Maybe the other members could block them from implementing it, but I consider that unlikely (and why would they want too?).
Secondly, and the real point, MS rule basically every desktop in the world already. Do you believe that computes to leverage FOR or AGAINST Microsoft when negotiation with the MPAAs? Truly, the MPAAs would be at the mercy of MS. "Here's the DRM we're willing of giving you in Vista, be glad you're getting as much!".
I'm more a follower of the "Microsoft is doing this for their own, lock-in based, reasons". The history of Microsoft is the history of vendor lock-in and market control through technology.
Maybe MS really want the RIAAs and MPAAs on their side in the fight against the iPod? Maybe if MS give the RIAAs and the MPAAs what they want. One back scratched for another... If I didn't despise the MPAAs of the world, I'd raise a warning about MS long documented betrayalish ways, but I do.
BTW. Do you know what company I didn't see stamped on the first page of the AACS specifications?
Apple.
Lesser members perhaps. Now who is in control?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
What people should do if they ever want windows is INSIST on XP instead of Vista!
c ost.txt
If we hijack the Windows bandwagon from Microsoft, then Microsoft will be like a BIOS vendor when it comes to Windows. Anyone remember "IBM compatible PC"?
If almost everybody stays with XP and DirectX 9 and doesn't move on to Vista, then Windows XP+DX9 could become a defacto standard that even Microsoft can't get rid of! Just like Intel can't get rid of x86 - they tried and failed with their Itanic, and when IBM tried to switch to MCA.
Then the jobs of people doing Wine, Crossover office, Cedega and more become a lot easier - they have a fixed target instead of multiple moving targets.
Be realistic and ignore the fanboys out there, there are many valid reasons for wanting Windows. XP will continue to make a good substitute for Vista, unless more and more people start switching to Vista.
There really is no Linux substitute for Windows yet, BUT if enough people stick to XP, it becomes far more likely for there to eventually be one.
Just a look at Vista will tell you that Microsoft is no longer improving things significantly or meaningfully, so we might as well freeze Windows, and be able to spend more time and resources on innovating elsewhere.
So everyone, start telling Dell, HP et all to preload and sell XP instead of Vista, and tell your friends to insist on XP instead of Vista.
There are already other valid reasons to prefer XP to Vista, for example: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_
Macintosh, mid 1980's: Mac Filing System (MFS, used on the 400k floppies) and Apple's older and current HFS revisions all support(ed) an alternate stream. In Apple's case, theyre referred to as Forks. There's a resource fork, which contains application data, document resources, etc. There's also a data stream which commonly contains the document data itself.
Picture, if you will, an application with all of its support DLL's included within the executable file. You have nearly every macintosh application written prior to OSX.
"Alternate file streams" as it is is not a new invention from MSFT. It's a 20 year or more old technology. It's yet another other rework of a technology by MSFT that Apple originally designed.
Alternate file streams may have their uses, but theyre pretty much outmoded by the true random file access granted by any modern filesystem. You use a standardized file format (ELF, BFT, EXE, DLL, etc) that contains a table which contains locations and sizes for each data segment within a file. Even Apple have seen the light and moved away from forked and multistream files to a solution that works on flat (non-forked/streamed) filesystems.
-jbevren
But still, how is someone supposed to know what the 'search' field does? It's not intuitive that the search string will actually search the contents of a file. Plus, having a look at his screenshot of the search dialog, it's bad interface design having the search field separated from the rest of the search criteria. There's very little visual indication that they're all related.
He also raises a very good point about the broken search feature in XP SP2. Once, I tried finding a string in a directory tree of php files. The search function found nothing, so I assumed that there were no files that contained the string. I was wrong. The string was in one of the files, but the windows search feature did not bother looking inside php files. That cost me many hours of time, until I finally came back and searched files by hand. I was extremely pissed at Microsoft, and was wishing wholeheartedly that I had easy access to 'grep'.
The blog author seems to indicate that this is still broken in Vista. If it is, then there is legitimate concern here.
I just read your entire post and came to the conclusion that you can't spell.
Depends on which mode of undelete you used. There were three: the typical undelete functionality, which you described; delete tracker, which actively avoided writing to the deleted FAT entry until there were no other options; and delete sentry, which moved the files to a hidden directory, much like the Recycle Bin does today.
Vista is so delayed, would it hurt to delay it a little more, to fix those high impact issues?? I mean, wouldn't it be great to get a Microsoft OS that works from release, and not having to wait to SPxxx for it to work right? Its been delayed a million and one times already.. whats the friggin difference anymore...
WinXP works well in its current stage, for what I need it to - work stuff, and play at home. Haven't tried any of them on the RCs of Vista because I couldn't install it in the frist place. Seems like Vista did not like my SATA HDD. Talk about lack of hardware drivers.. it was RC and all.. but if XP works on it, shouldn't its successor work too?
Is anyone else having deja-vus left right and center? It feels like last week we were arguing why people should stick with 2k and not adopt XP. How XP was just eye candy over 2k and how it didn't improve anything of importance and it happened before 2k, etc etc. Once again, here we are, arguing that the new version of Windows is nothing more than an empty upgrade forced upon the masses to continue increasing MS's bank. What has changed since the last iteration of brown matter MS flicked at us? Is this really the best Windows version ever? Will people finally wake up and smell the poop MS packages? Will the masses give Linux/OSX a "serious" try? Will we be here x number years from now arguing about how people should stick with Vista instead of upgrading to MS's new Windows 2k10?
[alk]
The simplest form of rebuttal I found was simple: Most (not all) of the reasons to get it were reasons I use Linux. For example, even though I don't use an "image based" install, in a way, Debian, with .deb files, is based on images and I've been able to use the Debian Net install to install it in less than 25 minutes on a system -- and I can use data from one install to install on other systems. I can encrypt on laptops or desktops fairly easily and there are ways of setting up the kind of undelete rollbacks that they talk about.
Once again MS has copied everyone else out there but thinks they have done something new and has succeeded in convincing a lot of people that their rehash of old ideas is new and worth paying for even when other systems that have been able to do most of those things for years are free.
Right now it's running perfectly fine, with no BSOD, no DRM issues, awesome graphics, and a wonderfully intuitive OS/desktop combination (that can't be matched by any other OS on the face of this earth) on my brand new Acer Ferrari 1000 laptop computer, that I got from my good friend Steve Ba.... wait, uh... Palmer.
Did I mention it's also runs blogging software without any problems?
Normal APIs don't support extra streams. Getting fopen() to work with streams is a hack, to put it mildly.
The notation used on Windows is... interesting. If you are in D:\ with a file called C, does C:foo refer to a stream on D:\C or to a file called foo in the current directory of the C drive?
On a Linux or MacOS system, all characters except '/' and '\0' are valid in filenames, so we have nothing to spare. No, you can't steal the ':'.
Today I can copy a file with the dd command. I can copy a file using the cat command and shell redirection. Multi-forked files would lose data.
It looks like you need a directory... why not use one? This is how MacOS X apps work.
There are fundamental difficulties with on-disk data structures related to fragmentation and bloat. You add complexity for little gain.
Do these extra streams get permission bits? Can you solidly justify your choice?
Can a stream have a stream? If not, why the limitation?
Can I move a stream from one file to another? Can I move a stream to be just a regular file? Can I move a file into another file, to become an extra stream?
Why should everything become more complex (buggy, slow, insecure, confusing, etc.) for this barely-useful feature?
Vista doesn't have issues. It *IS* an issue to anyone who cares about secure, reliable, affordable computing. I've been telling clients to avoid it like the plague that it is. The main problem with the plague known as MS Vista is that it is spread by the carriers known as computer manufacturers.
:-) That would be another great requirement of any settlement the US and EU might reach with M$: if a new system is shipped with an M$ OS as the default, it ought to include a full set of generic Windows install discs, with a license transferable to any other machine the consumer decides to put it on. Making that part of the agreement retroactive, so that current users of Win98, WinME, WinNT, and WinXP could easily obtain installation discs for their old OSes when they decide to upgrade their hardware would annoy MS but impose no significant burden upon it, as long as it could charge a nominal fee to people who want physical install discs instead of DLing ISO images and burning and burning their own. I think a fair price for a set of Winblows install discs could be pegged at what it costs to have a set of install discs for a quality OS such as Ubuntu delivred to one's door. :-)
One way the plague might be stopped is for the US and EU to re-open their anti-trust cases against Micro$oft with a minimum goal of having any system where an MS OS comes pre-infec^H^H^Hstalled boot up the first time to a screen that gives the customer a choice of alternative non-MS (FOSS) operating systems. Since none of the major vendors, Dell, HP/Compaq, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, Lenovo, etc. provide much in the way of technical support unless a customer pays them outrageous prices, they really wouldn't have anything to lose by pre-installing one or more flavors of Linux or Unix on the new boxes they distribute via the major chain stores.
My point is that the typical PC buyer has little choice but to pay for and try to figure out how to deal with the Microsoft crapware that comes on almost all new systems. I suspect that many computer vendors would welcome an opportunity to stop wasting money on lame MS products and distribute FOSS equivalents. The neat thing is that MS has already implemented a system whereby it can charge only those customers who actually decide to use its buggy bloatware instead of one or more of the other OSes and office suites that manufacturers decide to allow the consumer to select from when she first boots a new computer.
I truly wish new systems came bare by default, with consumers getting to choose which operating system(s) and office suite(s) they want to put on them. I fondly recall when systems came with complete sets of installation disks (not discs
Basically, in order to end the Microsoft monopoly and stop the spread of Microsoft Buggy Bloatware(tm), the anti-trust regulators need to force the supply chain to change so that costly MS operating system and office suite software is no longer the default. As much as I dislike MS these days, I have little doubt it could deliver a very high-quality OS (far superior to the flashy junkware known as Vista) if it had to compete on an even playing field. This would be especially true if big companies such as Google or Sun could put their own (new) OSes on new systems as options, right alongside the MS product, since all existing contracts MS has with hardware vendors that pre-install its OSes would be nullified as part of any reasonable anti-trust settlement.
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I applied for a contract job a day or two ago, desktop rollout engineer, ello, all things being given this likely means MS Windows Vista rollout engineer, and / or MS Office 2007 rollout engineer.
Being a diligent sort of bloke I downloaded a release candidate version of Vista Business edition from the usual sources and proceeded to test it on the main box.
The "main box" is currently an AMD 64 bit jobbie, A-bit mobo, 2 gig of Mushkin, WD raptor HD, so not the absolute latest and greatest, but no slouch either.
In common with all versions of Windows this install (XP SP2) picks up "cruft" and after about 6 months the only real cure is a reinstall of Windows.
Knowing it was a dying install I thought I'd play with AutoPatcher, which patched everything sure enough, but made things around the edges even more flaky, and in particular made the ethernet connection unstable, this then was the candidate for Vista.
Installation / Upgrading was NOT straightforward, I had to manually uninstall Kaspersky anti virus, Spybot S&D, and two MS windows updates, one was powershell, I forget now what the other one was.
I tried a virgin install as opposed to an upgrade, rather than uninstall all the above, and got a BSOD at the first installer reboot, clearly a hardware / driver issue.
Nota Bene, this is hardly exotic or just released hardware, nor is it obsolete hardware, so immediately the tables are turned between Windows and Linux, Debian will simply install, Vista will not. Don't even ask about trying to get hardware drivers for Vista
So I went back to the upgrade path, uninstalled the software that Vista was moaning about, and tried again.
Well, it worked, but.......
This installer very clearly said on the splash screens two extremely worrying sentences.
During install your computer will restart several times - it did.
Installation may take several hours - it took about 2.
This is NOT Linux, so taking the upgrade path and the multiple reboots mean you cannot use the computer for anything during the upgrade process. I am not a coder, but the fact that Vista STILL requires several reboots during installation speaks volumes about the fundamental workings of Vista, this is not a "professional" Operating System.
The astonishingly slow upgrade times, bear in mind this is a 64 bit AMD CPU on a good A-bit mobo with 2 gig of Mushkin (best memory money can buy) and 10k RPM Western Digital Raptor hard disks, beggars belief, XP SP2 will install on this box in 25 minutes, Debian + about 1000 applications will install in about 15 minutes, Vista took TWO BLOODY HOURS, and I must say again, unlike Linux, totally rendered the box unusable in the interim.
So, eventually, the Vista upgrade / install is complete, and it boots into the OS.
Before I go any further, I must give this some perspectiive, I have been using computers since whenever, punched card on mainframes, 8 bit DIY stuff at home, not quite Altair but damn close, and I've used most operating systems too, the various DOSes, the odd bit of CP/M and OS2, Sinclair speccies, Tandy TRS 80, Commodore PET, Apple ][, the 16 bit NMS machines from the likes of Philips, Atari, BBC and Acorn RISC, MIPS based Cobalt servers when they came out, DEC, etc etc etc.
The point of this comment is to reassure the reader than the mere sight of something different does not give rise to "oh noes! this is the suxxor!" shit, different is "OK, let's see what you've got." and of course assuming that whoever wrote this OS will, like me, have some idea of what went before and therefore have a good idea about what are good ideas, what works, what doesn't, etc etc etc.
In 1995 the Acorn RISCOS 3.5 had full screen font anti-aliasing so you could read 8 point text on a 14 inch CRT, it had a Pause and Resume dialogue button on the file copy / move function, and would not fall over as soon as it encountered a file that could not be copied or moved, and would simply get on with moving or copying the rest
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
cp file.iso /mnt/cd/wd # burn to cd /mnt/cd/wd # fixate /mnt/cd/ctl # eject
rm
echo eject >
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/4/cdfs
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Good luck with that. The rest of us will be buying a better card for 1/4 the price in two years, and still have it installed well before the number of published games that really take advantage of DX10 hits double figures. And our drivers won't crash the whole PC at random intervals, either.
Seriously, buying the latest and greatest graphics card is a fool's game, and has been for probably five years or more now. Lack of game requirements and poor quality early drivers mean that you won't get the best out of such a card for several years after you get it. By that time, the rest of your system spec will be struggling to keep up, and even the budget graphics cards will support the same API standards.
Point for comparison: I last built a PC around 4 years ago. At the time, I went for high-end pretty much throughout. For the processor, RAM, and hard drive it was well worth the extra: they gave a direct advantage in things I could do with the PC at the time. However, my Radeon 9700 Pro (replaced after 6 months with a 9800 Pro because of the power supply issues) that was pretty much state-of-the-art at the time has never been used to its full potential. The games I bought it for, which would really benefit from DX9, weren't released for another year or two in reality. Today it's actually that then-high-end graphics card that is the biggest limiting factor in running more recent games (along with, ironically, simple things like not installing a DVD drive, which was a luxury item back then). I might as well have bought a cheap 'n' cheerful Radeon 9500 or then-mid-range nVidia card, and used the significant financial savings to upgrade the graphics card a couple of years later when the games could use it, spending less money overall, winding up with better kit, and suffering no practical loss of functionality in between.
In any case, in the time frame we're talking about, it's quite possible that the whole DRM house-of-cards will be crashing down around poor Microsoft's quivering OS dept. and execs will be running around trying to distance themselves from the mistakes underlying Vista. That's likely to require a significant reworking of the whole multimedia framework within the OS, which in turn is likely to do weird stuff to DX. There's still a lot of potential in DX9 that most new releases don't tap, and a lot of the PC gamer market will be on XP rather than Vista for some time to come. With this sort of environment, I would think DX10 is a pretty unappealing target for game developers right now, so I wouldn't be rushing out to upgrade things just to support it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
As an aside, I usually use the command-line findstr command when I need to do a real text search. It's three-quarters-assed compared to grep but it hasn't failed me yet.
In the future, all spacecraft will be made of cheese.