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Vista Indicates A Shift in Microsoft's Priorities
jcatcw writes "After hundreds of hours of testing Vista, Scot Finnie is supremely tired of it. And of Microsoft. Although 80% of the changes in Windows Vista are positive, there is nothing about Vista that is truly innovative or compelling; there's no transformational, gotta-have-it feature in Vista. But the real problem isn't with Vista. It's with Microsoft itself. His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users. They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.'"
That's about my thoughts exactly, except let's not forget turning the screws on the paying customers.....
"Although 80% of the changes in Windows Vista are positive, there is nothing about Vista that is truly innovative or compelling; there's no transformational, gotta-have-it feature in Vista. "
They attempted to improve their security and GUI. Any additional features were already available as third party add ons or with different OS's. Were we really expecting anything else? Time will tell if their attempts were successful. I for one have no interest in Vista other than possibly having to use it at work.
"His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users. They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy."
Again, no surprise here... Marketing is all about positive publicity and MS recognizes that their bread and butter is evolving into the large, medium, and small corporate entities that are locked into their OS and apps...not the everyday home end user.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
I suppose Microsoft BASIC was good back in the day.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Making the largest corporate users happy is the same thing as making the end users happy. The corporate desktop represents a large portion of their end user install base, and it's definitely a larger portion of the end user paying install base.
Like it or not, corporate desktops are Microsoft's bread and butter.
Video for Online Dating Profiles
Why else would Bitlocker not be available in the Professional version?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Is the hologram on the DVD. That is pretty fucking cool! Otherwise... meh.
This is nothing new. Any company whom knows whats is what would approach business in this manner. why focus on the market which Has no value or cost more to support than implement?
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.
I guess this is why Apple is deliberately ignoring the Enterprise market.
Now I'm not saying this all came exactly true but if'n you ask me, some serious trolling of blogs for peeved-at-Vista articles is going on
Which makes Slashdot about the only place in the world where anyone cares about it.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
How can Microsoft simultaneously focus on their large enterprise customers (who have hundreds of thousands of end users) and simultaneously stop focusing on end users?
Second: why would it be a negative to fucus on security and SW quality? Were these not the things MS was criticised the most for --for not focusing on security and quality enough --now this is their bane? What??? Make a straight argument. Or is he trying to say that MS is only pretending to address the issues and their main strategy is really a public relations strategy on security and SW quality?
I get his gist, but he's just not explaining himself clearly. In critizing MS he's using odd logic.
throw that boy some coffee
Yessiree bob, Apple is looking better every day!
Scott: it's a friggin OS, not a video game, it's not supposed to have a nice plot twists, hot action and lots of suspence.
1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.
Funny, that. I can see how it's bad they don't attract negative publicity and piss off their largest enterprise customers.
But tell me, how do these features fall into any of those two categories:
* New aero candy interface (I bet enterprise customers demanded this!).
* DVD maker.
* Photo processing.
* Live thumbnails.
* Updated Windows Games.
* DirectX 10
* etc etc.
There's a real reason why nobody is impressed with Vista as much: we've been watching it for 5 years. Previews, alphas, betas.
Maybe Jobs is right to sue blog sites that leak product info, and release everything with a ton of hype, of the "Best. Chewing. Gum. Evah!!!".
Because you see what happens now: people who followed Longhorn's development since it's inception are now whining that they're kinda familiar with what's new. Well duh, smartass.
That's been the case since 2K/XP, and arguably since Win9x and the introduction of IE/ActiveX.
Word and Excel macros on by default? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and all content created by people in the office is trusted!
NetBIOS filesharing on by default in 9x? Of course! Everybody's on a LAN, everyone should be able to share their documents with each other!
ActiveX things that autoinstall and execute when some string on a webpage tells them to? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and the only thing they should be browsing is the company Intranet, and the only web applications are going to be about entering your vacation time into a database of timesheets!
Javashit on by default! Of course! See above -- how else can we be sure to tell those UNIX greybeards that they're fired (because they can't run ActiveX TimeSheet Thingy that the consultant was paid $100K to write) unless they're running IE!
Install IIS by default and make it listen to requests from everywhere? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if everyone had their own little web server thingy running on their desktop so they could share their Word documents with other people in the office?
UPnP on by default? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if you just plugged the computer into the LAN, and it automatically knew about the printer down the hall.
DCOM and RCP services turned on by default, listening on ports 135, 139, 445 or 593 for requests from everywhere? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and DCOM makes it easy for people to stick Excel spreadsheets in their Word documents!
Goddamn near every out-of-the-box remote exploit (and most of the designed-in insecurities in IE and the Office suite) arises from the assumption that everyone's on a LAN, and that all content is trusted.
They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.'"
DUH!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
So, is Microsoft actually marketing Vista in a way to lure current XP users into Longhorn? The way I feel about it is that a lot of computers aren't very capable of running Vista plus applications on the side, so Vista will be a great purchase with your new computer. It will probably also take away some of the shine from OS X as Vista is a good step forward, too.
I think Vista is more of an upgrade that included features a lot Windows XP users have requested, but I don't think the intention was to create an operating system that would change as much as OS X did if compared to previous versions of the Mac OS.
If you're buying a new PC, make sure to get Vista. If you're on an older PC, stick to XP or previous versions of Windows. If you're on a new, Vista capable PC, consider it and buy it if you think it still sounds affordable.
Full Tilt
I'd get supremely bored of testing an OS for hundreds of hours, too. My lord, man, have you never heard of applications? I'd shoot myself after the 300th hour of "fun with notepad".
Although there's no must-have features, they'll bludgeon everyone with the DX10 stick and the "we won't patch XP any more stick after 2011" until everyone has bought it.
Windows is not secure......Bad Microsoft
Security (a.k.a, User Account Control (UAC) for Trigger-Click-Happy People who click "Yes" no matter what).....Bad Microsoft
Give me a break....Bashing Microsoft just-because-I-hate-Microsoft (a.k.a, Linux fan bois)
is getting too old and childish. Grow up people!
It is a "No-Matter-What-Blame-Microsoft" attitude.
Overall, I think Vista is a gradual evolution of the Windows platform.
That is why, they delayed one of the most anticipated featuresJust like every other company, Microsoft had to make hard Business decisions.
like WinFS because it is NOT ready and solid yet.
In my opinion, Microsoft is focusing on releasing a STABLE OS rather than an error prone insecure OS.
Scott Finnie tests Vista for hundreds of hours, finds nothing wrong with it, so he complains that Microsoft now focuses on " Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality)". And it's somehow wrong.
Booohoo, Microsoft releases a secure system! They are doing it only so that they can avoid negative publicity, let's slam them!
Microsoft doesn't really care about the little single machine buyer.
The entire publicity was done to get mainstream media's attention and tell the corporate buyers, who buy not 1 machine at a time but 10,000 to 20,000 machines at a time that the change is coming.
The end-user who's sing a PC at home isn't going to upgade his OS until he buys a new machine, and he's taking what they're giving because he has no real choice.
Unless he buys a Mac or is geeky enough to get a Linux box. (That means YOU reading this, and you didn't give a shit what Microsoft was doing anyway, did you?)
Its all being done for the volume buyers.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Fast forward 20 years. Everything is in MS Word format, which may or may not work with a particular version of Word, and is much more likely to work with another Office application. We are nearly 100% connected, but if you do not have the MS Windows only version of IE, there are significant web pages that will not work. It now matters that you have the same computer as work, if for no other reason than you can use the office copy of MS Office.
If there was the fluidity of motion of the 80's, then perhaps the MS strategy would be as disastrous as the IBM strategy. However, I do not see millions of users moving from the WinTel machine to something cheaper, nor do I see millions of users who never bought a computer before buying something other than a Wintel. Perhaps a few hundred thousand will buy a Mac, and few hundred thousand will buy a *nix machine, but that is not going to be a short term problem for MS.
Ultimately Vista does what it is supposed to do, which is to satisfy the contract of those that paid MS for very expensive long term licensing, as well as justify the higher cost machines from MS real customers, the OEM computer people. A positive ancillary purpose of MS Vista is to further isolate MS OS from other commodity products, thus making it harder to switch. This is a risky proposal, but perhaps the only way that MS can continue to amass the huge profits on what is essentially old stock. Good for them.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
to the phrase "largest enterprise clients."
I keep having this strange dream where most of the governments of the industrialized nations got tired of the myriad of problems they have when one connects a relatively anonymous PC to the Internet and decided to do something like mount a smart card module on a motherboard to generate a unique, verifiable signature (among other things) for each pc.
Just a dream though...
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Excellent, excellent comment. If MicroSoft had simply realized from the beginning that they needed to treat *all* incoming content as hostile until proven otherwise they'd have avoided so many of these mistakes.
... erm ... lawyer didn't take these assholes to court in a class action suit for the billions of dollars in damages their idiotic design choices directly caused.
Personally, I think they've always had a "not invented here" mentality and for that reason, didn't bother to study the lessons of those who'd been dealing with the internet for ages before it exploded in popularity.
There's a reason java applets (lame as they were) weren't associated with the type of security problems we've seen over and over from MicroSoft. Sun understood the "all incoming content should be treated as hostile" principle and sandboxed applets by design from the very beginning.
I've often wondered why some enterprising bottom feeder
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't
MS's biggest problem is to try justify all the effort that goes into making something "new" that is not perceived to be new by most people looking at it from the outside. There must be a lot of investors/share holders asking why MS spent $5bn or whatever developing Vista when XP seems healthy enough.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
http://slashvista.org/
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=vista
Why couldn't they just release an NT 5.3 that's backwards compatible with the drivers from XP/2003 to some degree (WDM), while ditching the older VXD model?
What would have been wrong with that? And keep the fixes for how async IO is done, and keep the new schedulers, and keep the new installer process, and so on.
I don't care if it was a $149 box and $79 upgrade like XP vs. 2000... I just want some continuity between my OSs. Give me some nice benefits without the drawbacks.
I mean, you want to talk about being business-oriented; it didn't take a kernel version jump to give us the features we wanted (we being the IT folks). DX10? New APIs to validate our apps against? We don't want any of that stupid shit.
SQL Server 2005 runs just fine on Server 2003 fuck you very much microsoft.
Oh, I forgot. They need a secure DRM platform so they can make me rent my software and music. God fucking damn it.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Buy it bitches! (still a shareholder)
I'll let others discuss the merits of points 1 and 2 in the blurb. There is definitely another: keep content providers happy with DRM "technologies".
;-)
I'll let others debate the merits of DRM.
wow, how long did it take for him to figure out MS doesn't give a rats ass about him?
all they care about is large corporate accounts? what? they don't love Joe consumer as much?
how long before this lucid moment wears off?
But only in Romania and China. :P
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
I can't help but agree with your statement that Microsoft bashing for its own sake is childish, but since when do we expect people to act grown-up on teh interwebz?
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
It seems to me Vista has had a lot of its inner gears re-tooled so that others can add-on the new applications. The sound features alone seemed to have been re-oriented more than people might be aware of.
3 47
"Vista redefines the audio landscape, but is it a landscape of forced obsolescence?"
http://pc.ign.com/articles/759/759538p1.html
In this blog there is video about how the audio stack in Windows Vista has been rewritten so people can have per-app audio control.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=116
I don't have Vista and am not in a rush to get it, but I think perhaps in time there could be more benefits to Vista than meets the eye. Certainly the 64 bit security functions don't seem exciting but if they block remote code execution then that's something to like.
If Microsoft really cared about end users, the latest Windows would be a small, tight little GUI shell with the bare essentials that still ran smoothly on 5-10 year old hardware. And IE would still be part of the Plus! pack, along with everything else they currently feel the need to bundle.
No one OS will ever make everyone happy. One group will always bitch about something. You know what, its time to go back to scratching stuff in the dirt.
You mad
large enterprise customers are end-users if you define end-user as the one who writes the check for the software.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I just attended a very popular IT industry event in San Diego, and finally saw Vista for the first time. I went in with an open mind, but quickly realized it does NOTHING that is original or interesting. However, the reps were very excited about some new features the "public has not seen yet". For example: New tabbed browsing (FireFox), A desktop side panel with e-mail, news, and tasks (Google desktop), new window management (XGL!), and some other lame stuff. In fact the rep actually admitted to using FireFox when all was said and done. Don't waste your time even considering this OS. Linux is coming.
He's right about those "largest enterprise customers." The example I've been following is Exchange. If you've installed Exchange 5.5 back in the 1990's, you'd remember a relatively easy installation. Set up Windows NT, pop in the Exchange CD, and you basically had a working system. (It'd be an open relay, but that's another story.)
:)
Fast forward to 2007. In order to install the current version of Exchange you pretty much have to become a directory services expert. You need to know Active Directory pretty well, and basically be at the MCP level of Microsoft-brainwash. Sure, this is great if you're running something like Ford Motor Company and you have 100,000 users at dozens of locations, but what if you're a small to medium business and you just want to set up a basic mail and calendar server?
Disclaimer: the reason I know about this is because I'm involved in the development of Citadel, an open source groupware server. One of the things we focused on was making the installation as easy as Exchange 5.5 used to be. That's my "full disclosure".
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Which is exactly what an operating system maker is supposed to do. End users don't use an operating system, developers do.
If Microsoft finally starts giving developers priority over end users, Windows might actually become something useful someday.
http://outcampaign.org/
Theres an old salesmans saying:
"Sell to the masses, live with the classes. Sell to the classes, live with the masses."
Where 'the classes' are the 'enterprise customers'.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Bashing Microsoft just-because-I-hate-Microsoft (a.k.a, Linux fan bois)
is getting too old and childish. Grow up people!
And assuming everybody who disagrees with you are "fan bois" is mature?
Overall, I think Vista is a gradual evolution of the Windows platform.
Just like every other company, Microsoft had to make hard Business decisions.
Apple threw away their OS, and then changed architectures. That's a hard business decision.
What hard decisions did Microsoft make? Cutting WinFS? Congrats, I guess. But if you want to survive for long, you have to be known for delivering, not cutting.
That is why, they delayed one of the most anticipated features
You misspelled "a dozen".
In my opinion, Microsoft is focusing on releasing a STABLE OS rather than an error prone insecure OS.
So the reason Windows 95 was error-prone and insecure is because in 1995 Microsoft was focusing on delivering an error-prone insecure OS? Good thing they changed their focus, then!
Despite all the talk about "security", Vista includes NO tools of any kind for detecting nasties (viruses, trojans, spyware, worms, rootkits or anything else).
Way back in the dos 6 days Microsoft included an anti-virus program.
Then when windows 95 came out, they stopped doing that.
With nasties of all kinds being one of the top reasons for people to need some kind of computer help/support, one would think that adding anti-virus and anti-spyware (both of which would be memory resident and catch stuff before it can take hold of your PC) and such to Vista would be a great way to get sales from people tired of dealing with such crap.
Pardon me, but back in those times, you never tried CBasic dialects, did you ? If you had, you surely wouldn't mention MS-Basic as a good product from Microsoft, focused on users. Even then, most other basics had already dropped line numbering in favor of non-sequential numeric labels at worst, alpha labels at best. And to nail it, no other basics of reputation I know of had computational bugs in floating point arithmetics.
I think what the author meant by no huge breakthroughs, was that all of the big breakthroughs that were promised (WinFS, database filesystem, etc.) were scrapped. Microsoft touted and planned on a huge makeover for the Windows operating system, hoping to do a big change to the core of the OS ala Mac OS Classic to OS X. It proved to be more difficult than they had planned, so they scrapped all of their big plans and went with WinXP with a rework of the gui and tweak to the way it handles file permissions.
The reason people aren't going apeshit over the Vista, is that it's nothing really new. It's just XP with a facelift. It looks pretty, has some nifty new widgets...err, gadgets, and uses twice the resources at idle time. In short, all of the original big promises were dropped, so all of the big expectations were dropped as well. It's all ho-hum now.
Microsoft continues to lose touch with the home user. Lately, they've just been blatantly copying features from other products. Were it not for corporate workers needing compatible software both at work and at home, I think more people would have already switched to Mac or Linux. Not only that, but Windows is the only non-unix-like mainstream OS left. Give it up Microsoft! You will be assimilated into the unix collective. Resistance is futile.
How is Vista in any way targeted at large enterprises? From all of the extra licensing nonsense in Vista and Office that make life more difficult for cloned deployments, to its desire for awesome video cards, to all of the extra DRM and media features that are worthless in an enterprise environment the very notion that Vista is targeted at enterprises is absurd to me.
I can tell you that my particular environment can't get Vista to work correctly with our 2k3 Active Directory server. That we have no desire to buy thousands of $400 video cards to replace GeForce 4MX's that do manage to render Excel documents correctly. And that we could care less about upgrading to Vista Ultimate and whatever else.
But, this is basically the same thing that everyone said when XP came out. 2000 works fine, we're just going to stay with that forever. Shockingly that becomes impossible; time passes and eventually you'll have to keep up with the Microsoft Joneses.
I was always under the impression that the focus of vista was on re-writing the stuff under the hood to make it more reliable and more secure (this is a direct benefit to the end user...isn't it?), not to make it do new flashy things. Some of that has been thrown in just to help market the product and keep up with the times....but i did not think that was the intention of vista.
Hard work is just an accumulation of the easy things that you didn't do when you should have.
The way I see it, this is exactly what they needed to do, as XP seemed like a bug-ridden hideous security and usability nightmare*. If they make Vista more stable and secure, then it will do a lot more for MS's street-cred than almost anything else.
;-)
Windows has never really been about innovation - the 3rd party apps do that. If it becomes more secure, we'll all be better off. It's (hopefully) gonna be more like Linux (minus the freedom/flexibility/no-DRM part, of course), and I personally think that's a Good Thing.
I won't be using it personally (nor did I use XP), but it'd be kind of nice if the huge number of computers in botnets was reduced somewhat...
*personal predjudice there..
Microsoft is very focused on end users. Yes, corporate desktops are a large segment, but there are millions more citizens than office lackeys, such as people who have a computer at home but would never use one at work--construction workers, janitors, blue-collar workers, etc. Vista Home Premium has many personal user options--an improved Media Center, Windows DVD Maker, a new version of Movie Maker, and more. Do you think that Aero was made for business users? Business users generally don't care about the GUI, save for maybe personalizing the desktop. I keep my office PC on the default themes, not loaded with extra themes and whizbang graphics effects. My home PC, now running Vista, is much better looking than XP and is visually appealing.
I think Microsoft is trying to make money ultimately. To make money, you have to a) have an appealing product, b) avoid negative publicity, c) have a product that works, and d) have happy consumers. Any market segment that gets marginalized will hurt profits. With the amount of money Microsoft has, I doubt they decided marginalizing home users was worth focusing on the exclusive large enterprise market. I am pretty sure they can afford both.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
But if it ain't broke, nobody buys the upgrade.
If you run Windows properly you can still use it in 20 years to write text documents and make fancy drawings.
As it's now 2007, we want an OS that feels like 2012 so that when 2012 arrives we're ready to upgrade again. For a lot of users, in 2002, Windows XP felt like 2007 in terms of stability, features, etc. Even Windows NT feels usable today for people who just do the same work day after day for the last 10 years.
How can one say Microsoft is really targeting the enterprise? Many companies are still running Windows 2000. If the enterprise is such a big goal, upgrades would be sweeping the land.
It appears rather that Vista is a mere stepping stone to the next version. If it ain't broke, no one will buy the upgrade so Vista can't be the be all and end all.
What does 2012 feel like? Will people have giant monitors or an array of monitors? Are they finally going to be able to communicate their commands through voice or pen as well as they can to another person? Will your own personal hard drive and applications be accessible from ubiquitous public terminals or handheld devices? Even if the implementation is clunky, I would like to see some of that futuristic ilk in Vista.
Instead Vista appears to create fear in the user, not from hacker attacks but from information that may be acquired surreptitiously to prod users about software payments. A Trojan horse of a different stripe. So if the argument is that Microsoft is programming to sell to corporates, that idea is bang on the money.
Corporates should upgrade their OS, but maybe not this version, which is a mere harbinger that they'll have to keep their systems clean. This version may be more secure, but the next version should have more goodies. Besides Vista right now slows everything down and ought to have better performance in future editions.
MS doesn't care about either publicity or enterprise users with this release. Vista is all about DRM, period. This release is all about satifying content providers (content enslavers?) not about any kind of end user, enterprise or individual.
Security (a.k.a, User Account Control (UAC) for Trigger-Click-Happy People who click "Yes" no matter what).....Bad Microsoft
You aren't paying attention. The criticism is directed at the poor implementation, not the fact that it was implemented.
Edith Keeler Must Die
That doesn't even rhyme, unless your a dirty northener. Or some yankee idiot.
...than about your experience as a user. It's been getting worse in this respect for years. When you add in the extreme DRM included, I will never "upgrade" to any version of Vista for my own use.
This took Microsoft over SIX years to send out. People aren't saying it's not a gradual improvement, people are asking why the hell it took Microsoft SIX years to make such gradual improvement, how long its going to be before they make their next incompatable "gradual improvement", and whether or not Microsoft even has an R&D department. Most of the things they did were very clearly innovated by someone else.
-Security's a problem? Let's create something that will let us blame the user. (UAC)
-Games going to other OSs are a problem? Let's rewrite an incompatable DX10.
-Third party drivers for video crads are crashing our driver model? Let's just gimp the third parties so that they can't and do it ourselves. (Bonus for gimping OpenGL.)
-GUI/useability is a problem? Let's just slice and dice some Linux and OS X elements.
The problem is not that Vista is incremental in change, it's that its incremental, it took six years, and Microsoft is forcing the incompatability anyways.
FanFictionRecs.net
Seems like everything you listed there is a complete focus on the end-user rather than the other way around. Most end-user's don't think about security (especially back in the late 90's), they simply expect everything to work. If MS had started by making it difficult to do all the things you mention because of security I don't think they would have taken over the market the way they did. Seems to me that the reason MS has been so successful in the OS market is because it was super simple to connect everything.
Now that they're starting to focus more on security they're blasted for not doing enough for end-users. Blasted for not doing enough for security in the past. Blasted for... pretty much everything. I'm certainly no MS fanboi, but it seems that somebody's gonna complain up a storm no matter which direction they go. If other OS's out there are as good or better than Windows for the majority of users who aren't techies then let's see it. But I don't see how anyone seriously complain about the features in an OS that has dominated the market as a direct result of their implementation. Seems to me MS got it right (their general popularity pretty much speaks for itself) and because they're on top everyone's gotta poke em with a stick. Who cares about how MS implemented Windows 98 anyway? That was close to a decade ago!
I am Jack's smirking revenge.
Vista contains quite a few very nice new features, volume shadow copy(sure novell's had it for 15 years, but not on the desktop), bitlocker(sure you could do that with third party apps, or if you configured it reasonably well, linux, but whole drive encryption is still pretty new, especially having it work in an efficient manner. Even the DRM is about as "innovative" as operating systems get(that's not to say it's a good thing, but not all innovation is good).
Most of the truly innovative technologies in Operating Systems are really low level, new file systems, new kernel designs, new process schedulers, emulation, etc. We haven't really seen much innovation in any of these things in a number of years, certainly not anything that just changes the whole way we do things.
ReiserFS is just another way of looking at journalling file systems, not a major new step. GNU Hurd has been working on a microkernal design for nearly 20 years and it's still not ready for prime-time, Microsoft has been working on WinFS for a long time too, and maybe eventually they'll have it, but not this time.
In essence Vista is what 2000 was supposed to be and XP almost was. It's a reasonably functional and reasonably secure multi-user operating system from Microsoft. One which is relatively secure, but which can still run most of the programs you want to run on it. Yeah, it took them 10 years to get there, but if you think of what things were like in the NT/9x days, where you had to choose between an OS which wouldn't work at home(and didn't even always work in the corporate environment) or an OS which was about as secure as a sieve, we've come a long way.
Dude, they've been working on WinFS since about 1993. If it's *still* not ready yet, it never will be...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.
This is not exactly a revolutionary observation. Ever since the PC entered the corporate market Microsoft has been this way. The "end user" has been nothing more than a cash cow to be milked.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Didn't Red Hat do something similar by focusing on enterprise customers with RHEL and abandoning their flagship RHL product. Several years ago, Red Hat WAS Linux. Ask anyone outside the community and to them the company Red Hat was equated with any and all things Linux. With the drop of RHL and the ensuing confusion over Fedora versus RHEL versus Centros, etc., Red Hat has lost mindshare and hence market share, except with the enterprise. THey make a lot on enterprise sales, hence the stock is up and overall the company is doing well, but for a while they abandoned their roots.
Microsoft may be following the same path.
Only one other person replied to Kris's comment, and it was a completely different response. How was this redundant?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
The relative disinterest with which Vista is being greeted, is far more of a compliment to Windows XP and 2000 than it is criticism of Vista.
They still have not learned. You have to turn on the gaping hole that is Active-X to get security updates. This may completely defeat the purpose of putting the security updates on there in the first place.
Well, maybe they can get Hans Reiser off and hire him. After all, he's done one already and maybe he and Balmer could discuss conflict resolution strategy!
That is all.
All of this talk about installation problems and driver issues and DRM and all the other hurdles to install a workable OS - and even then, a chunk just doesn't work right... It sounds exactly like switching to most UNIX platforms. Same frustration, same problems. So my take on this is if you have to bite the bullet, why not just switch now and leave the crud behind once and for all? At least with most UNIX installs, you get good solutions to problems - that usually fix it the first time - and it's low-cost or free. ie - same headache, but for 1/5th the duration. Microsoft - shoot - who knows when the programs will work right or the bugs will be gone? Vista SP2 or SP3 is a *LONG* time from now.
If you essentially have a monopoly on home computers do you really have to appeal to customes? Basically do you want a computer or not can be the sales pitch. Apple may be an alternative but there are limitations in software availiblity and compatibility and most people are just used to PCs. What I find most interesting was before it's release most pro PC types were claiming how innovative it was but now that it's out and everyone has seen it they are all saying what were you expecting, innovation? The argument is it's more stable, be happy. Five years is a long time for what amounts to a bug fix. They changed the interface and made it more secure but it's hardly earth shaking for a five year development cycle. I'm not taking either side but Mac has produced more innovation on a yearly basis than Microsoft has managed in five years. Considering how much was spent that's pretty sad. The only feature I'm interested in is Direct X10. The extra stability may come with a price since I've heard some of my software may not run on it and most of my stuff is heavily licenced and a pain to reload if there are problems. So long as they command better than 90% of the market share I wouldn't expect much simply because they don't have to produce much. They need some serious competition to drive innovation. Linux has trouble breaking away from being something for the fanatics. Just too many install and maintainence problems. Mac can give them a run for their money but not until they approach 10% market share. This year could get interesting since Leopard looks pretty stunning and they do have a lot of new products coming out. My biggest complaints with Windows is the stability, lack there of, and with XP the fact it won't leave me alone, and Vista is supposed to be much worse. I violently hate constantly being prompted. It really slows my workflow so inspite of my fastest machine being XP Pro I generally still work on my Win 2000 system eventhough it's half the speed. It's less annoying.
Damned if I'm wrong, and may be I am anyway, but pair Vista with a dual core system and you should have a pretty slick system. If an app wants to go to 100% cpu, then with a dual core system you can probably feel magnanimous. But prior to vista if an app resulted in hard disk grind then even setting the errant process to idle-priority would't be enough (though it generally still helps, from experience). If vista does what I've been lead to understand it does then we are looking at a significant practical (as well as technical) step forward.
Vista probably needs condition variables and a security model that not only panders to 'least-privilege' but is also actually easy to use (window's APIs are so dreadfully awkward and poorly documented, you have to read Raymond Chen's blog to get some clues - at least he writes engagingly). I don't though. Bye.
That's where WinTel and the rise of the 'CIO Culture' coincided. WinTel produced products optimized to make CIOs important, CIOs grew important trying to make WinTel, particularly Windows, work. The Intel part makes gigabucks on supporting each new product, that provides additional demands on computers. (Truly, what do you do now that requires several orders of magnitude more computational power than you did 10 years ago? If you're like most people, running email, word processing, low compexity spreadsheets, simple graphics programs for presentations and the like, I'd assert "not much." Sure we have more glitz, but does anyone think that MS Word now is that much more functional than MS Word 5 was on Windows 95???)
CIOs and Micro$oft have been an evil combination. CIOs gain authority by fielding systems that have some sense of 'business case' but that require expensive tech support staff. Windows moves capabilities away from end users and to CIOs and corporate overhead. End users get stuck with problems that only CIOs can fix, but the CIO -never- has to pay for employee downtime when the computer goes south. In the meantime, the Microsoft monopoly grows, and no CIO gets fired for buying Microsoft, no matter how bad the crap from Redmond is (and there has been some -real crap- from Redmond.)
This clearly started with WinNT's focus on 'the managed user experience' and was obvious to me by 2000. So I'm only surprised it's taken others so long. Geez, and they talk about -Steve Jobs'- reality distortion field!!
dave (they get my Mac when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers, -or- they indemnify me against all of the delay, downtime and inconvenience of the alternatives...)
#2 is wishful thinking.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Where has this guy been? That's been M$'s pattern for a while now.
Power to the Penguin!
Who wants Vista with DRM:ed content and drivers?
Is it you and me or is it one of the worlds worst monopolies who's only interest is your hard earned money?
If you are not a hard gamer are there any reason anymore at all to use this non free and proprietary Microsoft DRM-ed software?
Wake up and liberate yourself!
My thought when seeing those was it was more geared towards potential investors.
... those guys on Wall Street have to take leaks occasionally, right? Let's put our ticker right where they're going to see it!"
The best investor-focused ad I've ever seen was when American Standard started printing their stock ticker symbol next to their name on the top of their urinals.
I guess they just figured "hey
So, everyone else in the universe got to see it, just because someone, somewhere, was hoping that some important trader would see and remember it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Every time you use ext3 Reiser kills a woman.
Please think of the women.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
>there is nothing about Vista that is truly innovative or compelling
Correct. Same was true of XP vs W2K, so what?
> Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users. They 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.'"
1) Msft has never focused on end users. Msft focuses on controlling the standard. Msft is not even shy about this. Bill Gates has said as much.
2) Msft doesn't give a damn about bad publicity. Msft is not even shy about changing formats just for the sake of forcing sales. Practically everybody hates msft, and msft could not care less. Msft wants your money, not your love.
3) Msft doesn't want anybody to be "happy" with their products. With msft it's all about vendor lock-in, network effect, and controlling the standard. Msft makes sales by twisting arms, not by making anybody happy.
Microsoft makes lots of stuff that target home users rather than big business.
Is Media Center fuctionality, bundled as part of Vista, meant to appeal to corporate users or home users?
Is Xbox 360 meant to appeal to coporate users or home users?
Are Windows Movie Maker, WMP, DVD-maker, etc, meant to appeal to coporate users or home users?
Is MSN Messenger meant to appeal to coporate users or home users?
etc.
But it is a fact that big business and small business are the lion's share of *paying* customers, so it makes sense that Microsoft would cater to them.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
What do you expect when everybody is jumping on the lets sue microsoft and get them out of business bandwagon.
"Overall, I think Vista is a gradual evolution of the Windows platform"
I disagree. It's a major evolution of the price from XP to Vista.
Oh right. Vista Home Basic Loser Edition. $99, and it has less features than XP Home edition. That's the free one they give out now if you buy a PC with XP on it. Woot.
Or! Get Ultimate! Every Feature of Windows XP Media Edition, but instead of being $140, it's $400.
But, it has Aero! That means your multimedia PC can have not just 3D dialogs, it goes up past the 4th dimension into the 5th dimension. Up up and away! Woot.
Do you people realize that for the money that MS is charging for XP, you could buy a Mac Mini with OS X included? Oh right. Mentioning that makes me a fanboi. Woot.
Or maybe it's just better to add another gig of memory to XP and use that for 2 more years. Oh right. That makes me a hater. Woot.
I don't mind that MS is evolving Windows. But I'm not going to pay $200-400 to watch it grow.
It's not that. The platform looks to me as a way to cram a DRM'd platform down everybody's throat with no upside as a user.
I mean, why do I want to switch from XP? What does it get me? MS hasn't begun to answer that question.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"No one wants DRM."
That's what you think!
You call killing support for opengl used in solidworks, catia, pro-e, maya and every other xyz cad/cam/cae program making your enterprise customers happy? I hope every one of those seats switches to Linux or MacOSX. Take a look at these benchmarks of WinXP vs Vista
Apple calls it a new point version. M$ calls it a service pack to an existing OS. But whatever you call it, it's about the same level of incremental upgrade, released on about the same schedule.
The main diff is that Apple charges for these incremental updates, and M$ doesn't.
Ironic, isn't it....
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
... there is nothing about Vista that is truly innovative or compelling; there's no transformational, gotta-have-it feature in Vista.That's because you're not part of the *IAA cartel. If you were, you'd be pissing your pants in excitement over Windows Vista.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
You forget one big thing... the Internet happened largely because of Microsoft. Hostile traffic from the Internet (made popular by cheap, easy to use computers) was practially invented to attack Windows. They're the first line for every single new security threat in IT today, for the most part (Cisco is coming into this position, now), so it's a bit tough to respond when whole new kinds of crime are being invented specifically to target only your product. Nobody, including Microsoft, could have forseen the amount of absolute shit that is being generated by assholes in the general population (spam, worms, etc.). I think the sheer amount of "hostile" traffic online has taken *everybody* by surprise.
I don't respond to AC's.
See tags for this negative article on Linux. Slashdot's anti-Microsoft prejudice is pathetic.
But remember, this is in the context of an expensive upgrade. This is not a few patches to an existing system.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but the "largest enterprise customers" are end users. They are not all end users, but they are end users nonetheless.
Actually the "largest enterprise customers" aren't the end users, the end users are the enterprise employees that have to use the system they are given to use. I doubt the actual end users decide what system to get, more than likely it's the IT department or some executive that makes the decision on what to buy.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Windows Vienna, their next planned OS, is going to use .NET entirely, and sandbox native code. No programs will be allowed to run with more than "anonymous" access unless they're verifiable, and the only programs allowed to run with administrator rights will be ones signed by a large company approved by the VeriSign cartel.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Before the internet exploded into popularity the majority of businesses used LANs and the majority of home users had sandboxed services like Prodigy, if anything. In short, before the internet exploted into popularity this issue didn't exist.
... they implemented everything they could think of to enable what truely was useful functionality, with little or no regard for security. The Win95 and IE teams take some of the largest blame, and because they were so focused on home scenarios and not corporate scenarios they were considerably more oblivious than the NT folks.
.NET environment has a similar record of security, however the moment you p/invoke to native code you introduce yourself to the same old world of legacy code and legacy issues where tradeoffs are required between compatability and secure design.
This doesn't absolve Microsoft from the blame for what they did
Microsoft's success in building a product that home users wanted and in embracing (even if late) the internet is exactly what led to the security of windows being exposed as an abomination. The fact is, if you put millions of copies of AmigaOS, or some old Mac OS, onto the internet and everybody seriously used them - they too would fall apart because they weren't built with the security threats of the internet in mind. Microsoft is trying to rectify that now and has been for years; and I don't think anyone can seriously say that they haven't improved by leaps and bounds - whether or not they've improved enough is another matter (really, you can never improve enough on this front.)
Sun build Java years later after the internet was a fairly well understood concept. They had the benefit of creating a new environment with absolutely no need for backward compatability and as a result were able to build something far more secure. The fact that Java apps, by their very nature, don't need the same level of access to system resources as typical native applications made this task simpler. Microsoft's
LUA/UAC represents a very large effort, one of the largest chunks of work shipping in Vista, to significantly improve the situation. It's not as easy for microsoft as forcing users to run as non-admin, they also needed to make existing applications and user-expected behavior actually work in this environment. They need to overcome years of application development with the assumption that users are running as admin, years that date back to well before the internet sprung into the minds of the average user.
Right. So if everyone now makes games for the Mac instead of Windows we'll have a 'home OS' and a 'work OS'. That separates home from work a bit more, which is better for all of us.
-- Cheers!
Back in high school my first exposure to programming was MacBasic on Mac Pluses. My recollection of it was that it was very user friendly--it adhered to the Mac interface, and if you had a programming error it would not only identify which line it was, but what specifically the compiler was choking on.
Next term they'd been replaced with MS Basic. Its idea of informing you of errors was the line number and "Syntax error" or something similarly vague and useless to a programmer still getting his feet wet. At the time I had no idea why the change was done, but it was definitely not appreciated.
Until then I had no opinion of Microsoft either way, but after using MS Basic my opinion of them soured, and it's been downhill with them ever since.
Then I found out MacBasic had been killed as part of a deal Apple made with Microsoft. Big surprise.
It will probably also take away some of the shine from OS X as Vista is a good step forward, too.
Activation and WGA are forcing me to leave Windows behind and switch to Macs. While I believe in innocence before guilt MS believe I should have to prove my innocence.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Apparently it "starts your wow" whatever that means :D
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The author of TA sounds like a textbook case of burnout to me.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
That was as far as I wanted to go at this point. The stark reality about Vista is that driver support is minimal at best. Rather shocking considering XP had drivers for much more hardware. I'm really curious if anyone knows why driver support is so minimal at this time. Does the consumer version have more? If not, all of the people who bought Vista are in for an uncharacteristic surprise.
Is the lack of drivers a conspiracy to get people to upgrade hardware?
Why are the hardware vendors so far behind supplying drivers?
There are a lot of different answers for this. Let's start from the top:
Microsoft completely rewrote the entire audio stack in Vista. Top to bottom, boom, all gone. They had to do this... audio drivers were responsible for a sizable percentage of all total kernel panics in XP. The whole structure was rickety at best... third-party ASIO drivers had to be provided to get decent performance in audio authoring applications like Propellerhead's Reason, and it has also been quite common for desktop apps like Winamp to use DirectX to play audio instead of the regular sound API. Latency and reliability were two serious weak points with Windows audio.
The new audio driver infrastructure puts most of the driver code in userland instead of in the kernel, and some new memory mapping techniques have been introduced that allow the usermode audio driver to access the audio card's DMA buffers directly. This gets around the user->kernel data transition that used to be required for playing audio. Being in usermode also means that the OS can recover gracefully from an audio driver failure... it can restart the driver, report the failure to Microsoft (who then takes those reports and whaps the responsible hardware vendor over the head with it), and continue playing sound. There are other benefits to the new architecture, too, like being able to support per-application volume controls, and a plugin architecture for supporting different types of audio effects.
There was another problem -- before Vista, there was NO STANDARD for writing audio drivers. Microsoft couldn't provide an out-of-the-box class driver that could reliably play sound on a wide range of audio cards... Creative had the last de-facto standard with "Soundblaster 16", but even Creative has abandoned that in favour of their proprietary Audigy stuff. Now you might go, "but what about AC97?"... AC97 was poorly implemented most of the time, and there has never been a way for a single driver to run all those chips. A lot of custom software is required... if you've ever seen an audio UI in Windows that looked like it'd been beaten from birth, it was probably there to support AC97. Granted, some parts of the AC97 standard got better over time (like introducing jack detection support), but a lot of the implementations were still basically ass on a stick.
Intel introduced the Intel High Definition Audio standard a few years ago, which is a much better-defined system and is a lot more insistent on high-quality output. Most audio solutions created now (with the notable exception of Creative) support Intel HD Audio. Windows Vista comes with a class driver for it, which means that any audio device that is built on this standard will work without any third-party drivers. Microsoft is really pushing this, too... they've made it a requirement for OEMs to include audio solutions that don't require additional drivers in order to get the Windows Vista Capable logo.
This is GOOD. This means that we're no longer beholden to audio driver manufacturers to keep writing new drivers for their older stuff. Unfortunately, this is also why a lot of older audio chips don't work in Vista... in some cases, the companies just don't want to put the effort into it, and in other cases, the companies are GONE.
Microsoft begged and pleaded with manufacturers to get on board, so that their pre-IHD devices would be supported in Vista. Some did, some didn't. Some are still working on it. Some have
"-Security's a problem? Let's create something that will let us blame the user. (UAC)"
Yeah! That's slashdot's job.
"-Games going to other OSs are a problem? Let's rewrite an incompatable DX10."
Well it's certainly not going to Linux or MacOSX. You must be thinking consoles. No DX was rewritten because GPU architecture is changing. No more dedicated pixel, and vertex pipelines. Now you just have more general units that can do pixel, vertex, and physics.
"-Third party drivers for video crads are crashing our driver model? Let's just gimp the third parties so that they can't and do it ourselves. (Bonus for gimping OpenGL.)"
Most people use the OpenGL that their video card maker provides.
"-GUI/useability is a problem? Let's just slice and dice some Linux and OS X elements."
Uh, huh.
One of M$'s largest enterprise customer is Hollywood. So, if you meant DRM by screwing the home users, it fits the big picture.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Anyone else thought the headline read:
Vista Indicates Shit in Microsoft's Priorities
?
Go ahead, I won't tell anyone. Just remember, that after you have tried your favorite distro for 30days and continue to use it you are legally obliged to A: have sex with me if you are an attractive female or B: provide one C: A picture of one D: roll a female blood elf and talk dirty to me.
Offcourse you could not do that, but that would the PSA on your ass (Penquin Software Alliance), they are killers.
Or to put another way, the poster you commented to doesn't want to BUY the wrong Vista version and then have to pay yet more to get the correct version. With linux, he don't need to pay and he can try whatever version he wants for free for as long as he wants. Oh and more easily since quite a few disto's are now burn and play.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The average computer user doesn't even know what Windows IS. Windows makes their computer operate, but for all they know it's their Word Processor.
The average computer user gets Windows installed on their new PCs, and it just goes.
Businesses tend to understand that they have choices. And can weigh those choices. And may actually be better served or at least served the same by other choices.
Who are you going to try to keep happy?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
It took them 6 years because Win32 is a horrible spaghetti code mess. And since all their attention is how to handle that gargantuan API, it is getting increasingly difficult to focus their attention on issues like security and the UI.
And this conclusion is incredibly sad for CS and IT, given the large percentage of PhD graduates they hire.
The only sane thing for them is to make a new Windows version totally from scratch, and with a programming language other than C, for safety and security reasons; then run Windows code inside an emulator.
Stupid ad campaign or not, it made one good point; how much of the modern world would be possible without plastic? It isn't seen as a very glamorous material, and yet it's a mindbogglingly essential component of mass production which would be impossible to replace without redesigning the whole system (and I doubt that anything else would be anything like as good a substitute).
Let's be honest; from that point-of-view, if we suddenly had to stop using plastics, we'd be in serious trouble. A computer made without using plastics, down to the lowest level?
I think that modern materials (and their development) are so unseen that they get virtually no consideration from a mainstream- and even geek- audience. After all, do you know how reliant that new toy or neat gadget is upon some smart new material that was only developed in the past 10 years?
TDK's new coating for hi-def discs (which may well make them far more usable) is probably the most prominent example, but I'm sure there are countless unsung heroes which don't get as much publicity.
1. Somebody who probably won't openly pay for a Windows OS but will probably use it if it's bundled in with their new PC.
2. If the end user can easily get a pirated version of Windows, they probably will do rather than paying for it.
3. End users like games so if you can tie in DirectX versions to specific Windows environments, you force them to upgrade their hardware and software when games start appearing that they can no longer play.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
hey 'now seemingly make many decisions based on these two things: 1. Avoiding negative publicity (especially about security and software quality) 2. Making sure the largest enterprise customers are happy.'"
and Damned if you don't!
Everyone used to say, MS keeps adding features and not taking care of security, now someone is complaining that it isn't the other way around. Just makes me want to laugh.
This important msg was brought to you by the Microsoft astroturfing department.
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--
"In essence Vista is what 2000 was supposed to be and XP almost was"
No, in essence Vista is a poor copy of OS X from April 2005. And in essence any modern Linux desktop provides the same functionality.
XGL Desktop for Linux
http://youtube.com/watch?v=lawkc3jH3ws
Berl 3D Window
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpIhoLzDOTY
Beryl demo on Linux
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpybBKdcUQw
Looking Glass on Ubuntu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjQ4Nza34ak
was: So what? (Score:4, Insightful ?)
davecb5620@gmail.com
the bigger picture is that over 100k people's gotta eat!
if there is no release of new software, there's no food on the table.
it's the same deal with slashdot's site.
the old site did its job fine.
You're the ONLY one who got it, or at least posted that way.
Vista Comparisons Yeah, REAL informative.
Here's another example of one of my gripes using that cart that a "trained monkey" can use: it looks like only "Home deluxe" and "Ultimate" allow the burning of DVDs, so if I want to burn a Fedora DVD, I need those versions of Vista.
Anyway, you got the point unlike the parent.
The history of computing, up until Vista, has been mostly trying to make computer *work*, and work better. We're still not really there yet, because if you were to go up to anyone on the street and ask, "Does your computer work well enough yet, can you actually do what you want with it?" the answer would generally be "No," or at best, a qualified "Yes."
For the first time in a widely-deployed software product, Vista has had extensive work done to make it *not work*. That's really what DRM and SPP are, parts of the system that at "appropriate times" make the system not work, or work in a degraded fashion. Argue all you want about the philosophy of DRM and SPP, and even if you agree with those precepts, you must also agree that they are present in order to degrade the machine's operation.
Now if we can't really make a computer "work right" in the first place, what sort of hubris is at work to make us think that we can add software to make it "quit working right," and have that work right, too?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Another bash M$/Vi$ta article on /. What the fuck is this, Digg?
On the whole I agree with you, but:
Install IIS by default and make it listen to requests from everywhere? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if everyone had their own little web server thingy running on their desktop so they could share their Word documents with other people in the office?
IIS doesn't install by default on any desktop Windows OS since at least Win2k, and I don't remember having it installed under NT, either. IIS isn't even available for XP Home, and won't be available for the Home editions of Vista below Home Premium. Even on Home Premium it won't be installed by default.
UPnP on by default? Of course! Everybody's on the LAN, and wouldn't it be cool if you just plugged the computer into the LAN, and it automatically knew about the printer down the hall.
I can't speak for any other version (and I do remember an early UPnP exploit when XP was released), but on XP Pro SP 2 at least UPnP is on but firewalled off by default. You have to explicitly open a hole in the firewall to discover UPnP devices on the network.
Now, this is available (to admins) by clicking a link right there in the explorer window (when you're browsing the Neighbourhood Network), although it asks you if you're sure, so it's not hard to disable the protection. However, it's not entirely true to say that UPnP is on by default, at least not any more, as while it's on, it's not accessible.
Oh, and it *is* cool to be able to plug stuff into a LAN and have it find each other automatically. It's just a shame that there are too many arseholes in the world for it to be entirely safe.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Cisco's iPhone trademark dates to 1996, when it originated within Infogear Technology. The iPod dates to 2001. The iMac dates to 1998.
Now, it's true that Cisco wasn't being very protective of the name and may have failed to protect it by legal standards. They may have renamed the Linksys CIT series solely to try to keep the rights to the trademark, and may have failed to do that.
It's clear, though, that in 1996 the iPod and iMac had no influence on the cell phone, IP phone, or even the MP3 player markets. Unless someone within Infogear Technologies was a rival to Einstein and Hawking, there was no way to speculate that the iMac, iPod, then iPhone would come out of Apple over the course of a decade. To run a business on such speculation would likely be suicide anyway.
Maybe Infogear, and now Cisco (or maybe the Cisco of the future) had/has/will have an iTimeMachine, but Occam's Razor suggests coincidence over John Connor coming back to stop Skynet and discussing Apple's product lines with Bob Marshall and/or Sandy Lerner.
The focus shift of MS is a reaction, I assume, of the competition with Linux and other open source operation systems. These OS have a large impact on companies (i.e. Peugeot migrating 20000 machines, cities switching it Linux like Munich and Vienna). At the same time the impact on private user is not as big right now, because people fear to migrate to Linux or Macs. This fear is in most cases diffuse and can disapate when the people start thinking about their feeling.
So I conclude. MS act that way because they try to defend their standing in business applications. At the same time they think they can neglect the private users because they won't switch that easily. But this can be a problem. As right now a lot of people are refusing to switch to Vista. And if you look at the profit-chart of MS in OS business. It had its peek with Win95/Win98 and then it dropped over WinME bringing a sidewards movement. This is caused be slow migration from old to new computers, as people switch from Win98/ME to WinXP when they buy new computers.
The same thing will happen to Vista. And as companies are the key figures in such migration process MS is focusing on them.
The main diff is that Apple charges for these incremental updates, and M$ doesn't.
This has been beaten to death by just about everyone, but since you've been in a closet and missed the discussion - service packs are repairs and bug fixes. Those are free on both platforms (10.3.1, 10.3.2, 10.3.3, XP SP1, XP SP2, etc.) These are also separate from security updates - which both vendors release roughly monthly.
10.n upgrades are additions, new APIs, changes to functionality of code - not just bug fixes. They're like the XP-Vista upgrade. Apple charges a mere $129 for those, while Microsoft charges $399, though in their defense, they only release one every 6 years.
Am I the only one that simply CANNOT read something if there's a constantly looping and annoying ad RIGHT NEXT to the article? Makes me hate the site, the author, and not care about the content of the article or the ad. Poor poor marketing.
needless to say, I didn't read the article and have now lost interest.
sorry. had to vent. carry on.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
MS obviously worshipped the porcelain goddess, er, I mean Big Media, and inserted all that DRM that Linux, et al doesn't have, so Big Media's products will be available on Vista and no other, thinking that consumers will stick with Vista because of that (many will, regardless of the lack of quality of the products). I think many game producers will support *nix if/when the numbers are high enough, but MPAA/RIAA will resist regardless because of DRM/lack of vision/imagination.
What will get me to upgrade to Vista? An application some day that I absolutely need to run, which won't run on XP, but will on Vista. Until that day, I plan to stay with XP as long as possible in the weak hope that Vista will become so hated that MS will have to remove some of its worst excesses.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I wouldn't sweat the lack of "gotcha' features. Before 10.3, Apple's OS X was rather dull and before 10.2, it had a lot of rough edges. With 10.4, Apple got to the point where adding "gotcha" features was easy. Vista is roughly at the 10.1 or 10.2 stage. Time will demonstrate whether Microsoft can get to a point where they can bring in some clever innovations. The ability of Vista to use a flash drive to speed up virtual memory demonstrates that they can. Those who've used it say it speeds up applications quite a bit and it's something Apple has yet to announce for OS X. Mac users need to harass Apple about that. Copying should be a two-way street.
The focus on enterprise customers is a more serious problem. It parallels my gripe with Adobe about InDesign. In design work, the big guys are newspapers and graphics-rich four-color magazines. InDesign enhancements have focused on their needs and not the more mundane needs of small publishers like myself. Forget a category of client, and you can loose those clients. But even there, Microsoft will be forced to change or see its small and home business clients migrate to Macs (and yet more servers to Linux). That would give Macs a better selection of business-related software and that software might, in turn, open doors in larger and larger businesses.
Competition is good. Apple and Linux are both positioned to keep Microsoft from getting too fat and happy or, if it does, to keep Microsoft from dominating a market it's taken for granted.
For the last several years, the single biggest end-user complaint about MS operating systems has been security (or lack thereof). Now they release an operating system with a concerted security focus and the criticism is that MS is no longer focuses on end-users? It seems to me that they've been focused on end-users to a fault.
Let's all tag this "microsoftbashing" and move on, shall we?
Actually, the Windows Update (or is that Microsoft Update?) in Vista no longer runs inside IE.
Also, Automatic Updates on XP doesn't (as far as I know) use ActiveX or IE.
"His opinion is that Microsoft has stopped focusing on end users."
Microsoft NEVER focused on end users, corporate users, or any OTHER users.
Microsoft has always, solely and forever been focused on extracting as much money as possible from EVERYONE for the personal benefit of one Bill Gates.
As the song says, "And nothing else matters..."
This is why security has NEVER been an issue for Microsoft. Security does not make Bill any more money (until he can sell a fake copy of it back to you with Live Care, of course.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
How many of us here noticed one peculiar thing with the new windows versions. Remote desktop... used to be free download. Download it now, doesnt seem to work on Vista (unless you buy the business version). The same is true for Media Player and several other apps. They are selling the OS in several versions but each "better" version simply contains more of the things we already have for free now. Is anyone else bitter about being sold things they already have?
Truly, what do you do now that requires several orders of magnitude more computational power than you did 10 years ago? If you're like most people, running email, word processing, low compexity spreadsheets, simple graphics programs for presentations and the like, I'd assert "not much."Sure we have more glitz, but does anyone think that MS Word now is that much more functional than MS Word 5 was on Windows 95???
You've never heard of document collaboration I take it? Where have you been for the last 10 years?
CIOs gain authority by fielding systems that have some sense of 'business case' but that require expensive tech support staff.
And unix/linux doesn't? I take it you've never configured LDAP.
Gee, I remember being tech editor for a POSIX standard 15 years ago and being quite efficient at collaborating to produce that document across the country. Other POSIX standards that I contributed to (as a reviewer) were developed across the world. It -is- nice that Word provides diff marks, but we had those in Scribe and troff 20 years ago...
And yes I've configured LDAP, on OS X Server. It wasn't the easiest thing I've done (but it's a lot easier than configuring PKI certificates).
Note that LDAP != Microsoft Active Directory.
dave
There are millions of people who use Linux. These millions do not think it sucks.
This is my story.
Once upon a time in year 2000, when the office I do computer haltura at, did not have a CD writer yet, I tested a purchased Linux distribution that was made by a small company from a neighbouring country by developers from another neighbouring country. This distro was very unstable and sucked big time. Adding to that, I managed to render a particular hard drive's MBR unusable, because I didn't know how the GRUB bootloader worked at the time (v0.53 or v.0.57 or something). I later had to go through a very long and boring MBR recovery process with Windows Me. That distribution had a 2.2.14 kernel, KDE 2 and was RPM-based.
After this incident, I was very disappointed with Linux and dropped the idea of using it.
In late 2004, one old computer's hard drive with Windows started showing bad blocks, i.e. failing. Since I had a spare hard drive that I did not use, the same one, where I tried the distro with that 2.2.14 kernel, I tested the hard drive with its manufacturer's tools, the tools found out that the drive was usable and fine and I installed Debian on it. That install help was thanks to the great Debian #IRC channel. Their support is very good and quite free. They actually helped me go through the installation process of Debian 3.0. I think at the same time of Autumn 2004, I burned myself a Knoppix 3.6 LiveCD and since it was a LiveCD, I think it may also have sparked my interest.
I got the hard drive back to that old computer in Spring of 2005 and from then on I learned and used Linux for over a year, until I moved and lost the net connection in mid-2006. For about a month or two in that Spring of 2005, I had to get used to using the console and learned a few ropes of it in Linux, until I got X working with the great help of Debianistas.
During that yearlong time, and also with the help of mostly friendly people (once you learn to know them better) who frequent the Debian IRC channel, I slowly became one of the millions of people who realized that after all, Linux didn't suck and many things were way better and more convenient in console (knowledgably editing a config file and making things work) than with any graphical frontend in X. Of course, the computer's resources were very limited, so it was just more reasonable to make changes in console than with unreasonably resource-intensive graphical frontends in X. Perhaps the best part was that I could otherwise in X browse the net, IM and even work within the limited resources that I had. I guess trying free, new and different possibilities was a very liberating process.
At the time of moving, I had problems with more data gathering on the hard disk, probably a log file, but I couldn't resolve the issue, because I moved to a new place. Had I not moved out of my old place into a new place with no Internet, I would have probably solved the issue, with the help of people at #debian.
There are millions of other people who will try Linux but coming from a Windows perspective. The majority of these millions will give up. Linux is not for them because they have to learn something different. They do not have the right attitude - the attitude that they may have to learn something. Some, however, will stick with it.
Concur. Linux is indeed nice once people actually learn to use it. People who think that Linux sucks are those that are not really familiar with it and I do admit that it requires a good learning curve for this. People who think that Linux does not suck, are usually those that have been raised with it or who have dedicated their time to familiarize themselves to it.
Perhaps the real problem is that the people who could learn to use Linux (or any other *NIX), have learned not to study by the time they have reached their adult life and reached a certain educational milestone (a degree in some discipline or field, for example).
Since there are