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Olympic Committee Chooses XP Over Vista

Posted by samzenpus on from the if-it's-not-as-broken dept.

Vinit writes "The popularity of Windows XP is still making things difficult for Vista. Now Vista has again suffered a major setback, with Lenovo (Olympic 2008' official sponsor) installing XP on it's machines to run the Olympic Games' vital PC-related tasks. Vista will only be used in internet lounges set up for athletes to use during the games."

13 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. It is a natural decision. by rolfc · · Score: 4, Informative

    My employer took the decision to migrate from win2k to XP, and we will roll it out this fall. Vista was proposed but we do not consider it ready for use.

  2. Not ready for prime time. by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 3, Informative

    The popularity of Windows XP is still making things difficult for Vista.

    I wouldn't blame the popularity of XP as much as I would blame the god-awfulness of Vista. At our organization, there are so many problems we've identified with Vista on our enterprise that we've declared a moratorium on its rollout...probably until SP1 is released (which, considering how late Vista was to begin with, could take a while).

    In the meantime, I now get to blow Vista off all the new systems we purchase and replace it with XP. As if I didn't have enough work to keep me busy...

    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

    1. Re:Not ready for prime time. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      I know you are totally making that whole story up, but indulge us anyway on these "problems" that you've found.

      The funny thing is that, assuming that your story is even remotely true, that you've paid MS twice. Once for Vista and again for XP, all the while you're typing this as if you've really stuck to MS by not using Vista.

      You haven't the first clue what you're talking about. You can use a license of Vista and install XP without any additional cost, since XP is an older version. You can do the same thing with Office.

      Upgrading a large organization costs a bunch of money. Good companies cost benefit these types of things. We did ours and the benefits just weren't there to pay for the massive hardware upgrades we would have to do.

    2. Re:Not ready for prime time. by timbck2 · · Score: 3, Informative
      I work for the State of New Mexico. Our Microsoft "Account Technology Specialist" had this to say about buying Vista licenses but using XP:

      OEM OS License: Only Vista Business and Vista Ultimate have downgrade rights to Windows XP. Rights to OEM versions of systems software are granted in the OEM License Terms. The OEM License Terms for most OEM versions of systems software do not grant downgrade rights. The exception is the OEM License Terms for the Windows® XP Professional operating system and the Windows Vista(TM) Business and Windows Vista Ultimate operating systems, which grant downgrade rights. See the full text of the OEM License Terms for the specific downgrade rights. End users can use the following media for their downgrade: Volume Licensing media (provided the end user has a Volume Licensing agreement).


      Does he know what he's talking about? I have no idea. But I'd say he's in a better position to have the correct information than most of us, who are merely guessing.
      --
      Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
  3. Article Is Blog Spam; Direct Link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    The direct link is http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/080807-vista -wireless-kept-off-core.html (and the blog's source isn't much longer).

  4. Re:Hmm by GiMP · · Score: 2, Informative

    Linux, they would probably choose etch over lenny.


    Except even Etch isn't that old. Infact, as a "stable release" it is *very new*. I only upgraded a box from Woody (to etch) only... yesterday.
  5. In somewhat related news... by Idaho · · Score: 4, Informative

    The dutch equivalent of "the consumerist" (de consumentenbond) recently started a program where consumers can send in their Vista-related problems, which they are going to urge Microsoft to fix or ask for money back (or perhaps, to give free copies of XP instead). To quote de consumentenbond (article in dutch, relevant part translated here):

    "A power user will be able to solve most of the problems that Vista confronts him with, however the average consumer will run into serious trouble. The [operating] system contains so many mistakes that we want to investigate this in detail."

    Furthermore, the article notes that "The consumentenbond dislikes the fact that new computers are delivered with the Vista operating system by default".

    Yup, Vista seems to be doing great...

    --
    Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
  6. link is to a parasitic blog instead of the source by 1u3hr · · Score: 4, Informative

    TFSummary links to TFA:
    http://www.pclaunches.com/software/olympic_committ ee_chooses_xp_over_vista.php

    which just regurgitates the story from
    http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/080807-vista -wireless-kept-off-core.html

    Why not link directly to the source instead of some blogger collecting Adsense? Network World has got advertising too, of course, but at least they earned it by doing the work and researching a story instead of just plagiarising it like a Picquepaille.

    And for fuck's sake "installing XP on it's machine".
    "It's" == "It is". Possessive is "Its".

  7. Mod parent down... (was Re:Its not so difficult) by Angstroem · · Score: 2, Informative

    "http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_ a post.html"
    In the latter 2 examples, when "It" is used to refer to the Olympic Committee or Microsoft, then "It's" becomes the possessive case.

    You obviously didn't scroll down to the part of the page where it clearly says:

    Don't use apostrophes for possessive pronouns or for noun plurals.

    It's perfectly okay to use "it's" to signal possession.

    No, it's not. Just read the very page you liked to refer. Or just ask your English Grammar teacher if there's a money-back-guarantee regarding his (no, not his') or her (no, also not her's) lessons.

  8. Re:Its not so difficult by FiloEleven · · Score: 2, Informative
    Hey, your link makes it look like you know what you're talking about. If you've got a Purdue English page backing you up, you must be right.

    Except...what's this?

    Don't use apostrophes for possessive pronouns or for noun plurals.

    Apostrophes should not be used with possessive pronouns because possessive pronouns already show possession -- they don't need an apostrophe. His, her, its, my, yours, ours are all possessive pronouns. Next time try reading your own links.
    --
    Your brain is not a computer.
  9. Re:Its not so difficult by Snocone · · Score: 3, Informative

    tough I'm sure some grammar super-Nazi will pull me up on this.

    Your speculative deduction is both logical and original, lacking only the minor detail of veracity. There are two common explanations for the usage you cite:

    A) It was all a big mistake (technical term, "folk etymology") by Normans. The mess which is the usage of " 's " in English arises from the genitive case of Saxon, which was kinda-sorta adopted, but not consistently. So the fellow who wrote "St. George his Channel" on that map was a Norman who, completely confused by the Saxon name of the place as the locals pronounced it in their genitive case, wrote down the nearest sense he could make of it the way he spoke the language.

    B) It was a deliberate attempt to disambiguate. Take the phrase "the King of England's forests". Grammatically, this is ambiguous, as it could mean either "the King of the forests of England" or "the forests of the King of England", and is only parseable because we know that forests and non-forests do not have separate Kings. (A good example of the kind of thing that bedevils natural language AI researchers.) This problem was more vexing in medieval times, when the name of a geographical region, "England" here, could mean either "the lands of the region of England" or "the political ruler of England", so "England's ships" for instance could mean either "the merchant marine crewed by Englishmen" or "the navy of the King of England", which could vary your meaning enormously. "England his ships", on the other hand, unambiguously means the King's navy, and was deliberately adopted for that reason. As the conflation of a region with its ruler died out as a grammatical construct, so did the need for this disambiguation, and thus the possessive case was readopted universally.

    Take your pick.

  10. Re:It Isn't The Popularity of XP by jawtheshark · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't know much about why DOS 4 sucked...

    I do.... One of the main reasons was that it ate memory for breakfast in a time that memory was expensive and that we lived with the 640KByte barrier. Many programs by then required a good 500KByte to 520KByte free. With MS DOS 4.x that was pretty much impossible, with MS DOS 3.3 and MS DOS 5.0 and later MS DOS 6.22 it was possible.

    --
    Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
  11. Fool me once... by realinvalidname · · Score: 3, Informative

    The IOC was rather famously burned by widely-reported technological problems with IBM systems at the Atlanta games in 2006, with bugs that reported some athletes as being 7 or 8 meters tall. Near the end of the games, I recall there was a proclamation that the IOC would no longer adopt any technology that hadn't been in production for at least n years. This may simply be a case of Vista, being not even a year out of beta, not qualifying for consideration under this very conservative restraint.