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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.
There will be no change in the situation as long as the business customers take it in their chin and continue to buy MSFT no matter how much abuse they suffer. If the constant acceleration of upgrade treadmill gets interrupted, at least MSFT will retreat from all its loss leading misadventures and allow creativity and innovation to flourish in other areas of computing. Hopefully. The way it goes, PCs are a lost cause for the next five to ten years.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Are you planning on installing it on a production machine?
Are you planning on installing it on your home machine?
The answer is: Don't!. But, if you do, don't come complaining that it broke your system and that's why MS sucks. It's a release candidate.
Are you planning on installing it on a test system and documenting any issues to see how things go so you can plan on how the install will go when it is in RTM?
O.k., go ahead, that's what a release candidate is for. Especially if you plan on providing the feedback on major issues.
Anyone who installs "beta", "community technology preview", or "release candidate" software on their systems and then complains about the experience and how it sucks should be branded with a big ol' "D U M B A S S" on their short-bus-riding-tuckus.
Now, if you install the RC on your test system, provide feedback on you major error, and then the RTM has the same problem, you can complain.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
That's not true. Sp1 has never solved the glaring flaws of Microsoft OS's. They get solid around SP2 or SP3. But that doesnt stop adoption.
I'm actually not trolling, but if anything, stating the obvious. Windows NT's setup was a good-enough architecture back when "the company LAN" was just a bunch of computers strung together on a hub or in a ring. The Internet changed that, and just as it almost left Microsoft behind back in 1995 at the apps level, it's almost about to leave them behind right now at the OS level. It's becoming apparent that the thing simply cannot keep up with what's required.
If SP1 actually improved speed and performance, as well as add a better legacy/compatibility mode, they might have been able to eke by without people (outside of /. and the Mac community) questioning it.
Not anymore.
I think we're going to start seeing the decline of Microsoft. It won't crash overnight, but I suspect that, barring a miracle on their part, things will only start falling from here for them. Between Macs at home and Linux at the server room, MSFT's market share loss will be slow at first, then start accelerating. It'll take about a decade, but by then Microsoft's OS will be about as popular as Amiga's was in 1998-2000 (roughly), but will perhaps a larger base of holdouts, depending on developer mindshare and markets.
I've never really said that (at least and meant it) before... now it's moved from being a personal guesstimation to becoming my professional opinion.
Glad I went full *nix a long time ago...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
What the heck is going on here? That applications wont break is an upside? Wasn't the biggest selling point of MSFT has been the compatibility with the existing installed base?
This is a telling moment for all the CIOs and IT managers of corporations. The biggest reason why most companies could not migrate to a competing platform (or at least platform-agnostic technologies) was because they were locked into this proprietary system and it simply costs money to remove all the hacks and remove dependencies. Now they can't dodge the cost. It is inevitable. Given that, does it make sense to pay so much to get locked into another proprietary vendor locked system again? They were fooled once into vendor lock or vendor lock crept up on them unsuspected. But now?
The MSFT strategy is clear. They must make the cost of migrating from XP to Vista will be marginally smaller than migrating from XP to platform-neutral-technology. If the IT managers fall for this trap once more they will exactly be in the same situation five years from now.
The key is open standards. We don't have to bicker among ourselves the merits and demerits of open source vs closed source, or free software with paid software or whatever. Open Standards will level the playing field. That is all we should ask for. Let us duke it out in a level field and may the better philosophy win.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
One of the biggest reasons people and companies are not upgrading to Vista is backwards compatibility. Microsoft have a free product called Virtual PC that anyone can download. They should include a suitable version of XP with very Vista license and include Virtual PC in the standard install. If you can run all your mission critical apps in a compatibility layer like this (think 'Classic' on the old PPC Macs) then they could really move forward with Vista and make it a modern OS and drop the old cruft they've been carrying for years in the name of backwards compatibility. If they wanted to they could even include Win95/Win98/WintNT or even Win3.1 virtual environments.
If Parallels and VMware can make the desktop sharing between Mac OS X and Windows easy, why can't Microsoft make it easy between Win9X/NT/XP and Vista easy?
Problem is no one at Microsoft in interested in doing this. I was invited to Microsoft's London offices last month and suggested it to a few of their top engineers and sales/marketing people and no one wanted to admit that Vista was a relative failure. You can downgrade to XP but you need your own DVD/CD media, and can't run Vista and XP at the same time, it's one licence or the other. Madness!
You have much better experiences with Wine than I do then. Usually Wine errors result in the application crashing for me.
I read the internet for the articles.
The problem is that the application compatibility problem is really a double edged sword. Microsoft bit themselves in the ass by pretty much forcing the habit of always running as admin when using windows. This led to programmers doing things like writing to there install dir and using system wide registry keys when a local one is more appropriate.
The real problem is poorly written applications for the most part. The fact the microsoft had to add file system and registry virtualization to vista is just a demonstration of this.
So the question comes...do we make easier to write bad software and install malware as a normal user? or do we tighten up security and break backwards compatibility? In all fairness the answer isn't obvious, because it depends on your needs.
There are other issues as well for compatibility. Unfortunately there is no win-win here. If they make it more compatible, it will be just as much of a security cluster fuck as previous versions.
A one hour delay sounds like propagation time through a distributed data base. So all that it probably is waiting for is whatever implements Microsoft Windows registration to fully recognize that the machine in question is legal to switch to Microsoft Vista SP1. I.e. it's perfectly normal and there's nothing to see here, move along.
And that was the biggest flaw you saw? That's, uh... good! No, you're right, that's the only thing wrong with it.