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PC Makers Offering a Bridge Back To XP
The Telegraph is reporting on efforts by PC manufacturers to give customers buying systems pre-installed with Windows Vista a much-sought way to downgrade to Windows XP. ( A few months back we discussed Microsoft's similar concession for corporate customers.) "It took took five years and $6 billion to develop, but Microsoft's Vista operating system, which was launched early this year, has been shunned by consumers — with computer manufacturers taking the bizarre step of offering downgrades to the old XP version of Windows."
"It took took five years and $6 billion to develop"
:P
Who's took? He must've been a genius to develop Vista with only $6 billion!
WOW! Old news is so exciting!
just wonder why there are so many anonymous cowards in this world....
Man, forget this "downgrade to XP" crap, let's really go for the gold and demand a downgrade all the way back to the Millennium Edition. Ah, the halcyon days of youth.
More like needed. Microsoft is trying to force it to be bundled with everything, even hardware that has no business trying to run that resource hog of an OS. I recently got a cheap laptop to take notes with and do basic lab work at school. It came with Vista, and it took 6 minutes to boot. I couldnt put XP on it fast enough. Too bad my school uses a few programs that wont run under linux at all.
I'm a computer-using professional, (a web developer, actually) and I haven't bought a computer in years (who needs to? a five year old Pentium IV does everything anyone needs a computer to do!). So I was amazed back in July when a friend and I went to a Circuit City and then Best Buy on a "cheapest laptop we can walk out with" quest. XP was already gone and the pimply-faced Nerd Patrol/Geek Squad/FireDog/CatFucker people all told us that installing XP on these computers was impossible. They said they'd tried and it couldn't be done. I remember wondering if perhaps this was the end of the Microsoft Universe, since there was no way we'd be getting a Vista computer. The only use for multiple cores and 4 gigs of RAM is if 80% of your CPU cycles are given over to DRM and Norton 360.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
"It took took five years and $6 billion to develop" Yep, and it took me FIVE DAYS to decide to dump it off of my machine, and go back to XP Pro.
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
I wouldn't consider Vista to XP a downgrade. You end up with a faster box, better selection of drivers and less DRM. How is that a downgrade?
More than 60,000 Windows programs won't run on Linux.
I'd actually welcome the opportunity to get some XP recovery disks for the laptop I purchased last month. It's my first experience with Windows Vista. Over the past month, I have seen that Vista has changed everything that was good about XP, and left all the bad parts untouched. Everything from network browsing to hibernation support has been subtly altered for maximum annoyance. Maybe Vista is a ruse to bump up sales of XP, because I've certainly been considering a self funded downgrade. And yes, Linux runs on it like a dream, but I'm still having trouble with the video and suspend to RAM functions.
Give me a moment while I do my happy dance of Microsoft humiliation.
Technoli
Everyone should be running the newest of Windows, which is Windows Vista! People who still get by with XP are uncool and stick-in-the-muds. Windows Vista on a Wacom-enabled Tablet PC is the way to go! And Windows Vista to me seems much faster with the new wallpapers! I love Microsoft and everything they do. Products like Vista and Office 2007 are brilliant. I really have a mancrush on Steve Ballmer, too.
Anonymous Coward Sig 2.0:
--
I love Microsoft! I want a job at Microsoft!
All of the parties will provide various slightly off-topic and apocryphal anecdotes and statistics to support their position.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Is that 6 billion in excel dollars?
According to some excel functions, that's really only 3,932,100,000.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
I wanted to upgrade from Vista to XP when I bought my laptop a few months ago. Where was this offer then?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Ok, I've been using Vista Ultimate (Yes, I PAID for it. Shut up already) on my Acer Ferrari 3200 lappy. Why? Two reasons.
1. Acer abandoned XP driver support on my laptop shortly after launch. I've had to scour the net for updated Wifi drivers from HP and other places that supported my ATI mobile 9700. Windows Vista OTOH, supported all my hardware on the first install.
2. I support Windows servers and desktops. I figured now would be a good time to learn Vista including all of its quirkiness.
How did it go? Well...Vista is a POS to be blunt. It's slow to boot up, next to impossible to access work group resources, application compatibility issues, and next to no 3rd party VPN app support. It's a good thing I kept my collection of XP drivers for this laptop, cause I'll be nuking the drive and loading an XP SP2 build within a month.
Life is not for the lazy.
I love Dell for this but if you know someone w/ any Dell OEM OS cd, then you can install it on almost any other Dell system without a key needed, and although Dell Phone Support may not be willing to help you with this, on the Dell support site, you can download both XP and Vista drivers for most of their systems. Just a thought.....
WWPD - What Would Picard Do?
Are we finally seeing the wheels coming off of this tired old monopoly? This sounds like the Soviet Union in the 60s and 70s, where nobody cared about the revolution anymore, nobody pitched their 'fair share' any longer, and the whole economy is collapsing.
MS seems to have been able to push crap out in the past. The only way they got away with it was monopoly position, user lock-in, favors of the press, and the ignorance of the general public about what computers were actually capable of, at the time when MS was releasing its features.
Seven years, how many thousands of programmers, evil genius and chair-throwing asshole at the top, and it's still not ready? Perhaps modern OS development is a task so complex that traditional human organizations -- the hierarchical corporation being the most powerful to date -- can no longer tackle it. Is open-source collaboration the next big thing in societal evolution?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The only difference between Vista now and in the beta stages, besides stability, is the system requirements for a well-running system. I was in no way surprised when businesses balked at the minimum system requirement. I can't tell you how many IT departments I've seen out there that have machines that run XP but only barely. Now, a machine that is a year old can't run the latest OS. Hmmm. If the average company would want to upgrade to Vista, they would have to make some massive capital investment to replace things that haven't completely depreciated in order to have IT just for the sake of IT.
XP is a good operating system. And after SP2 came out, it got even better. My place of employment plans to keep using Windows XP for the next few years. It's not that we don't want to upgrade to Vista. It's that we would have to change the whole computer system for each of our 200 seats in order to run it. If the transition was as painless as the jump from Windows 2000 to XP, I don't doubt that we would be in the middle of implementing it right now.
The game.
Shopping with my mother for a new display to replace the broken one on Sunday, my mom pointed to a "Works with Vista!" sign attached to a LCD monitor and said "I heard that's (Vista) not very good". I was quite proud, and a little shocked, that quite possibly the most technophobe and technologically backwards person I know (my mother) was even aware of how bad Vista was, even if only through the grapevine.
That said, even with that kind of bad PR, Vista will no doubt make headay in to the market in 1-2 years time. It took at least that long for XP to really have good market penetration.... and by that time, computers should be able to run Vista reasonably.
moox. for a new generation.
At some point even Microsoft's best-paid shills are going to have to admit that there's a serious problem, that Vista is not what Microsoft has come to expect from their business plan of periodic forced upgrades. I don't expect Microsoft to admit it, because it's marketing department is filled with well-paid liars, but somewhere in that behemoth in Redmond there must be some folks getting nervous.
I was assured by my Dell rep last week that XP will be available well into next year. I think Microsoft has a serious problem, and is finding that, at the end of the day, it is the one at the whim of the manufacturers and consumers, not the other way around.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Unlike the Linux competition between distros, there is no real competition driving innovation within Microsoft Windows. They sort of notice it, but why bother? They'll continue squeezing blood out of the turnips forever even if they fire *ALL* of their development programmers and just retain a skeleton staff of maintenance programmers. Actually from what I've seen of Vista, maybe that's what they did. In terms of real innovations Vista looks and feels like it could have been done by a couple of guys in their spare time. Less innovation than between the three Linux shells I've tried.
Most of my experience has been with Ubuntu. Functionally, it does most of what I need right after installation. (I'm including the basically simple Flash, Java, and codec installations that really should be included in the baseline installation.) Most users want email, Web surfing, and basic document editing, and Ubuntu delivers all of that. On its own merits, it should have roughly half the market, except that it's cheaper, too, so it should have more than that.
What's wrong with this picture? The problem is that most Linux people have a cooks-first mentality, and when a regular diner comes along with a question or any comment except for extreme praise, the standard answer translates into "Why haven't you read the cookbook yet? The answer is right there." Well, the reason they didn't read the cookbook is because they just want to eat a tasty Linux sandwich, not to become a master chef.
There's nothing wrong with the open kitchen concept--but the Linux people keep trying to force people into the kitchen. Sorry, but my time is limited, and even though I made my living as a programmer for some years, I've had enough of it--and most 'diners' want even less than that. They just want it to work and help them get their computer-related tasks done.
Of course Microsoft's cooking model is a closed and locked kitchen, with no health inspectors and a complete waiver of liability printed on the back of your receipt--and you accepted all of the terms and conditions when you sat down at the table. However at least Microsoft is interested in the diners' money, even if they don't care about poison software.
Anyway, I'd love to see Vista flop in the dirt. I want some real choices, and most of the time I'm at work I'm forced to use Windows. Freedom is about real choice, and Microsoft is dedicated to eliminating freedom, no matter what their ads say.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
i just bought a new laptop in seoul, south korea, and every single computer i found came with vista pre-installed, but shop keepers were more than willing to format your computer and install XP for 40,000 won ($40) but being the cheep bastard that I am, I said no to XP, went home, and downloaded Ubuntu.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Dell and HP finally getting around to pre-installing Linux could not have come at a better time.
I have to this day spent less than 30 minutes with Vista and that was nearly 30 minutes too long. Hardware doesnt work, it reminds me of XP on a 400Mhz PII/256Mb RAM as far as how clunky it is, you cant maintain a decent network connection. I dont mean to be a troll but Vista is an absolute joke.
From now own I take my business to places that will pre-install Ubuntu
Make SELinux enforcing again!
As I understand it, XP is the last of a series of upgrades dating back to DOS.
I suppose it is mostly based in code that was designed to maximize performance since early systems didn't have the resources to waste with modern day code.
Does this mean Vista was written with no care whatsoever to memory management and CPU time?
It's a good thing I decided not to pirate Windows Vista. That would have been embarrassing.
So, I am a grad student, TA'ing a class in computational physics.
... Vista Business.
... ssh to a linux machine, so they can do their work. The *same* Linux machine, able to handle a dozen students numerically integrating shit without a problem.
... run ssh badly. Lovely. And then the students submit their writeups as .docx's, and I have to fuss at them and ask for something I can read.
Said class is taught in the only lab in the building with Windows machines; everything else is Linux. The old Athlon XP boxes do just fine; I've got Monte Carlo running on some of them right now.
These computers are state-of-the-art: dual-core Pentiums, 2GB RAM, and
1. Half the time you can't log in because "An error occurred contacting the User Profile Service."
2. Sometimes you can't log in because of some other error I forget.
3. The things take forever to boot.
4. The first thing the students do when they get into Vista is
5. We use some shitty software called Excursion that lets you get X graphics back through a Windows ssh session. Trouble is, it sucks and crashes all the damn time.
So we're using ~$2k of Windows licenses and a bunch of spiffy hardware to
Vista is a joke. XP is much faster, more stable, and works fine for me. MS really screwed up on this one.
My laptop takes just under a minute to boot, and about 5 to clear all the security checks.
Confuscius say:
If you're too dumb to know it's spyware the first time you click "download", you likely won'y grow enough brain to matter by the second or third "Security Alert".
Support Darwinism: let the idiots fry out their hard drives so we don't have to listen to them support Vista on forums for smart people.
corrected the subject for you.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Either they are outright lying, or they suck.
That, or they are selling some VERY unique laptops.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
In the automotive world of the late 1950's Ford motor Company came out with their 'Vista'. Much ballyhoo'd and heavily promoted, it had all of the characteristics that Vista has. Ladies and Gentlemen, let history repeat itself and meet, The first Vista
* Carthago Delenda Est *
the new Edsel.
Oh-oh. It's not good when a desktop OS's rep gets to the "mom can't e-mail" stage. That argument is usually employed against Linux distros (and rightly so, IMHO).
There's even a potential bumper sticker/T-Shirt market: "Even your mom knows Vista sucks."
Man alive, if that anecdote's even remotely true, it flat-out trumps the more technically oriented reports in indicating that Redmond is in serious trouble.
--
Toro
I know that it's a unacceptable solution for "enterprise" / "corporate" users to pick up random Windows patches from "non-trusted" sources, but I wonder if there would be a market for a "legitimate" company to start offering such support after Microsoft abandons XP users?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I've heard some people say: "Everyone said the same thing when XP came out." That's bullshit. When XP was released, everyone here on Slashdot was saying: "Wow, this is actually pretty good; I haven't had a single crash; They finally delivered on their promise to release a consumer OS with the NT core."
Maybe in a few months Vista will be a good upgrade, who knows, but right now I can't see one feature that I want.
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
In the early 90's, MS nearly blew it. MS was pooh-poohing the Internet. Windows 95 was going to ignore the Internet-- the Internet wasn't important. However, Bill Gates realized the importance of the Internet, and singlehandedly turned the company attitude around. He "got it".
This time, with Vista, MS has blown it. They've been pushing DRM. They didn't learn the right lessons from the WGA fiasco. If all that Vista's DRM did was stop a few DVDs from being viewed or CDs being ripped for the 10 seconds needed to circumvent the protection, the DRM wouldn't be a big deal. But no, DRM is so deeply embedded in Vista that it casts its shadow on everything Vista does. Vista runs slower. Vista breaks more often. Hardware capable of supporting Vista's DRM schemes is more expensive. Security concerns have been deliberately conflated, with security for users from viruses being handled with less concern than security for MS and the MAFIAA from the users. And MS insults users' intelligence with lies about _all_ the security being for their own good. It's not possible to just turn off some sort of "DRM service" and have Vista just work, because Vista really is defective by design. In exchange for putting up with all those inconveniences, people receive in return less than nothing.
This time around, MS doesn't have Bill Gates in there, getting it right. He's busy trying to save the world from diseases. Laudable, and I wish him the best. But I wish he'd put some of these charitable impulses towards making MS kinder and gentler. I don't know whether Gates would get it this time, as he did in the early 90's. But no one else of consequence at MS is getting it right, and that's scary that a behemoth like MS can make such a blindingly obvious idiotic blunder. Perhaps corporations are inherently flawed systems in this way, susceptible to bad groupthink. They may wake up before they bleed too much. Sic transit gloria MS.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Man, that is one slow machine.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I recently upgraded my computers, my windows xp game machine from a P4HT and my linux dual P3 machine both to Core 2 Duos and 2gigs of ram. The windows machine used to have 1 gig of ddr and the P3 had 512mb of that ram that failed.
Both were okay machines in their own right, I am currently playing a lot of LOTRO and the frame rates weren't too bad with pretty decent settings. The problem was lack of memory, ddr is expensive compared to ddr2 and I had all full slots.
So, with two new machines, am I experiencing what you claim? HELL NO. For one thing, bios boot time (before the OS starts loading) have dropped to mere seconds, often so fast I can't even hit del fast enough. While the machines themselves idle most of the time, they respond a lot faster when I actually want them to work.
BRING OUT THE CAR ANOLOGY
If you drive you car one hour a day at 240 miles per hour (lets keep the math simple) then you claim that a car with a top speed over 10 miles per hour is wastefull since obviously on average your car only drives 10 miles per hour in a day period.
Computer speed is not just about total capacity, it is about how fast it can do the tasks you ask it to do. If I boot my computer, I wanted to work on it NOW, every milisecond it is not ready is wasted time. If I open a document I want to work on it. Don't matter that a 10 second load time ain't that long, it is time I spend waiting.
That is the secret of why powerfull computers make for better productivity, NOT because we need them to constantly be performing heavy workloads, but because we want them to do what we want them to do quickly so we can do our work in the flow we want it too.
I remember the days when if you wanted to print a document you went and got a cup of coffee while the computer got ready, and then you went an hour later to the printer room to get your document from the pile. It worked, but your workflow was being dictated by the hardware/software. Not a good thing.
BRING OUT THE SECOND CAR ANOLOGY
Old diesels had to warmup before they could be driven. Not too much of a problem, just make it part of your getting ready routine to go outside and start the car before you actually leave. But god, those petrol cars with their instant usuable engines were handy, and we curse when we have to scape the windows when there is frost. We want the car to be ready when we want it to be ready, not when its hardware is ready.
I agree that getting a new powerfull computer and then wasting all its cycles on crap is not progress, but just because a new powerfull computer spends most of its time idling does NOT mean it is useless. Same as your car that spends most of its times doing 0 miles per hour is NOT wasting all that horse power.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think you're exactly right, and what we are seeing is one of the critical flaws in an autocratic hierarchy, which is how most American business is run. If you get the wrong person at the top, eventually his or her poor judgment travels all the way down and throughout the hierarchy.
--
Toro
Isn't this exactly the same as this story: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/29/1657256
The longer XP stays in circulation, the more time Wine, Samba, Kerberos, OpenLDAP, Fedora DS, and a myriad of Linux producers have to target Windows. If Vista really has mass rejection by consumers and businesses, it buys Linux oh so precious weeks, Days, and hours, to try and overtake Active Directory.
My own little experience with Vista...
I was happy enough with XP.
Then some mofo lowlife stole my laptop so have just been forced to get a new one. The shop said they "can't" provide machines with XP, so I was forced to use Vista (with hindsight I should have shelled out for a copy of XP and downgraded the machine).
The weird thing is, you can sense the stirrings of some actual respect for decent security underneath the glittering, laquer-coated turd that is Vista. But sadly, the actual implementation is just as bad as I feared.
My first 2 hours were lost just trying to get an ssh shell working again.
- cygwin doesn't run (easily) - file permission problems. Need to become Administrator to fix them.
- turns out that under Vista, just because your account is an "Administrator account", does not mean you are an Administrator. No, there is an actual Administrator (root) user, which has been thoughfully disabled.
- you can google plenty of instructions for turning on the Administrator account - but because I have the artifically crippled "Home Premium" edition, those menu options are simply not there. I eventually work out that I need to go to the dos box and type "net use blah blah". Finally I can log in as Administrator and change file permissions.
- despite all this, I still find I need to disable UAC to do things from time to time - and of course, reboot whenever I change it. But at least finally cygwin works.
Despite all of these new annoyances, MS has thoughtfully retained some of the quite annoying features of XP (and probably of the devil's spawns that preceded it). eg if you leave a network drive connected, then go to another network, then doing "file open" in an app such as Word freezes for a few minutes.
I think MS has had little choice in releasing Vista. Their bad designed decisions in the past - always favouring absurd "one click and its running" ease of use over normal security procedures - have come home to roost, forcing them to paint themselves into the corner they're in now.
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
did you go on vacation after installing?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I bought a cheap (really cheap actually, NZ$600) Compaq PC the other day. AMD Sempron 3600+ with 512MB RAM, on board graphics, ethernet and sound and an 80GB SATA disc (where the hell they found that I don't know). It also came with a copy of Vista Basic so for a laugh I fired it up to see how it worked.
The long and the short of it is that if I bought this machine to run as a Windows PC it would have gone right back as unfit for purpose. Just getting the thing through its configuration took about 1 hour. Add a couple more hours for downloading and installing updates/patches. Then, restart and it takes 10 mins to get to a usable interface. Start more than one program at once and it slows to a crawl (eg explorer and IE7 at once) and the screen locks up. Simply awful. The shop told me that many people have complained that it was slow and their response was that it was a cheap machine. Well yes, but seriously, XP would function well enough on it. CentOS 5 spins along at a perfectly usable rate. Vista Basic. Nope.
MS has seriously lost the plot with this thing. Sure, stick a lot more RAM in and it will work OK but come on. Why is MS allowing companies to sell these woefully underspecified machines. It has a sticker on it saying it was designed for Vista but it really can't run it well enough for real world use. I know Compaq is to blame too, surely they could have tested these things. Even the lowest spec Mac will run Tiger nicely. Once you bump the RAM up on one of these Compaq things you could have bought a low end Mac mini which would still run better.
This machine should have come with XP. It is not Vista capable.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Apple moved their entire userbase from an older, crotchety OS that crashed every ten minutes (thanks not to the OS, but to the apps you use day-to-day being horribly written), to a Brand New OS with much more security and more features, that ate eight times the RAM, had above-moderate-for-the-time minimum VRAM requirements, thrashes the hard drive like a mother, can't be used on older hardware, and everyone absolutely loves it.
Microsoft does the same thing, and fails. A lot.
Of course, Apple was willing to shit on millions of legacy application users in the process*, whereas Microsoft isn't: backwards compatability for zillions of business apps is one of the selling points - "it doesn't work on XP" keeps people on 2k, and "it doesn't work on Vista" is keeping people on XP.
Why go to all of the hassle to upgrade your OS if it doesn't do what you need it to do?
(disclaimer : gradual hardware failure combined with tactically-delayed feature inclusion in new versions of applications forced me to OS X. Vista's still lacking the 'killer app' that bellows IT IS SAFE TO UPGRADE!!!!.)
* 68k -> PPC shit on developers and consumers; PPC -> Intel did the same thing again, or will the second Apple drops support for their PPC hardware.
No, it wasn't Mr. Gates who "Got it." Gates was pushing MSN as an AOL alternative, as a standard closed environment separate from the internet. He was part of the reason Microsoft *didn't* respond to the internet in a timely fashion.
It was new kids coming in to Microsoft from college who "got it." It was the cover articles in Time and Newsweek who "got it." Microsoft only "got it" because they had no other choice. If they had followed Mr. Gates' plan, they would've missed it entirely.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Windows XP CD detected. Would you like to:
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
How is a discussion site suppossed to work if not by different people describing their own experiences and personal opinions?
In other words, thanks for poinitng the bleeding obvious, I hope you feel schmug and clever, that would be about the only positive thing comming out of such post.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I mean we need lingo for these slash-memes. The antithetical ones are always the best (cutting!) but there's a whole chain of mantras we proudly trot out (only the older and the wiser of us of course) as if they haven't be said line for line 123902184^23948 times.
This is the newest one I've seen bandied about lately. Kind of a post-slashdotism really. Quite clever to mock the very community you're MUCH to good to be a part of...or maybe it's just meant to be ironic. I mean, it is...but it would be enheartening if these posters see that it is (then I guess the jokes on me!).
Effectively you offer nothing (+5 Interesting!) but a rehash of another person's rehash of a set of observations about...observations condemning other posts for having...opinions, that might relay (God forbid it)...facts and stir conversion. Which I totally get. It's trite (??). All that talking and stuff can really bring a brother down. Sometimes I just hold my breath (*unless I read something somewhere really witty I can reiterate*).
Quack, quack.
* Someone saying that this is the end of Microsoft's monopoly.
It's not.
* Someone saying that the exact same thing happened with XP, and people will have to change over the next Holiday season.
The exact same arguments were made against XP. I remember quite a few people that that thought 98SE was the pinnacle of computing.
* Someone complaining that their very common hardware doesn't work with Vista
My sblive worked in the beta, but doesn't now.
* Someone saying that they have managed to get all their equipment running right out of the box with Vista, including some obscure piece of hardware.
However everything else works fine.
* Someone complaining that even on a 2 GHz processor with 2 gigs of memory, Vista crawls
It does. Seriously.
* Someone saying that people should stop complaining about Vista performance, because they got it working on a P2-266 with 128 megs of RAM.
Early twentysomething MS fanboys working entry level Tier 1 tech support. Also early thirtysomethings with expensive MCSE's working entry level Tier 1 tech support.
* Someone saying that with Vista's failure, this is the year of Linux on the desktop.
Not until there is a decided upon common desktop. And filesystem. And directory structure, And package management system. And less than 32 apps to sync with my iPod.
* And someone saying that until Grandma can write an e-Mail, Linux isn't ready for the desktop.
Grandma can write an email, but nothing on the rack of Grandma apps at Staples will run on Linux.
All of the parties will provide various slightly off-topic and apocryphal anecdotes and statistics to support their position.
And now they don't have to.
Shift happens. Fire it up.
Downgrades?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Antithetic. The spelling-bee ones are possibly one of the more primordial. So let me just get that one out of the way for you. My bad.
Quack, quack.
That any of my customers that bought computers from them that needed to downgrade, they would provide OEM cds for the cost of the media ($30) yeah, expensive cds, but they work for the oem computers.. :)
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
This reminds me of Netscape. It seems like their web browser reached its optimal functionality with 3.x. 4.x was bloated, and then Netscape was rescued by the AOL buyout.
It seems like the MS development process produced its optimal output with XP. Now it's past peak. All they can do within the context of their current development process is add new features that aren't necessarily what people want. At the same time, they can't solve persistant problems, the biggest being security.
MS can't be rescued by a buyout--they're too big. It looks like MS needs a whole new process. I think it would be really cool if they got more friendly towards Open Source. I'm not talking about the whole OS, just some parts. Perhaps they could even do a *NIX core like Apple did, and create a "Wine Killer" that would run Windows Apps in a *NIX-like environment, flawlessly. Also, it'd be nice to have well-known things like libjpeg, zlib, etc, installed as part of the OS DLLs, instead of having to staticly link that stuff, or fight DLL wars.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The fact so many people want this, it is not a DOWNGRADE, it is an UPGRADE from vista to a more usable PC.
I start a new job on Wednesday, even though I got the official "Welcome Aboard" on Friday.
Why?
They have a laptop with Vista that I could use. Only problem is, I'm to be working on HD-DVD. Microsoft makes a free HD-DVD simulator for Windows, it even goes so far as to verify your WGA status before installing.
And the fuckers still haven't ported it to Vista.
Yes, even Microsoft doesn't feel like supporting their newest OS.
So, even though it's almost entirely an MS shop, I have to wait till Wednesday to get the XP downgrade for the thing. (My guess is, they're shipping a physical copy -- where's that "Windows Anytime Upgrade" now, huh?) And I can't do any work until then.
For anyone who actually follows my posts, yes, I'll be partitioning it with Ubuntu, and maybe the HD Sim will work under Wine. I will laugh my ass off if it does. If it doesn't, I'll dual boot, maybe try virtualizing, whatever works best -- of course, all of this on my own time.
Of course, I can't tell you if it's going to be like XP -- if by Service pack 2 (or 3, or 4), it'll be good enough that we'll all be telling everyone to upgrade. But I can't wait that long.
As far as I'm concerned, Vista is still Beta, and shame on Microsoft for making us pay for it before it's done.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
FTA
"If you're not ready for Vista, you can downgrade to Windows XP without affecting your Sony VAIO warranty and switch back to Vista at any time."
That says to me that Vista just isn't as 'run-in' as XP yet (Which is isn't, no doubt), and people are wary of this.
I'm beginning to wonder if we've used up all the links yet repeating the same news that, shock-horror, some people would rather have tried & tested software than the bleeding edge.
Slashdot really does sound like the FOX news of nerdy sites sometimes. Coming next: "How Vista leaves pubes on the toilet-seat, throws steaming turds at the neighbours, and sleeps with your wife when you're at work.
throw new NoSignatureException();
To me the word downgrade implies a loss of utility, a loss of functionality, a backwards step. In my mind swapping XP for Vista is nothing short of an upgrade.
This is a global monopoly we are talking about. You are Vista's bitch -- until Vista R2 is released.
My point is it is easier for Microsoft to use the power of their monopoly (bolstered with crack pipe promises of DRM to Hollywood and the FBI) to ram Vista down the publics' throats than to give us what we want. Neo is not going to fly in and stomp agent Smith.
I WISH I was just being a troll, I sincerely do...
On the bright side, Mac OS X 10.5 will be out next month. At least somebody around these here parts still knows how to develop an operating system properly... /ducks //SLASHIES!
Not to sound like a Microsoft shill (having traditionally been an outspoken Linux and FreeBSD fanboy for over a decade), but:
DRM? Sheeit, nigga - give it up, already. I've been running Vista (by choice) on my laptop since a couple weeks after its released, and have yet to have negative experience from this "DRM" thing which I only seem to hear about in Slashdot straw man, begging-the-question-in-the-traditional-logical-fallacy-sense-of-the-term rants.
See, I'm just not particularly sure how it might be affecting the things I do with the computer. I still copy DVDs with anydvd+dvdshrink, my MP3s all play just fine, CDs rip as well as they ever did on this machine, and YouTube (along with its its ilk) all work fine. Azureus still downloads torrents, VLC, Winamp, and [horror] Windows Media Player still play video without any particular episode. Even Miro Player works fine when fed with all manner of illegitimate RSS feeds.
Yeah, sure. Vista supposedly supports some Trusted Computing Alliance boojigity that will permit (restrict?) me to play certain fancy DRM content (or, I suppose, software) with Vista that won't work elsewhere. But I've never found such media. And in the unlikely event that I'd actually be interested in such content I suspect that the effects of any newfangled DRM would affect users of other operating systems more so than me and my Vista Business install.
Meanwhile, I just don't feel at all inconvenienced by any special DRM function in Vista.
Aren't you schizophrenic motherfuckers bored with the DRM FUD, yet?
Kid-proof tablet..
News Flash: Man buys cheapest PC he can find, and is shocked to discover that its performance, as configured out-of-the-box, completely fucking sucks!
1994 called. Packard Bell wants their infamy back.
Kid-proof tablet..
I have 3 laptops. 2 run ubuntu. The third, with vista, sits in a drawer.
-John Fenley
It's that I submitted this as Anon. Coward 24 hours ago, and I obviously got ignored.
And I picked the original off The Register, who did all the hard work. They didn't get any kudos either!
I'd be able to hire another contractor to work for me, if the first one wouldn't prolong. With proprietary software, you don't have that option. You are artificially limited by whatever CEO "vision" governs the providers business plan at the moment.
Using proprietary software for any mission critical part of your business is reckless.
Like a dirty only man that hides behind my sofa wanting to tickle my private bits, DRM lurks in Vista. Vista ya filty pervert, stop it, oooer.
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. IE was a Microsoft success above and beyond their usual.
Microsoft said: "We understand that our [original equipment manufacturer] partners are responding appropriately to a small minority of customers that have this specific request. But, as they have said before, the vast majority of consumers want the latest and greatest technology and that includes Windows Vista."
(emphasis mine)
That sounds horrible. Aside from their attempt on every second word to scale back the perceived failure of Vista, they know very well what they say isn't true.
To get mammoths like DELL and Lenovo to consider a "small minority" of customers so quickly, at the potential to sell overspecced machines loaded with Vista (something they waited patiently for over 5 years), then they're not a small minority at all.
I use Vista daily, for school-related online components that require vanilla IE and basic access to Microsoft controls through XML and such. For the other 95% of the time, I am fine and dandy through Knoppix on campus workstations, or Red Hat at home or on the laptop. What is all this whining? Reinstall winders if there is a problem (as we discussed a week or two ago) and if you are pertarded enuff to buy a 'puter from ol' Dell and their counterparts, well, tough shit!
FairTax baby!
Congratulations! You've won the daily prize for 'point missed by widest margin'.
I'm a cav scout in northern iraq, and being one of the few computer nerds out here, I spend a good amount of my free time fixing laptops, and once Vista become the norm on new laptops, every single person who has gotten a new one, has asked about going back to XP. at most they tolerate Vista, and these are people who should like vista right? Computer proficient, NOT savvy, some gamers, and yet they all hate it. When I went to buy a laptop I just picked up a refurbished one with XP. Some of these laptops don't even have drivers for XP!
The problem is, XP SP2 is fine for the vast majority of people. Consumers are used to it, and businesses have tweaked their environments so that it runs pretty well. The dirty little secret is that most of the 'features' added in Vista can also be added to XP with free third-party tools (e.g., suDown is a nice tool that does what substantially UAC does, and better, IMO). To be fair, XP was warty when it first came out, and didn't really hit its stride until the release of SP2.
My hope is that Microsoft will come out with a Vista Reloaded to slim down portions of the OS and make it more modular so that it runs on more modest hardware. Eventually the world will switch to Vista, but not yet.
Agreed. Complaining that Vista is overloaded with DRM only detracts from legitimate complaints about how totally lackluster and low-value Vista really is. Why give people conspiracy theories when it should be enough to explain that Vista will cause them some small amount of headaches in exchange for almost no benefit?
Breakfast served all day!
it's for OEMs offering Vista Business or Ultimate to offer a downgrade path (at EXTRA COST) to XP. OK. They'll claim that it's all about delivering drivers, but that's bullshit. The Inspiron laptops and the XPS laptops ARE XP machines. I know this, I have a stack of them. Both my XPS books came with Vista, I didn't even boot them on it. Just dropped in a nuke program and installed SuSE on them both. The Vista licenses are sitting in a drawer. (go on, ask me why I didn't just get them with Ubuntu on? Because I don't actually like Ubuntu is why, apart from that I couldn't get Dell to supply me the specifications I required any other way except with Vista).
Short of it is, it's a cashcow for Microsoft. They screwed the pooch on Vista Gold and they know it, now they have a way of screwing the consumer not just one more time, but TWICE as Vista SP1 promises bugfixes, XP support runs out whenever forcing consumers to upgrade again with NEW LICENSES.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I've been a Mac developer since OS 7, and I have these comments:
all these crashes you're talking about: not for me. I had very well working setups on OS 7, and OS 9. 8 didn't last very long I recall. The fact that Apple has switched platforms several times, and provided backwards compatibility via emulation is great. That managed to clear the crap out of an O.S. without disabling all the currently running apps. These apps would run slower on the new hardware; well so what? Don't buy new hardware if you don't like it. If you do, wait a little for the app vendor to port to the new platform
As far as developers are concerned: the current Carbon api is substantially the same as that of OS 7, so what are you whining about?
Bye
"In Soviet Russian, Vista downgrades you"
Oh, wait... that goes for the rest of the world too. Damn.
With a capital C. MS has firmly taken control of device drivers on Vista. You can't get a driver to install unless it's submitted to MS for DRM compliance.... er, I mean "Quality Assurance"... and get them to sign it. (Actually you can get an unsigned driver to load but the average user isn't going to go through the procedure every time they boot their PC.)
As new hardware comes along they will do their damndest to make sure it's supported on Vista while downplaying and actively discouraging the development of XP drivers for said hardware.
It might start with USB 3.0, which I saw mentioned for the first time last week in the mainstream press. If Vista fully supports new and cool hardware that use the new standard while XP seriously lags behind, that could be the first Big Hammer they bash everyone over the head with in their quest for more Control. With a capital C.
>>> (who needs to? a five year old Pentium IV does everything anyone needs a computer to do!).
Ok. I just moved a Pentium-4 2GHz to the garbage, and bought a Core2 duo 2.6GHz with 4GB ram. It is fast, and I'd like it to be even faster. It actually now lets me do my fpga designs in 1 minute per edit-build cycle instead of 5. Some people really do need speed, you're obviously not one of them.
Bart
Hey, I've got a bridge to sell ...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Bought a compaq C571NR laptop with Vista at BestBuy + WinXP upgrade. Compaq used to sell this same hardware with WinXP, so the HP website has most of the drivers (including the SATA driver), plus the graphics driver from Intel. Used nLite to 'slipstream' the SATA driver onto the WinXP install disc. From there it was a fairly normal install, and no messing with the BIOS settings.
When booted under Vista, waiting for you to do something, used memory = 780MB (out of 1G)
When the same laptop booted under XP, used memory = 250MB. A 500MB RAM upgrade for using XP!
Microsoft.Windows.Vista.Ultimate.x86.Integrated.August.2007.OEM.DVD-BIE
Dude, like XP before it, Vista runs at a snails pace on my typical 2GHZ/2GB system, even though it ran fine on my P2-266/128MB, even the 5 1/2" floppy drive! As soon as our Grandmas can write e-mails on Linux (should be right around the holiday season), Microsoft's history.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
XP is an upgrade from Vista, not a downgrade.
We continue? Don't you mean if Microsoft continues to pay, then the programers will continue to program? I imagine any good programers that worked on XP code, when their '90 days' are up, would then be offered a job working on Vista code for '90 days'.
Cars, TVs, VCRs, and even Operating Systems get old over time, but I don't think one can credibly claim that XP is being 'artificially' ended too soon, as it is arguably one of the longest running, most useful OSs of all time.
This laptop has the same specs, with the exception of the CPU (Celeron M 1.86G), and performance when booting/running Vista is almost exactly what you describe. (For more detail, see my post "Vista setup/3hrs | Linux/1.25hrs with xtra apps" ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=305299&cid=20707761 ).
I do plan to upgrade* hardware somewhat, but as it stands, I will only use the Vista install on this machine for 2 things:
1) Occasionally checking how websites render under Internets Exploder (not often - takes too long to get there...), and
2) To be able to replace the disk image if ever needed for a warranty claim.
In short, on this "Basic" machine, Vista is slower than slow, not even really feasible for use; yet Linux flies along, even when running Beryl w/only 64M RAM allocated to video.
--
*It's not needed for my Mepis install, but I plan to add another gig of RAM, and get a better wireless card (the Broadcom chipset causes problems, easily fixed with a Belkin Cardbus that uses an Athero's chipset). For about $75 total (including shipping), I'll have a machine that should work for me for the next several years.
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
That should be when they can drop support. Drop the copyrights as well as the support and we're OK (ish).
Tried to do this on an XPS M1330, but can you believe that XP drivers for the video card (8400MGS) do not exist.
With the release of XP, Microsoft started that delightful policy of dissuading manufacturers from including stand-alone install media with new computers (of the kind that frequently ends up on eBay). If you want to reinstall Windows, you have to use the system restore disks to reinstall everything, OEM crap and all, and we all know the only realistic way to get rid of all of it is to format your hard drive and reinstall the OS alone. I'm still toying with finding a warez copy of Home OEM and trying the product key on my old laptop's XP sticker and seeing if I can get that to work.
Vista, supposedly, has the same problem, but that little "Windows Anytime Upgrade" disk that comes with your new computer, conveniently (and undocumentedly, of course) works as install media. When I use it to reinstall Vista and use the product key on my new laptop, I always end up having to call Bangalore to finish activation, but it's still more than what I can accomplish with an OEM XP install.
With that said, I'd still throw on one of my retail XP licenses instead if I could find drivers for everything.
You haven't touched upon the topic of TFA at all. You haven't even replied to the GP properly. All you've done is to show the world what a self-serving idiot you are and much much "better than the GP poster" you feel for it. Truely sad.
You can change the language quite easily on Linux, per user. But you need to log off and log in again, or you can set the language for a single program on the command line (LANG=language_code name_of_program).
On ms windows xp, you need to restart the computer and the setting is system-wide, and I'm only talking about changing the default codepage of non-Unicode applications, and it's a system-wide setting. I don't have dual-language ms-windows versions (I know some do exist, like French-Arab used in North Africa), so I don't know about the language of the interface and multi-languages aware programs in that case. It's always in French for me, and I can't change it.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
This comment is not for you smart tech folk or the gamer types. The average computer user is tired of change. I think they are at a critical mass of sorts where the want what they have to work fast, safely and easily. They don't want shiny and new. XP works for most folks and they see no need to change, after helping a few people buy new Vista computers I noticed that they wanted a computer to work. The example of how to do this well is what Firefox is apparently trying in their new release, to speed things up and to make things safer. This is not what Vista did it junked things up and made them hard to use. That's not what the average user wants the want to turn a computer on and have it run.
MS gets the "Ballmar Quantity" discount for chairs at Costco. Buy one, throw one free!
So, when I ordered a laptop from Dell over the summer, they refused to give me XP pro with the machine. So, I, of course, used an old version of XP on it and all was good.
So, I just called Dell, and asked them to upgrade from Vista to XP, and, believe it or not, they actually did. For free.
Of course, I haven't received the disks yet...
...but I completely agree with your sig.
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
I've been trying to do that with my old Dell laptop I bought used at a small Chicago computer store that has since gone out of business. The laptop came preinstalled with a copy of XP Pro, and it was only later after I got the thing back home, some three or four months later I discovered the key on the bottom of the laptop was XP Home OEM....
I've since tried several times to install XP using my OEM key and one of several OEM XP copies floating around the net all to no avail.
Buyer beware indeed....
The one where a mac zealot says that M$ just badly imitates Apple, and the inevitable response that Apple in turn steals all their ideas from elsewhere.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
I can certainly imagine web developers seeing productivity improvements from using newer than 5 year old hardware, but the only supporting evidence for that proposition given in the grandparent post was a strawman about dual monitor systems at high resolutions (which were cheap and plentiful 5 years ago) and a ridiculous claim that *real* web developers need to "cut corners" if they only have half a gig of RAM, when, as the parent post points out, exactly the opposite is true.
But the hardest part is obtaining drivers for some of the newest built-in hardware.
I've been lucky so far (I've done dozens of my own "Vistactomies"
since January of 2007) in finding them.
The easiest way has been to go into Visa's device manager and write down the OEMS of each device.
(If XP is already in, use Unknown Device Identifier, or Lavalys' tools to probe the hardware and discover the same info).
Whatever Dell, HP, etc. won't provide on their sites, the OEMS of each chipset usually do.
Also, if you're doing a clean install of XP on a former Vista PC, make sure to set the SATA operation to "Legacy" "Mixed" or "AHCI" to make sure that the XP CD can detect the SATA drives.
How the heck do you spend six billion dollars on anything that doesn't involve heavy use of the word 'trajectory'?
Man, I remember when you could make a decent piece of software in your basement and score lavished media praise from it.
What were they doing over there? Were they starting with fresh new computers every week? Did Bond trash their island-based facility?
Jeez.
-FL
"Long Horn", Now Vista was in the making when I got my MCSE NT4.0 back in 1998. Don't know how log it had been in the works prior to that. MS will eventually choke on Vista just like everyone who has had it crammed down their throat. I'll never own it!!!
"Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will." -- Master Yoda
Really? Cool!
I could've sworn he was complaining about Compaq shipping a machine with Vista which was incapable of running it, much as Packard Bell was famous for doing in the 90s.
In fact, the OP summed it up as such in his conclusion:
This machine should have come with XP. It is not Vista capable.
It's not a Vista thing. It's a "the salesman is a damned liar" thing. In this instance, the role of the salesman is played by the marketing department at Compaq, who is obviously at fault for shipping a computer with irresponsibly low RAM.
*yawn*
*hands back prize*
Kid-proof tablet..
Besides conflating monitor issues with CPU speed, you've made one of the all-time classic blunders. The first is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia" but only slightly less well-known is "Never have developers use systems that have far greater specs than users."
My bet is that your developers with their shiny new boxes running the latest and greatest probably churn out the kind of crappy code that makes a page take 30 seconds to load at broadband speeds. The kinds of sites created by "fast-growing digital media agencies" that everyone hates because they're slower than molasses in the wintertime. Backed by slow, un-optimized code that "worked just fine" for your team running on dual cores off a local server local (let me guess, IIS?) using local storage. Probably (another guess) all your team's work is Flash "development"?
Give me well-written code that runs on slower machines any day over the kind of bloated crap turned out by "fast growing" "agencies" any day. The best, most usable sites are the ones that work well for the average user, running an average machine, with an average connection speed.
As a sibling said, I think your "digital media agency" is just the kind of place I wouldn't recommend having real development done.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Good thing I didn't respond to him immediately. I wanted to say the same thing, and it wouldn't have sounded half as good. His clients are probably losing money twice. Once for overpaying him, second for lost business when people decide "Screw this, what else did Google pop up?"
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
that dumbfounded me at first. Shortcuts to files were pointing to directories that didn't exist. Applications were downloading to partitions that weren't there. And error messages were popping up like the computer was infested with spy ware. Every single move I made to repair the strange damage popped up a window telling me that I couldn't perform those actions because the actions I was performing were not actions I could perform. I went to download all the windows helper utilities I could until I came across the real problem; The computer was running Vista. It wasn't infested with spy ware or behaving contrary to intention, it was just treating me like a retard and stopping me from doing anything and everything. I went from being truly confused by the strange behavior to utterly defeated by the ridiculous mannerisms of Vista. Everything that hadn't made any sense at all to me, an avid computer scientist, all became clear. Do not buy this bloatware 'monkey wearing a helmet and full body armor' OS.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Microsoft in an effort to get more consumers to like Vista has a new ad campaign..
;)
Eat Shit! 10-Trillion Flies Can't be Wrong!!!
Don't flame me -- It was Balmer's idea
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
You'd be surprised the sad old machines in which I've seen brand new copies of Norton 360, etc. It's not just that that kills their performance though - it's also all the spyware that is on there anyway!
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
When did hardware manufacturers start making hardware for not just Windows only but for specific versions of Windows? If that is truly what is happening now then it must be the next step above Winmodems to force consumers to purchase a product they don't want and they don't need.
Since day 1. This is the point of non free drivers. Some makers are better than others at "supporting" new and "legacy" Windoze, but you will never get everything you need unless you buy everything new every three years and throw away the old. It's intentional waste and that's what non free software is all about.
Non free software companies aim to keep users helpless and divided. They are helpless because the vendor won't tell them what they need to know to make things work. That keeps them buying non free software. NDAs, EULAs and social and technical measures are used to keep users divided so that they remain helpless. When users cooperate they soon find they no longer need software owners.
It's all very expensive. There are hoards of self supporting lies that have to be told to maintain user helplessness. M$ spends almost a billion dollars a month in advertising, astroturf and other nonsense to tell these lies. You and I pay for it as the cost of M$'s outrageous 35% profit margin are pushed through the economy. We also pay for it in terms of lost efficiency, the intentional use mentioned above and network pollution.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
From the article:
To express that in the Form of Underpants Gnomes Strategy (a "FUGS expression" for you MBA-types):
It seems to me that what Microsoft has really accomplished here is a way to charge a higher premium for Windows XP. Even if Vista is a miserable failure, it is a win for Microsoft, unless, of course, customers switch to a non-Microsoft OS and stay there.
So... Apple drops "Computer" from its name... Whoops! Now really is the time to push even harder with those "Hi, I'm a Mac" ads. Likewise Ubuntu...
Wow, you're an idiot who can't read.
Original Windows XP Pro SP2 OEM packs with the installation CD and the product key / licence sticker are hot sellers on eBay. They're going for around GBP 50 (100 USD), while the Buy It Now price is up to GBP 75 (151 USD). Plus postage. See here:
http://search.ebay.co.uk/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=windows+xp+licence
I recently needed a "cheapest laptop possible" - for use on the subway, beach, coffee shops, places
where risk of theft/damage is higher. Anyway I ended up with a $399 gateway with vista home basic,
1 GB Ram, celeron processor. Firstly, this is my first experience with Vista and well the first impression
is that it is dog slow. I first go to some web sites explaining how to turn off vista features to improve
performance - it helps a bit, but not enough. I should say my previous "beater" laptop was a toshiba 800ghz,
sattelite with win 2000 that gave up the ghost after 5 years - and despite the gateway having like 2x the cpu
and 3x the memory not to mention whatever you would expect moore's law to give you over 5 years this new
laptop was a real dog with Vista. So I finally bit the bullet and installed centos 5 (rhel 5) and I must say
that my little gateway was like a new machine - I was also pleasantly surprised that most of my hardware was
recognized - i did need to do some hacking to get the built in wireless to work - but man what a difference.
I think MS has really screwed up big time with Vista - forget linux vs MS - MS has to deliver on windows. period.
if they can't manage this after 6 Billion you have to wonder just wtf is going on in Redmond. I have to believe
if Bill G. was hands on with MS even he would have stopped the POS that Vista seems to be from leaving the station.
The the real world, a 35% profit margin isn't outrageous. Lots of companies have margins approaching 50-60%.
Sorry, no.
Now, maybe I missed this from 98 to 2K, but I know we didn't have this problem 95-98-ME, and I know we didn't have this problem from 2K to XP.
Basically, hardware manufacturers realized that some people were eager to upgrade to the bleeding edge, or actually needed some feature of XP, and some people were happy with 2K and didn't want to touch XP, at least until Microsoft fixed it, and maybe never.
Again, not since day 1. Since day 1, the point of non free drivers is that it "protects trade secrets". Never mind that it doesn't, really, but it's a lot easier for a company to just throw an NDA and a restrictive license around everything they do than have to selectively say "This part can be open, but this part contains trade secrets."
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
In a normal market, they shouldn't. As long as they can charge you for XP, why should Microsoft care whether you bought XP from them or Vista? In fact, if you buy XP now, MS ought to be able to get more from you for a future upgrade if and when they come out with something that's actually better.
.NET as an application platform. In other words, they want to sell you Vista instead of XP, because that's how they plan to bundle their way into future dominance in other arenas. Of course, they can provide the same 'features' as upgrades to XP, but then they'd have to get people to install the upgrades. That's (part of) the difference between monopoly bundling and normal business. The monopoly folks can go to third parties and say "write .NET apps, because 90+% of PC's will be able to run them off the shelf". As opposed to "write .NET apps, because they work great". The 'path of least resistance' argument is powerful, indeed.
But XP's not in sync with their agenda. There's stuff in Vista that's there in order to bolster Microsoft's position in web search. And stuff to bolster
Problem is, they blew it. The hardware requirements of Vista have more or less guaranteed that there's no upgrade stream from XP to Vista on older boxes. That's lost revenue and lost 'inevitability' points. But as long as XP can be made to conform to their 'vision', this shouldn't be too much of a problem for them.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Well, that seals it, I guess, because I'll be working with Visual Studio to start. (Actually a mix of Visual Studio and some bastardized Eclipse, but don't quote me on that, I really am not sure exactly how it's going to look.)
Basically, they want me to start in their environment, and once I'm comfortable and know what I'm doing (I don't know HD-DVD yet), I can move to whatever environment I want. So, most likely, I'll be moving to Linux at work eventually.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That is not completely true. The market for hardware that works for the existing installed OS base is huge and hardware manufacturers have always strived to tap into that market as well as the new system market. A quick perusal of Nvidia's driver download page shows that for the most part they have drivers available for multiple versions of Windows even for their latest chipsets.
http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp
But interestingly there are two specific multimedia chipsets that have vista only drivers. This is not the norm, something is afoul.
There has always been a long standing push-push relationship between the hardware and software manufacturers, I agree with that, and there has been a long standing vendor lock-in between hardware manufacturers and OS vendors, but this is something new.
In the past the arguement was that there was no market for Mac/linux/BSD/etc. drivers for specific hardware and that the market share of Windows was the reason to support only Windows, but there was always support of multiple versions of Windows so the hardware would work on new machines and on older machines. Now its narrowed down to a specific version of Windows that has minimal market share and by many accounts is struggling in the market with consumers demanding the previous OS version.
Call me a conspiracist if you will, but something is definitely wrong when hardware manufacturers are targeting a smaller market with their latest hardware.
The the real world, a 35% profit margin isn't outrageous. Lots of companies have margins approaching 50-60%.
No, only Exxon, Coke, M$ and other monopoly problems have margins like that. No one has 50%. 35% is insane enough, because most of the money should be put back into the business and it's employees. Unless the industry is fiercely cyclical most of the profits should go to shareholders.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
A friend of mine just got a laptop with Vista from Circuit City. It is slow to boot, and Vista keeps warning him that he has viruses or spyware (these are not internet pop-ups, they are OS warning messages that appear even when IE is not open, but they all lead to websites trying to sell some kind of security software) even though it came with a 60 day trial of Norton Internet Security (which is properly installed and updated, I checked). I told him that it was probably the crap that Circuit City had included with the installation CD. I wanted to tell him to copy someones "true" MS Windows Vista CD, or download an ISO, and use his CD key to activate it, but wasn't sure if his key would work with a regular version of Vista.
So my question is: would this work or not? And, could there be a problem loading the OEM specific drivers he would need from the installation disc, without actually installing from the disk.
PS: He was later able to solve the warning message issues by reporting the problem to Microsoft. They installed an "update" which basically disabled most of the bloatware. So it looks like Microsoft is working to rid people of the crap that that their vendors are adding to their software. A very good idea in my opinion.
Not very surprising. Having written code and hardware for a Nasdaq 100 company and a small company, it is obvious that a big company will rarely do anything right. In a big company you have an army of marketing people (that know little to nothing about the product) deciding what "cool" new features the software should have. Even the engineering departments devolve into big political battles. You can't even wipe yourself in the toilet without getting 50 people to sign off on it. Consider the gazillions of dollars microsoft has spent on R&D. Now consider the new technologies they have produced - I couldn't think of any either. They basically just park their finger in the sphincter and then lift it in the air to see which way the industry winds are blowing and clone someone else's product.
But now, nothing works (big suprise, I know). My life is one big mess of drivers that won't install and peripherals that won't work (scanner, media card reader, USB drives, video card, audio card, ?USB driver... the list goes on).
I WANT TO GO BACK TO XP, but I don't own XP. Can I downgrade? Specifically, how do I do it? (I can't find how) Can I trade? (who would want to trade?)
Any help much appreciated, thanks.
Incredible some of the comments supporting MS on this. MS does little to nothing however. Dealers just trying to meet market demand.
THE STORY should be MS capitulates. MS is weak right now and every free man should be working with unified purpose to drive a stake through the heart of this vampire. Essentially the people have this one chance and one chance only to cut the hamstrings of Microsoft. To slice open the windpipe so this beast drowns in its own blood. Otherwise we are nothing but enslaved field niggers to be bought, sold and exploited. Through our computers we become the commercial property of Microsoft and those same computers will sell us out. We cannot trust these machines. We don't own them. They don't work for us yet inexorably, we give our lives to them. Such is the chains that bind. No record expunged, no secret untold, Microsoft oversees our lives from cradle to grave and that uncomfortable truth is not simply manifest destiny but todays almost inescapable reality.
This tiny window of opportunity is closing fast and if we don't act NOW it will be forever to late. Microsoft will simply be permanently entrenched as a fourth branch of government. The death grip this company holds over a worlds people must be severed completely and without hesitation. Vista serves no good purpose for people and is nothing but freedoms heartbreak.
Linux runs nicely on machines with thousands of cores: http://www.top500.org/
but yes, that would be totally wasted on Vista.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Well, you could have left Linux on the machine and added VMware with WinXP inside of that. That should work just fin and dandy and there'll be no problems with drivers.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You may be thinking about markup, or gross margins. That is only the sales price of the item minus the cost of the item, without factoring in overhead. Payroll, taxes, business rent, utilities, advertising, etc. are ignored for the purpose of computing gross profit.
Profit margin is different for different industries. For instance, the average net margin for furniture manufacturers is approximately 8%, while average retail grocery chains have net margins that are a bit shy of 2.5%. The difference here is that while a sofa delivers a better margin than a can of soup, the inventory in a grocery store will turn over much faster than furniture, thus allowing the capital investment to not be tied up as long in inventory.
Check out http://www.hussmanfunds.com/rsi/profitmargins.htm to see a graph of the average of the top 500 companies' profit margins for the last 50 years. Most of the graph is in the 5.5% to 7.5% range.
Microsoft, OTOH, has huge profit margins. Software companies in general can have large margins because the per-piece cost of their product is so low that they can make serious bank once they've sold enough copies to offset the development costs.
A quick glance at a financials webpage shows MS with a 27.5% net margin. Compare to Google at 27.5%, or to GM at 0.8%.
And a final nod back to your quote of 50-60% margins: MSFT shows 79.1% Gross margin, which even you must admit is really really high. (unless you are too)
I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV...
This just proves that MS Win Vista is a complete waste of money and time. Honestly, 6 billion dollars for a product no one wants. MS need to get real.
Support for security patches and feature upgrades will end April 2009.
Which is one reason why I spent an arm and a leg for a retail copy of Server 2K3.
I've also bought a full retail copy of XP Pro, with the full intention of moving it back and forth between machines until I run out of hardware that will run it... or until Microsoft won't reactivate it. At that point, a class action might be fun.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
i hate to think of the poor smuck who buys a dell PC with an 80 g Hd, 512 ram and a single core celery WITH VISTA pre installed. It must crawl ...i just got a box( soon to have xp pro OR ubuntu) with vista and with a g of ram and a dual core it is slower than my last box( 3 years old 1800 amd and 512 ram). Vista looks ok...speed sux!
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!