Slashdot Mirror
Olympic Committee Chooses XP Over Vista
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."
At what point does an OS mature enough that it becomes "enough for general use"? Maybe XP is that mark.
okinawa japan
THe specialist software that it runs not yet being rewritten for vista- I'm sure it'd work on vista, but in an international event like this you really don't want to get things misbehaving or acting just slightly differently. Of course in 4 years time vista will be standard and they'll be no question of using anything else- or possibly using the next version of Windows.
Smart choice indeed. I for myself would have chosen Windows XP over Vista, because even though my personal choice is Linux, I will not force anyone on using it, whatsoever. My new laptop (issued by the new company I work) comes with Vista, and making my life a hell. I am going to install Linux on it if it won't hurt any company policy, as all I do is to develop Java applicatons and run some office work.
That is making things difficult for Vista. Vista is making things difficult for Vista.
Just about every day there are stories of how it can't do something important, or has some kind of security flaw, or won't work with this or that hardware, or needs even more system resources to even run.
What is making XP "popular" is that it doesn't have the problems Vista does. It is no advantage to XP. It's that Vista has so many faults. This isn't unlike the Microsoft even versions of DOS that sucked too.
And I wonder how hard MS will be trying to persuade them to reconsider. Wouldn't surprise me if in a few weeks time there is another article about how MS gave them a rather nice deal and they decided to reconsider their OS of choice.
Ryans Tutorials - A collection of technology tutorials.
Yes, funny how all those anti-Vista stories on Slashdot now portray Windows XP as a popular OS that's loved by everyone. Before Vista, it was portrayed as pretty much the most hated system on the planet.
Lenevo is choosing to go with an older, well-established OS that's tried and tested for the "mission critical" stuff rather than a newer, less tested one. So what?
Is anybody surprised at that? Would you do things differently?
When you have to look after everything from press accreditation to publishing results, from scheduling to putting up the correct names of competitors, and doing it all in a multitude of languages and to the tightest of schedules, what would Windows Vista bring to the party that Windows XP wouldn't?
To use a car analogy, Windows XP has been around the block, been put through its paces, had its engine tuned and is humming nicely, whilst Windows Vista has barely had more than its tyres kicked in the dealer's forecourt. If you were taking a 5,000 mile road trip across a continent, which would you go with?
Why anybody would be surprised at this decision, or even see it as a failing of Windows Vista, is beyond me. If you're going to go with a Microsoft OS, then common sense makes Windows XP the obvious choice.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Vista's price, system requirements, and youth make it a less-than-optimal choice for deployment in almost any business setting. What does Vista do for, say, everyone in my office that XP can't? Most people here on PCs run MS Office (we just upgraded to 2003), WordPerfect (and the rest of that suite... gross, but it's still our Government standard), IE, and FileMaker Pro. We already have images setup for XP (just load it onto the HD and we're done), and it means that the computers that aren't so great here can still be useful to people who are just using it for standard office work. It's a new OS, and it's received a bunch of notoriety for being a pain to use and upgrade from. I'm not a crazy Vista hater (there *are* lots of problems with it, and some aren't just bugs -- they're serious OS flaws), but I doubt I could think of five reasons for most people to upgrade to Vista. I upgraded my PC Laptop to Vista Ultimate and about two months later went back to XP Pro. I didn't hate it, per se, but I just didn't feel like I had gained anything by having it (and it hogging over 400MB of RAM at idle). And I certainly lost the ability to use a handful of apps I like. I'm sure we'll see Vista adoption, but at least not until SP1 arrives. There just aren't real reasons to upgrade yet.
-Matthew Riley "TofuMatt" MacPherson
I have a website
I'd love to moderate this up as "Funny", but I can't.
Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!
"a major setback"
Come on, really? Complete sensationalist bullshit. Why don't we keep it up and refer to these meaningless events as "the final nail in the coffin" or ones that "spell doom" or "darken the horizon" for Vista. In case you hadn't noticed, the money's all going to the same place.
I think I'll stop here.
I don't remember the transition from 2000 to XP being this difficult. There were a few bumps, the usual driver follies but nothing like the problems plaguing Vista. I don't remember companies going with 2000 because XP caused so many problems.
If memory serves the transition from 2K to XP was actually pleasant...at least by comparison.
Having said that I don't doubt MSFT will get Vista straightened out. My beef with MSFT products is not with the quality (although some of you could argue that quite compellingly). To me it's always been about value. Not whether it works but if it's worth the money you're paying. Right now, for Vista, that answer is "no" for a lot of people.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I fail to see how this is a setback for Microsoft. They still get their license fees from XP (though this is China, you never know). More importantly, any time you see an athlete using a computer, or anyone using a private terminal, won't they be using Vista? I betcha any sponsorship the games get from Microsoft will be branded "sponsored by Microsoft Vista," not "sponsored by Microsoft Vista (but jokes on you guys we're really using XP for our back end stuff here at the games)"
Vista is plenty ready for use. It's your employer that apparently isn't ready for it.
Just because you don't know what's different in Vista, what changes you need to make, etc, doesn't mean it's the operating systems' fault.
If you spent 4 hours with it, you'd say "This is actually better for our corporate systems. Let's move to Vista instead."
I don't love Microsoft of Windows any more then the next guy, but c'mon, Vista isn't as major of a change as people make it out to be. Maybe they changed all this crap under the hood? Who cares. Most of that doesn't affect anything. It's not like switching from Windows 2000 to Linux or something.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
No point retraining the support people on Vista when I'm sure all the officials and athletes are still using XP.
No one cares about wasting user time, this is all about marketing and boosting Vista. Lenovo says Vista is too buggy to use and the athletes will have to put up with it anyway:
That's typical of a M$ partner, going along with a marketing push of a system they know is crap. M$ will claim the Olympics are "Vista Powered" and that's all you will see on the idiot box and cnn.com. Their CEO still hopes the upgrade treadmill will spur sales, though the overwhelming evidence is that vista is a failure. From the CEO Amelio interview:
When M$ dies and this kind of intentional waste ends. Computers will always ship bigger and better but forcing people to toss their old ones because of softare "upgrades" is evil. Free software will soon provide a smaller, but stable and steady market for good hardware that will be much better for the industry.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Vista is plenty ready for use. It's your employer that apparently isn't ready for it.
I'll not question if Vista is ready for 'prime-time', but I will note that there are dozens, if not hundreds of applications that run on XP but will not run on Vista. That's a real showstopper for any business that depends on these applications.
If all you want to do is email and surf the internet, then Vista is great. For any mission critical use, it isn't. At least that's what corporate America is saying.
Because it couldn't be consumers demanding faster, better systems in order to, say, play newer games and HD movies? It has to be Microsoft and their 'evil' business practices. You conveniently forget that Vista will run perfectly well on a 1GHz machine with 512 megs of RAM, because that would ruin your petty tirade, wouldn't it?
And don't regale me on the puniness of the system that you run Linux on - nobody cares, let alone consumers. It's the nature of humans to always want more out of what they buy.
Anyhow, you'd be surprised to learn that Microsoft doesn't actually have complete control of the upgrades market. Hardware manufacturers and games producers have much more say in that when they release bigger, faster, better versions of their particular products. Do you really think that id would have been content to release every version of Quake they made on the Doom engine?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I believe it, but it sounds like the majority of complaints come from folks using legacy programs, 3rd-party solutions, and just a few comments ago, video drivers for fancy graphics/gaming cards. I would imagine that in Redmond most of your software is Microsoft, made (and tested) to work well with other Microsoft components -- in that controlled environment, I should hope that it went as smoothly as it did over there!
The moon may be smaller than the earth, but it's much farther away!
MS tweaks their adoption numbers because it is not possible to buy XP licenses anymore. Instead, you buy Vista licenses and can use XP. So, I am sure for the MS marketing department and for their reporting it might look like Vista is doing great. They did this for XP to 2000 as well but not as aggressively as they did this time around.
Vista is not something we need at the business-level.