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Microsoft Claims a Billion Windows Installs by End of 2008
eldavojohn writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claimed yesterday that there will be a billion machines running Windows within a year. 'The install base of Windows computers this coming 12 months will reach 1 billion. If you stop and just think about that, parse that for a second, by the end of our fiscal year '08, there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles, which is at least to me kind of a mind-numbing concept.'"
They are the McDonald's of software
Indeed.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
How is this possible? Do that many people even have access to a computer?
Yeah, he's probably right... if you include all the vm's we run to sandbox stuff...
J
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
Does that include reinstalls?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Are they counting pirated copies?
ST. PETERSBURG - WarezOv Industries announced today a new initiative in partnership with Microsoft that promises to put shared web hosting on every desktop.
"With Microsoft's help, we have brought web hosting services to nearly one billion PCS across the Internet," announced WarezOv CEO dRO0m@t. "Windows allows us the opportunity to bring value-add to the customer."
WarezOv's suite of administration tools allows easy management of all aspects of web hosting, including DNS, mail services and -- most important -- failover. "By tapping into Window's remote API calls, WarezOv's tools can scale web hosting to nearly any degree, and make it easy for the hoster as well," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "This -- and their tool's ease of install -- is what Windows is all about."
Free Software Foundation president and founder Richard M. Stallman was unavailable for comment. "He's talking to Google about building something similar for GNU/Linux," said a source close to Stallman.
Carousel is a lie!
No chairs were harmed in the making of this press release.
At the bottom of the
American billion, I suppose == Rest-of-the-world-milliard. Anything else would REALLY be mind-numbing. Imagine two hundred Windows installs per earth inhabitant...
A Microsoft billion. They use a similar system to calculate the amount of time remaining when installing a .msi.
I think that the average household has more Unix systems running for them than Windows. For example - I know for sure that my DVD player and my ADSL modem have Linux running in them. My TV, phones, etc - frankly no idea. Maybe some Unix too, maybe something else. But I heard that this thing runs them most: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project
Yeah, desktop is still important but with things like these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC gaining momentum I hope Windows will be further sliding into irrelevancy.
I'm not talking XP and Vista either.
I'm talking when a company buy a PC and has a corporate version of Windows XP (no activation req'd)
That means MS gets:
-one license for the PC leaving the store/reseller
and
-one when the company buys a corporate license for that PC.
Therefore MS get a 2-for-1 deal, everytime!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Let me see... I had to reinstall Windows 12 times on my son's computer, 8 times on my Wife's computer, 5 times on my computer at work, 15 times on my dad's computer, and so on....
Yeah, I can see how Microsoft can claim 1 billion installs - let's see them filter it out to "unique computers" and see where that number goes.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Not sure why that's so mind-numbing. I personally own more computers than I do cars, and I have my laptop from work. Two out of my three machines are Windows.
I'm sure most of us work in environments where computers outnumber people. And, I'm sure the back-room infrastructure of most IT departments consists of a fair number of machines doing various things. (And, any sufficiently large organization is gonna have at least one IT department/location.) Hell, I bet Microsoft and Google combined have several hundred thousand machines if not more.
Now, I have no idea of how they estimated this 1 billion machines, but I don't find it a surprising number at all -- I bet my office of 50 people has well over 100 computers running Windows, and we're one office in a multi-national corporation.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What they're counting is the number of times WGA pops up to confirm that your copy of Windows is valid.
....
.... you like using the computer you paid for right? We'll fix you good if you don't comply."
It's just retarded how many times that fucking thing pops up.... Microsoft wants to double quadruple check or something....
User: "but you already checked!!!"
MS: "yes and we're going to check again, bend over please
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Give it up. When I was at primary school in England in the mid-70's, the definition of a billion as 10^12 was already obsolete.
When the British government announces that they've spend a billion on this or squandered a billion on that, everybody knows they mean 10^9. It doesn't occur to anybody younger than eighty that they might mean 10^12.
You might have had a point in 1940. Now you're just being an arse. Hang on, is that you dad?
Just think of the energy savings if they had made it the black screen of death.
They already have 1 billion Windows installations in China, all with the same activation key.
Add number of instance licenses sold
to maximum population estimates of site license holders
to the highest out-of-thin-air web or internally reported estimate of unlicensed instances
add the results of rolling some chicken bones
Repeat until your number sounds psychologically significant.
But all that's ok. McDonalds still has them beat in the meaningless BS accounting department. They gave up at "Billions and Billions Served" though you can occasionally find one with a number in front of the billions. All things considered, i'd rather have the big mac than windows.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I guess I can agree with most of what you say, but I am puzzled by this statement:
d) There's still nothing in Unix that has the same handy role as a Graphics Device Context.
X does have Graphics Contexts and toolkits obviously build upon those as they see fit. It's a pretty standard part of a GUI these days, anyways. Perhaps you are annoyed that in X, the graphics context does exactly what it's supposed to...store graphics contextual information, rather than be a catch-all way to do graphics operations. Of course, then again, you can use the same graphics context with multiple drawables (windows, pixmaps) rather than having the GC be tied to one and only one drawable. I personally find the X system far more flexible than the Windows system, and not particularly more difficult to use or understand.
What I was talking about though, was that a DC in Windows is device independent. So, in Windows you can have the same set of code for printing as you do for display rendering. I think that's pretty nifty. And, Windows Metafiles too, were interesting. Had Microsoft been smart, they could have built a browser around a WMF hacked up to have hyperlinks. They had all the pieces in place as early as 1992, but, they just didn't see the application.
This is my sig.
You've obviously never worked in tech support, or you'd know that You Must Never Say "hit".
"Press control, which is usually at the bottom left of the keyboard, yes that would be left for you, not me, and keep on holding the control key down while you with the same hand press down the key marked "ALT", which is usually two steps over to the right, and keep on holding down that too, and no, you should not have left go of the control key when pressing the alt key, yes you really need to press both at the same time, no, and holding them down, because now you need to hit Delete, which is in the general top right area of the keyboard... Hello? Hello? You hit it? Erm, how hard? Yes, I know I said you should hit it, and I am very sorry. We will come out to you with a new keyboard, and again, we are very sorry for causing this problem for you, Sir.
From TFA
4 0206
"The software giant announced it sold 60 million copies of Windows Vista this year, more than the entire installed base of Apple,"
From http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/23/18
"According to Net Applications, in June Windows Vista accounted for 4.52% of all systems that browsed the Web, up from January's 0.18%. Vista has grown its usage share each month since its release to consumers Jan. 30, hitting 0.93% in February, 2.04% in March, 3.02% in April and 3.74% in May. Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X, meanwhile, accounted for 6.22% in January and hit its high point of 6.46% in May, but it slipped back to 6% in June. If Vista's uptake trend continues, it should pass Mac OS X in Web usage share by the end of August."
Are we to believe all these Vista installs are simply not browsing the web?
-- Boycott Shell
"more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles"
Why is this supposed to be surprising? A lot of people don't have cars.
There are peoples in cities, who have taxis, buses, subways, trains, carpooling, bikes, legs, etc.
There are people in the countryside, farms etc, who may not have need of a car because they walk or use animals on their land.
There are teens and college students everywhere who are likely to have a computer and not yet have a vehicle.
If anything, that car analogy makes the numbers seem a lot less staggering.
"if only i had known i would have been a locksmith." -albert einstein
A few years ago, I saw an IBM analysis that estimated more than 1 billion device are running Linux (mostly cell phones and routers).
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Had a dollar for everything I've heard that one he'd be as rich as Bill Gates.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
To me, none of those things are the hallmark of a good operating system. MS has coded some nice things into their OS on a higher level, but the underlying OS itself is terrible. OpenGL doesn't make an OS. Remote desktop doesn't make an OS. Good APIs, good scheduling, good timesharing, good fault tolerance, good response, good hardware support (ok, Windows has this at least), good networking, good filesystem, good caching strategy, etc... THOSE are the things that make an OS good. Windows might be a good windowing system, but IMO it's a terrible OS because it fails to provide the basics at a really good quality level, with really good performance.
Windows NT Crashes, Leaving U.S.S. Yorktown Dead in the Water
Ha!
to McDonalds. When was the last time you had a Big Mac? It may not be the most nutritious thing in the world, but at least it's TASTY. I have eaten many an XP installer CD, and I can assure you it is neither.
Ok, please explain to me, what is wrong with Windows scheduling, timesharing, fault tolerance, response, file system and networking. It seems to provide those very nicely, and any developer can tap into those features as well. Be specific, repeating your statement doesn't make it true.
Huh? What have you been smoking? May I have some of it?
Would you care to state why you think he's so wrong rather than making ad hominem attacks?
I like Linux a lot -- I use it as my primary development environment at work, even -- but I have to agree that, despite any other problems it may have, XP's remote desktop is much easier to use than forwarding X connections. Under Linux I have to start up an SSH connection to another computer, enable X forwarding, then figure out the command line to execute whatever GUI I'm interested in. If you actually want to use your desktop environment on that computer, you'll get to jump through some other hoops to make it play nicely with your desktop on your current computer. In XP, you just establish a remote desktop connection to whatever computer you're interested in, and poof, you're connected with full GUI access.
You can accomplish something similar in Linux with VNC, but that doesn't actually let you log in to a new session, you just take control of an existing X session. It's also much more bandwidth intensive than XP's RDP; you can use RDP over even a dial-up connection. VNC is an exercise in patience and watching windows redraw.
X has its advantages, but easier? No, sir, what are you smoking?
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Under Linux I have to start up an SSH connection to another computer, enable X forwarding,
Uhh.. what? Why did you have to bring SSH tunneling into it. You could say exactly the same about terminal server.
Under X the simplest is to go to the terminal, select the machine you want to log into and log into it. It's 100% transparent and runs at native speed. This has worked perfectly for 20 years plus. Or you can log in locally and multiple machines on the same desktop just by setting an environment variable (or a script which runs by clicking, which is easier) - and they run exactly as if you'd run them on the local machine again at full speed. Windows just can't do anything like this.
That whole paragraph about figuring stuff out and configuring is just FUD - have you ever even *tried* to use X remotely? 'command line to execute whatever gui you're interested in'? WTF?? Your GUI is already running on your local machine.
X works fine over dialup - it is *designed* to work over slow connections... when it was written that was all they had.
There's also a lot of bad stuff in windows, which is what is being dismissed. Meanwhile, you are too quick to dismiss linux:
_ and_Direct3D for some background).
a) but linux has ssh, which is far easier than having to remote desktop in to do most tasks. Forcing users to run a full GUI to copy a file is terrible design.
b) and windows 95 borrowed heavily from Mac OS and OS/2. Vista is borrowing heavily from OSX and Beryl/Compiz. Not an argument.
c) see b) above.
d) the power of X11 comes from a separation between what is being drawn and the hardware involved; remote X11 connections are just an instance of this. GDI is a different way of abstracting that information. Besides, regular users don't care *how* it's being drawn.
e) From it's inception, directX was considered inferiour to openGL by all of the big gaming houses. DirectX's popularity is a product of marketing. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenGL
f) it is now 2007, and linux is far ahead of windows in hardware discovery, and with a few exceptions doesn't even require you to install drivers (now where's the win98 driver floppy for my printer?).
g) you haven't used adept or any of the other modern package managers, clearly. I can install thousands of packages with just a few clicks (and then walk away to have a coffee), or a single command line if I prefer. Windows still requires manual downloading, inserting CDs, clicking through msis and installshields, manual dependency resolution, manual package updating... Kubuntu has a "new package notifier" in the system tray that will not only tell me what OS components need updating, but also which games/office suites/perl modules/utilities/etc can be updated, and which still gives me complete control over what I want to install.
Your FUD is several years out of date. Please try a modern linux distro and come back with some valid complaints.
a) Yup, I'll give you that.
b) Sure, that's correct, however, I wouldn't say that the start bar is still technically superior to Gnome's or KDE's.
c) Ah, but GDI is no longer hardware accelerated, and WMF is resource hungry for general computing use.
d) Can't speak to this, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
e) Ok, that isn't a statement of something Windows does better. Just a statement of popularity.
f) Closed the gap in hardware discovery? You're stating that Windows was superior 12 years ago. That should tell you something. Have you used Ubuntu? It discovers everything perfectly for me. Vista still won't recognize my onboard SATA, onboard NIC, Linksys Wireless card, or Promise Raid Controller without drivers and excessive rebooting. Good thing my network card drivers are available on the internet...
g) Completely incorrect for most purposes. Common software is available in repositories and available instantly with a search and two clicks. No restart, and installed in your menu in a manner that makes sense. Yes, many power users do work off of svn (easier in Linux than windows) or compile their own apps (easier to do on Linux again).
The television will not be revolutionized.
"...there's really no open source offering that comes remotely close to...SQL Server 2005"
+5 Funny, anyone?
a) Windows XP remote desktop is easier to deal with than X remoting.
I have to respectfully disagree. Not only does remotely using X offer far more flexibility then RDP, I believe it is a better bandwidth user then RDP. It should be noted we shouldn't praise MS for RDP either, their original TS implementation sucked. Citrix licensed their stuff off to MS so MS could make a better product. Look at old TS and compare it with Citrix of that time period, you will see who was the leader.
b) Both KDE and Gnome borrow u/i design heavily from the Windows 95 Start Bar. The concept of COM based shell extensions was looted by KParts.
Ah, but the glory is we are not limited to those two interfaces. WindowMaker, Enlightenment, XFCE, and others offer more ways to use X and in many cases are less overhead then using Gnome or KDE. Not to mention X has allowed you for ages to have multiple desktops, something that was only possible with third party apps for a long time in Windows. You can also heavily customize the UIs to be less Windows like if you want. Besides, isn't the Win 95 Start Bar essentially a rip-off of the Mac Apple?
e) Although I prefer OpenGL for its ease of entry, a lot of big gaming houses seem to prefer DirectX.
Blame MS for this; however, there are plenty of games that will work just fine in Linux. id seems hell bent on continuing to make their games run on Linux. UT2004 worked (and I pray UT3 does as well). Other games using DirectX will work, though some of them can only do so much in Wine and it is somewhat limited to older DX apps. Honestly, if you play that many games you can always dual boot or just stick with Windows. The gaming argument is weak at best.
f) For a long time, Windows lead in hardware discovery. Linux has closed that gap, I think, but in 1995, I was editing config files to get my X to work with my monitor, and Windows would discover both for me automatically.
This is just a poor argument. Tell me how many issues you've had in 2007? I will also say that there is better legacy support in Linux then Windows. I can still find devices that won't install drivers from the base Windows install but can in Linux, even if only well enough for me to get drivers that work well. The gap is practically closed with the largest problem being the quality of some video drivers.
g) It's -STILL- easier to install a new piece of software on Windows. Too easy, the security people will refrain... :-)
Really? Use apt-get or one of the various front-ends available or yum and then tell me this. Both of these do great at handling dependencies and make installations rather painless. Not to mention I do not need to spend hours installing extra software since most of what I need is installed when I install the OS, including IM clients, web browsers (not owned by MS), office applications, etc.
And, in the applications department, there's really no open source offering that comes remotely close to Visual Studio 2005 and C#, SQL Server 2005, and certainly not even Office 2000, let alone newer versions of Office.
Okay. Visual Studio is great if you are building for Windows. How well can you build on other platforms? Not at all. Go figure. KDevelop is actually fairly good and offers most the items that the average developer will probably ever use. Of course, I still prefer writing makefiles and source by hand. I've never been a huge fan of IDEs. As for Office, I must laugh. First, word processing of 2000 compared to either Abiword or OOo is equivalent in all regards. I see no advantage to either, except for the fact that both Abiword and OOo will still be supported long after 2000 is not. I have seen no major issues with Calc compared to Excel and if you are using Access (or Base) for a database, you should really get your head examined. Most database people will tell you that Access is not a good solution for a database and
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Try out a LiveCD of Ubuntu or Kubuntu to see how well your hardware works (which should all work based on what you've said).
/usr/local/lib/codecs/; there is probably an easier way to do this via EasyUbuntu or something like that, but this is how I normally do it) for support for everything ever.
For image editting, on Kubuntu (or any KDE-based distribution really), try out Krita which is a lot more similar to Photoshop than Gimp ever will be. There is also cinepaint for an Aperture-like program.
For video editting, there's Kino and Cinelerra (I don't believe this is in the repository, so installing it isn't as easy as tick the box -> install). There is also Avidemux, but that seems to be more suited for small edits and transcoding videos (GNOME program as well, not that it matters if you don't care about desktop environments).
For office, check out KOffice (faster and better than OpenOffice.org).
For video, you can still use VLC of course, but you can also check out Kaffeine with libxine1-ffmpeg and the win32 codecs (download at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html, get the essential codecs, extract to
If you need more help, you can contact me via Jabber (in profile), or you can go on IRC (Konversation's a good client for that) on Freenode at #kubuntu. There are also the Ubuntu Forums as well as alt.os.linux.ubuntu (for some reason, I can't find the group on Google Groups, but it's available in AT&T's Usenet mirror). The community is very friendly and helpful, so don't be shy!
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Try to run something that uses 100% CPU and then try to do anything else while that happens. What a great scheduler...
I don't have any problems using 100% CPU; when its doing disk operations though there is a slow down, but you have to expect a program hitting the disk that much will slow up other disk operations.
Also, try to fill up your RAM. Kind of hard, isn't it? Windows doesn't seem to think you have as much RAM as you do and starts to swap far too early to be considered useful. This is why people complain about Firefox using $x amount of RAM; Windows starts to swap way too early and causes slowdowns all around.
People complaining that FF uses too much RAM have two issues; one is that the memory used column in Task manager isn't accurate. The second is that there does seem to be a memory leak in FF. As far as swapping goes, i don't see the OS swapping until it is out of physical RAM. Since you want to talk about disk problems though, perhaps you should try Linux an an AMD x2 chip and see what happens.
Try to delete a file that's in use (something you can do in any Unix-like system). File in use? Whoops, can't do that.
Wow, that's the ONE complain about the FS you have? Big deal.. it doesn't let you delete a file in use. The only really ligitimate use of that "feature" is to hide what your program is doing, which a ligitmate process shouldn't need to do anyway.
Also, Windows has jack shit support for more filesystems than their own FAT and NTFS families (both of which get fragmented; modern filesystems prevent that on the fly). Sure, you can get more support via plugins (I believe there are two different ways to make a filesystem plugin for Windows: kernel and shell), but that isn't as reliable as having native support for them. Windows should at least support FFS (fast filesystem, the UNIX/BSD file system of choice for a few decades).
Again, who cares? Ext2 suffers fragmentation as well. The newest NTFS deals with this as well. How many Linux systems go beyond FAT and ext2/3? Not many I'd image. Support is there, sure, but is it useful to the majority of computer users? Nope. Your fringe case when you need more than a few filesystems supported doesn't make Windows a crap OS.
And yet here you are comparing SQL Server to its competition and declaring it to be `amazing'.
This sort of comment is exactly what he's complaining about, and a very good reason for someone without an extensive *x bacground to avoid desktop Linux. You just undid all the goodwill that the previous, very informative reply might have generated.
He isn't a computing n00b. If he wants something comparable to Photoshop, and similarly easy to use, don't smugly point him to a kids' drawing program. Just because a program is arcane and difficult to use (GIMP, although it's *slowly* getting better) doesn't automatically mean it's more powerful. Likewise, just because a user seeks a usable program doesn't mean that user is stupid or doesn't need serious functionality.
Given that Linux users needing support have no alternative but to turn to the community, it's pretty unhelpful when the community is rude and condescending.
You can't have it both ways. Either 1) you want Linux to stay the domain of a few self-satisfied, smug nerds, and accordingly never become important on the desktop, or 2) you need to realize there will be users who are new to Linux but, somehow, nevertheless manage to be smart and competent people.
Perhaps they did it because they didn't want a program running to be using a specific version of a component, have it unloaded and the next time it loads its a newer version.
You're doing something wrong if this is hitting you all the time during development. I've been developing on Windows for 10 years now, and have not had this features impede my development. Its also trivial to find which process is using the file in question; its called FileMon.
It's as if a billion computers all cried out at once in terror and said, "It appears you are being suddenly silenced. Cancel or allow?"
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Actually, the reason why Microsoft is showing such an inflated number of installs is people are buying OEM Vista machines, getting fed the fuck up with the OS, and going out and buying a copy of XP, so MS can double-dip their figures.
1 billion installs isn't that much, especially considering that they're probably including numbers from Windows 386 or DOS forward. It just means that some random guy reinstalled so many times that they're counting 1 billion installs.
Is my food tasty, troll?
+5, Truth
1,000,000,000,000,000 reboots! Is it a zillion after trillions?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
That's not working out so well either.
Idiot. That's a coffee cup holder. No wonder you're having problems.
just as healthy too
Actually, if you have over a 10% negative response rate, the result is generally bad. Les Gibson in "How to be People Smart" says you will be perceived as a negative person that people do not want to deal with or be friends with if you are negative more than 10% of the time. People generally like to be around people that are pleasant and agree with them. You have to build up a bit of positive credit before you can let loose with a "No."
It takes a lot of positive, supportive words and deeds to guide people to do things. Most people collapse very easily in the face of any challenge, negativity, or rudeness. They are typically very brittle about it too- they think and act like they are completely committed but after 10-20 minutes of seriously struggling with something they are done and want to quit and never deal with it again.
While you may relentlessly attack Linux issues, how well do you handle a single social rejection? A single rude comment by a new group of friends? Perhaps a single failure at trying a new activity like dancing or wood-carving. Learning slow dancing was one of the hardest things I've ever done emotionally- Linux doesn't even compare.
Similarly, a person who is trying out Linux can be turned away by a single negative response. Linux is not their passion. They are just mildly interested in it and a surprisingly small amount of rudeness can drive them away.
And there you have Windows, all cuddly and friendly (and Mac- even MORE cuddly and friendly) waiting with open arms for them.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Not only does remotely using X offer far more flexibility then RDP
Where then, in SUSE Linux 10, can I just click on an icon, enter a computer name, and remote desktop in?
Ah, but the glory is we are not limited to those two interfaces.... Not to mention X has allowed you for ages to have multiple desktops, something that was only possible with third party apps for a long time in Windows
Architecturally, Windows has allowed for multiple Window stations and multiple OS personalities since Windows NT. Microsoft never implemented them. Third party developers have. And I wouldn't hold it against MS for buying Citrix technology any more than I would hold it against KDE guys for working with Apple on some things.
This is just a poor argument. Tell me how many issues you've had in 2007?
Actually, in 2007, as I said, Linux has closed the gap. Neither Suse Linux 10 or Windows Server 2003 automatically installed the appropriate driver for my nVidia 6200 AGP on my dual Opteron. On the other hand, Linux utterly fails with my DVD drive, but Windows just plays them. Please don't lecture me about codecs and licensing...at the end of the day, Microsoft pays for it, and Linux writers don't, and I can watch movies on Windows and not on Linux. However, I don't really like to watch movies on my computer, so, for 90% of what I do, Linux is good for me.
And don't even get me started on sound. What sound API should a developer write for these days on Linux, and, does any Linux sound API support hardware accelerated MIDI playback on sound cards, support for sound fonts, and all that other stuff? With Windows, I know there is a layered solution, starting with PlaySound for quick and dirty stuff, then the MCI API for some studio type of stuff, then, there's the lower level mm API for MIDI, and finally DirectX for all sorts of audio playback. With Linux sound, it seems like I fly right into the teeth of KDE vs GNOME and I just lose all hope.
Okay. Visual Studio is great if you are building for Windows. How well can you build on other platforms? Not at all. Go figure. KDevelop is actually fairly good and offers most the items that the average developer will probably ever use
Portability is a religion that not all customers care about. If you are delivering a solution, you are delivering the total package of hardware, OS and language choice. Changing one out would be like asking Ford and GM to make interchangable V8s - a nifty techno trick, but really not all that useful in the real world. To that end, I think Linux does have a lot to offer that Windows doesn't. Off the top of my head, I prefer how Linux mmap works over Windows VirtualAlloc, Linux sockets to Windows sockets, and certainly how the Linux file system works - Windows locking files because they are open is just absurd. But on the other hand I think Windows threading offers more power than Linux threading does. There's a kernel native threadpool, support for the concept of a collection of jobs, and, yeah, I really do like MsgWaitForMultipleObjects.
KDevelop is, I think, better for C++ development than Visual Studio. There are some exceptions - looking at registers in KDevelop is utterly annoying. However, if you haven't done anything serious with Windows Forms in C# in Visual Studio 2005, then you have no idea what you are missing. The intellisense is absolutely godlike compared to KDE or Eclipse. Debugging works really well - the whole "Quickwatch" thing is nice. And finally the refactoring tools are simply rock solid.
As for Office, I must laugh. First, word processing of 2000 compared to either Abiword or OOo is equivalent in all regards
Word feels better. It just does. That matters. Featurewise, OOo is pretty close, as I said, but Word feels better. And besides, 2000 is 7 years ago. Word XP/2003 or whatever the version is before the current release blows OOo out of the water. Still, none feel as good as my old favorite, Lotus WordPro (formerly Samna Ami
This is my sig.
Not just OEM Vista, they are surely including OEM installs of every version of Windows. I own Windows 98 four times over despite the fact that I never wanted or even used it, Windows 95 three times, XP Pro once, and XP Home four times.
that is the biggest problem with the linux community- there are a lot of snob coders that aren't interested in the multimedia/graphics/audio/video/3d_development side of computing and put it down all of the time. That is what keeps me from switching (and trust me I would love to if it was realistic) but there is no way that I could do in multimedia/graphics/audio/video/3d (hell I can't even on a mac with as little software and hardware support) that I can in windows, though vista can't do a lot of it either so there goes that- I guess my xp system will end up like my atari st and amiga were- holding on for as long as they can until the world realizes what it left behind.