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Vista SP1 Release Candidate Available
Microsoft has made available the release candidate for Vista SP1, after a limited beta begun last September. Informationweek points out white papers telling business users that if they were waiting for SP1 to solve application compatibility issues, they needn't bother waiting: SP1 won't solve them, and in fact might cause applications to break that were running under Vista. Techworld outlines the hoops users will have to jump through to get SP1 installed.
I'm much more interested in WinXP SP3 or Win2k SP5...
It would be the same old same old if the SP1 solved the most obvious flaws of the OS. But the thing is this SP will not solve the application compatibility issues, which in my opinion is one of the big reasons why people don't move to Vista. So, not bussiness as usual, but bussiness even worse than usual. Cool.
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AnandTech says an RC of XP SP3 is also released. http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9987 Although I don't understand why "download directly from microsoft" on that page links to http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Microsoft_Windows_XP_Service_Pack_3/1197391546/1
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Here are the "hoops" you have to "jump through" to install SP1:
1. Download the RC1 package.
2. Execute the
3. Done!
Vista will automatically download all updates you need to install the RC1 and install them over the next couple of days (unless you have automatic updates turned off, of course). If you're impatient like me, you can manually kick off Windows Update and install everything with a couple of reboots.
So, speaking as someone that's compiled their own Linux kernel and most of my apps from source more than a few times, the above is no "hoop" at all. Slashdot again goes out of its way to make things seem worse than they are. It's a Release Candidate for crying out loud! I never see this level of scrutiny and criticism directed at any Linux-related software, be it free, open, or commercial.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
That's not true. XP SP1 solved a glaring flaw in some IDE chipset drivers that caused machines to boot into a BSOD and sometimes even caused massive filesystem corruption.
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Integration into the OS does not mean integration into the kernel. Neither IE nor WMP are integrated into the Windows kernel. WMP does have drivers to support it, but the code base is not tied to the kernel nor vice versa.
Rather IE and WMP are part of the Windows platform of modules which are reused throughout both the Windows Explorer shell, various supporting application and a wide range of third-party applications. A large number of applications embed and reuse the IE components so that they can offer web browsing functionality without having to write their own web browser.
Removal of these components would cause all such applications to fail. In order to remove them they would have to modify every application they release which depends on them to have some form of fallback functionality, and they could do nothing to mitigate tons of other applications failing.
This form of modularity is good design. It is one used by many opensource projects as well. Without the Konqueror web browser portions of KDE that load that KPart to function, such as the file manager, will fail. Microsoft has made such common dependencies part of the Windows platform which they refer to as the OS.
Now it sounds that they are accustomed to having a program run by the user manipulate things at a higher level directly, and that somehow Vista disallows that, ostensibly to mitigate the risk of the very malware anti-virus targets. One wonders whether the best long-term idea for the end-user is for Vista to relax their default security policies, or for companies to handle privilege escalation in a more secure fashion. *nix programs have dealt with this situation since inception, and haven't had to fundamentally revisit program designs in order to accomodate any radical security overhaul attempts. In recent history, things like AppArmor and SELinux have *certainly* caused a lot of grief to admininstrators trying to use it for the first time, but both are about allowing common applications to do *precisely* what they are expected to, and everything that they are expected to without redesign, but nothing more. Occasionally while tweaking such policies, developers realize a boneheaded security move they made and tweak it in an update. Quite frequently, administrators have to put more work in to setting the contexts correctly on, for example, files for a web server to serve, or directories for webapps to write to. But the fact remains, the *nix world security enhancements have always been able to perfectly allow 'legacy' applications to work just fine, because the model was never fundamentally broken.
Of course, it does little to change the default resource consumption/perception that inhibits Vista adoption. However, above all, the biggest gate to Vista adoption is no one sees the point of shelling out money when it isn't going to let them do anything new compared to Vista. If Microsoft follows through on the threat of decreased support of XP in favor of Vista without making the transition seamless, they risk pushing customers to alternative platforms. I wouldn't underestimate microsoft, and they always have the XP product that is thoroughly entrenched. They had ME and the consumer world ran 98SE until XP came out. Now they have Vista, and maybe they'll make it successful, or maybe they'll bring to XP the 'goodies' they were trying to bring people to Vista with (i.e. DirectX 10), and stall for another attempt. For the most part, the *common* person's reasons for not going to Vista are the exact same reasons they wouldn't jump platforms, except maybe milder (applications may not run, unfamiliar environment, what they have today suits them fine). I can't imagine any remotely reasonable set of company leadership officially ditching XP until they have absolute confidence that Vista has been successfully adopted, regardless of what roadmaps declare today.
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Odd, it says my submission for this story was accepted, but it doesn't mention my name in the summary. Of course, the editors did rewrite my submission, and it looks better this way. My original submission was a bit awkwardly phrased with quotes. Probably a bit dry. :)
But I still like my headline better, it was "MS says Vista compatibility not solved in SP1"
You're doing it wrong. The 8710w is a Novell certified machine.
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