Slashdot Mirror
PCWorld Says Firefox is Strong, Vista is Weak
twitter writes "PC World has released their year in review statistics and 2007 was not kind to Microsoft. IE 6 users are equally likely to move to Firefox as they are to IE7 and no one wants Vista. 'How much of an accomplishment is it for a new version of Windows to get to 14 percent usage in 11 months? The logical benchmark is to compare it to the first eleven months of Windows XP, back in 2001 and 2002. In that period, that operating system went from nothing to 36 percent usage on PCWorld.com--more than 250 percent of the usage that Vista has mustered so far.'"
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Well, I guess posting something brutally obvious is better than posting another dupe.
*shrug*
"more than 250 percent of the usage that Vista has mustered so far." It's really worse if you consider the more millions of computers installed now, compared to those installed back then.
Wouldn't the number of people using Macs be lower than average, since they were measuring visitors to a PC-centric website?
Of course a flaming fox is going to be stronger than a view. MS should have thought up a better name than Vista. Something that could beat foxes and fire - how about: Ice weasel?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Could the United States being in a state of recession have anything to do with Vista's slow growth? Just kidding, I know Vista is TERRIBLE. My karma is bad and I wish it wasn't. I don't want to have bad karma. I am a good person.
dumber people are doing harder things everyday
People can come up with statistics to prove anything, fourty percent of all people know that.
I doubt i'm the only one who didn't need PCworld to say that before i realized it
Pure awesomenes
Assuming the summary is correct...
They're comparing usage based on visits to their website. Not only that, but they're comparing uptake of Vista in 2007 to XP in 2001. As a percentage.
I can't help but feel that a lot has changed over that time to make that method of comparison completely irrelevant, both in terms of MS's operations (like how Vista follows a fairly strong OS that has had years to take root, compared with XP, which followed Windows Me, which sucked in every possible way) and in terms of the overall PC market (like how Macs are much more competitive, and how Linux has matured, but mostly how so many hardware and software has been developed for Windows XP).
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
... from Win2k to XP, a couple of weeks ago, because the child wanted to run something that didn't work on Win2k. (We have no Win9x or NT boxes left at home now, they've all been upgraded to at least Win2k.)
In the end, that'll be why people upgrade to Vista - difficulty in obtaining applications that still work on XP.
The chart occasionally shows Firefox having more hits than IE. Maybe those months had more /. articles pointing to PC World's website?
I have had the misfortune of being required to deal with 2 different computers recently - both were brand-new with a factory install of Vista (a laptop and a desktop). Blue Screen of Death was the rule and not the exception. My irrational hatred of MicroSoft is deeply rooted in personal experience.
dumber people are doing harder things everyday
The same BLOG linked to also states that ie7 is in use more than firefox. However, the tagline for the slashdot story says "firefox is strong". In the time it has come out, more people have adopted that single version of internet explorer than are using all versions of firefox combined.
Only on slashdot folks.
twitter also has another journal entry there, which is hilarious if not for the fact that he spends so much time arguing that Dvorak is an idiot when he says something about Linux twitter doesn't like.
For someone who has already ruined two Slashdot accounts with his misguided "evangelism" and is down to trolling AC, he sure has a lot of fun trolling the site.
twitter, please stop "helping" us. Free software needs people who can make intelligent arguments about why it is superior to closed-source gunk, not trolls who spend all their waking hours making up shit about Microsoft with liberal doses of infantile creative spelling.
How does the install base in 2001 compare to the marketplace in 2007? This is the key to interpreting these statistics fairly. I'm willing to bet the % of new PCs sold compared to existing install base was much larger back then. Let's be honest, a very small % of people actually upgrade their Windows OS, period. Most Windows sales are new PCs.
That said, how's the Vista market share compared to other non-MS operating systems?
So a newer version of Microsoft Windows isn't displacing it's predecessor as quickly. What's in it for us, really? We point at Vista's growth relative to XP, and let out a weak little Nelson laugh. Microsoft points at the total market share of Windows (all versions), Linux (all distros and versions), and Mac OS X (all versions), and looks at us with the same smug grin the IT world has seen since 1990 or so.
I'm sure focusing on one slice of the market gives certain zealots and Slashdot editors their jollies, but it's really taking our eyes off the real prize.
According to this web site (http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62034821,00.htm), Vista, in less than one year, has many times the desktop penetration as does Linux (all flavors still constitute less than 1%) after 15 years. The article also mentions that many (most?) businesses are waiting for SP1 before even considering adoption. Given that SP1 is due in a month or so, I strongly suspect there will be a dramatic change in Vista's numbers in its second year of existence.
Also along these lines, I know quite a few people who are getting Vista on their new home machines, and have been, for the most part, favorably impressed. This, over time, will also translate into increased adoption in the business world. Like it or not, Vista will become the pervasive desktop in the next 2 years.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
IE 6 users are equally likely to move to Firefox as they are to IE7 ...
Reality check:
1. MSIE 6.x (44%)
2. MSIE 7.x (35%)
3. FireFox (14%)
4. Safari (3%)
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the word "equally", but we have 35% vs. 14%. Add the IE6 users, the number becomes 79%.
Should I also remind anyone that IE8 is under progress, including new UI and engine that passes ACID.
for telling us what we already know.
Anybody want my mod points?
...where one of the Vista advocates, apparently quite sincere in his belief, stated that Vista was so secure it'd never need to be patched. EVAR. I bought a laptop with Vista preinstalled recently. After four days I blew three hundred perfectly good dollars that could have gone towards beer on XP Home. A man should not have to be required to make such a sacrifice.
I could do everything I need to do on a Win2K computer, and in fact, I still use it at work. I think there are tons of people like us. The other problem that gets people to upgrade is security, though. The world is a lot different than it was just 10 years ago. The problem is, those systems were very insecure to begin with, and the patches have either stopped coming or are very close to stopping. I occasionally still get people trying to use Windows 98 systems on the Net. That's fine, if you want to get owned in like five minutes (unless you have a good firewall, which most people don't). That's one reason MS quit issuing patches for stuff that old, because it was so fundamentally flawed to begin with, they couldn't even patch it without a complete rewrite.
I showed Ubuntu to a non-computer literate friend the other day. He wants me to install it for him, which scare me a little bit, but I will probably do it. How did I sell it to him? I showed him Firefox and then told him there was no spyware, no viruses, no virus scanners, no spyware scanners...and he was sold instantly, because he is sick to death of that on Windows.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Well, for one thing, I don't like Vista's DRM.
Maybe that document is a bit exaggerated and it's not quite as pervasive as that, but I still don't want to support the MPAA, and especially not Microsoft after the whole Novell/Linux situation.
Don't mind the extra X. Alex
The nice diagrams show what browsers visit pcworld.com - a site whose visitors usually run Windows pre-installed without much tinkering. I remember other statistics from another IDG website where Firefox was leading. Take these statistics with a grain of salt. They say more about your visitors and not much about the actual market share of a browser. Nevertheless, more than 30 percent is pretty impressive for Firefox, especially on a site like pcworld.com.
I use FireFox, but I still have yet to meet a single non-techy (or someone related to one or who works directly with techies) that uses Firefox. I'd say 90% of the people I'm talking about don't know what FireFox is.
Of course I've downloaded it about 100 times... and I'm guessing that 10% of population generates 90% of the web traffic.
When I first saw Vista I realized that there is no upgrade path for me after XP.
I sold all my PC hardware and switched to Mac.
This was the best decision to make and it worked out pretty well even taking my 20 years of PC allegence.
Besides that I haven't used no MS program besides XP anyway...
Those numbers are as made-up as the numbers you find anywhere else. My company, which hosts surveys and therefore sees a very broad cross-section of the market, collects web statistics. I just analyzed our logs and got these numbers, which I trust far more than thecounter, whatever the fuck that is:
:-)
IE6 (all operating systems) 35.22%
FF (all operating systems and versions) 18.35%
IE7 (all OS) 18.15%
Other.. the rest
Should I also remind anyone that IE8 is under progress, including new UI and engine that passes ACID.
You could, if you wanted to hear someone remind you that Firefox 3 is about to come out (far sooner than IE8) and also passes ACID, as if that were relevant.
Note, these are not the opinions of my employer, but they are the data of my employer.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
My simple issue with it, the scrolling "all programs" menu. I CAN NOT stand it! There are other issues, but that pisses me off the most.
Of course, someone will say that you can switch it classic style, well, I don't want it to look like windows 95 w/o the quick access to my documents, my computer, network, printers, etc.
Why couldn't they have an option to have a XP like menu. I don't dislike vista because it causes problems (I have it running on one PC and the GF has it on her laptop), I dislike vista because I think the new UI sucks.
Gone!
We'd all be decrying the downfall of Microsoft. Does anyone realize how much 14% is? Its huge!
'Adopted' might be the wrong word.
It has more to do with MS forcing IE7 in the windows XP priority updates. Prior to that, the IE7 uptake was very small outside of new systems. (This is anecdotal, I deal with 10-20 different personal systems a day, so I get a decent picture of all of it). IE7 suffered from the same problem Firefox does, most people don't know that there are alternatives to whatever they have right now, be it IE6, IE7, or Safari for mac users, heck, how many Linux users even know they can get opera, or about seamonkey?.
Since the typical home user will answer 'yes' to a popup by Microsoft. How many of these upgrades are from XP users taking the automatic upgrade from IE6 to IE7? I wonder how many actually thought "hmm, instead of upgrading from IE6 to 7, i'll download firefox instead."
IE initially became popular because users did not need to make a choice.
Therefore, if you want Firefox to take off, you need to get it included/bundled with Windows.
I feel like a large majority of the people who hate Vista do it because they think they're supposed to. Similar to people who like Titanic because they think they're supposed to, even though it's horribly depressing and all in all not that great of a film, average at best; or MS fanboys who hate Mac because they think they're supposed to--while these feelings might have a legitimate basis somewhere (Vista does have problems, Titanic did receive good reviews, and Mac has only recently started to shine), when multiplied by a few hundred thousand misinformed people they cause mass confusion. I bought a cheap laptop running XP a while back, recently upgraded to a better system that runs Vista. I had heard that I shouldn't like Vista. It was the devil. I've been using it for 6 months now and none of the "huge problems" have surfaced--the "Cancel or Allow?" took some getting used to (and you can disable it), and everything is a trifle different from XP, but all in all I like it. The whole scandal about DRM and Vista is petty at best, the average user really doesn't have to worry about it. And as far as security goes, I was surfing around the internet essentially unprotected by outside sources for quite a while before installing McAfee, and didn't get a single virus, trojan, or piece of malware installed on my system (checked with both McAfee and AVG). I've also used the most recent Mac OS on friends' systems, and I like it, I just wouldn't use it myself. And my old machine still dual-boots Ubuntu--I'm a fan of it as well, but again, I like Vista better. In the end, I think people who hate on Vista need to give it an objective second look and think about whether or not it really is as bad as they've been led to believe. It hasn't been in my case.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
Vista (just like XP) has "classic" view, that gives you a start menu like Windows 2000's. I think the setting is in start menu settings or something like that.
Well, sorry.
Six months ago I bought a drive and Vista Business OEM. I flipped the new drive into my laptop and launched the Vista installation DVD. The OS detected all the hardware (on a May 2006 Dell Inspiron), installed the appropriate drivers and rebooted flawlessly. I installed all of my apps, doing the compatibility thing for the ones that balked, and everything just works.
Please note: When Win2K came out every Win98SE lover bitched, then when XP came out every Win2K user bitched. It's a new day, bitch all you want then get over it.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
My wife has Vista on her PC. It's pretty strong to say "everyone hates it", but on the other hand it really doesn't offer a whole lot over XP, and it comes with a raft of new problems. Drivers still commonly don't work. The DRM is an issue, and in an effort to beef up security, it is a little less easy to use. Plus they've moved a bunch of stuff around and for no particular purpose. My wife was almost getting to the point where she could find stuff on XP, and now it's like she's regressed to the third grade. She also has Office 2007, and frankly, I don't see that the fabled ribbon is too great. It's just another, and different, way of organizing the same old stuff, but a little more confusing if you're used to the old office.
I think Microsoft is in a world of hurt, and they just don't realize it because they're still making money. But I suspect in the not too distant future (say, 5 years or so) they will have enormous problems as they market share takes a big (and sudden) dive. And then everyone will act surprised and say they never saw it coming.
RM
Look for something called VistaGlazz?
After that do a google search for themes and you can find a theme that can make the start menu look like XP. Its not elegant but the color schemes and start menu drive me crazy too. Especially with all teh garbage at the front of the menu thats bundled with your computer and all the real folders where you do work on the bottom.
http://saveie6.com/
Something else is if he has a valid Windows license consider installing it in VirtualBox (Gutsy has a package). With seamless mode* the apps will appear on the desktop. This is a better option than Wine since it always works, and no tweaking.
*Two issues: 1) Seamless mode doesn't work correctly with Compiz. Windowed mode still works fine. 2) Ubuntu doesn't ship the Windows driver iso (licensing). That's needed for mouse integration, clipboard support, decent video, seamless mode, etc. The fix is easy, just download the iso and place it in "/usr/lib/virtualbox/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso".
I'm just wondering how much of a backlash Vista will have on the open source operating environments.
.NET. This means that most of the operating system, and in short time - the applications - will be managed software. This will mean that, in general, software will indeed be safer to run - e.g. no more buffer overruns. I don't see any movements within the Linux environment towards this direction. Somehow, just playing the NX-bit game doesn't really cut it.
The most different thing about Vista and XP is the off-take of
On the other hand we have the more fine-grained security model. Yes, this means more popup boxes. But if I'm running Ubuntu, it's much worse. I'll have to type my passport so many times that it isn't even funny anymore. Just clicking a popup box seems more user friendly to me.
Not to nag, but even though Vista is a bit of a pain to work with, are we sure we (yes, we, I'm not a Microsoft fan boy, far from it) should keep discrediting Windows? Lets play the technological game and innovate instead. We can do better than MS, both at security, speed, and UI design. Now let's show what we're made off instead of screaming foul.
That article specifies that the DRM only applies to the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray content pipelines. If either were to actually be implemented on Linux they would have to write it that way as well. Now, the hundreds of gigs of avi, audio, and written material I have on my PC (um, home videos I guess!) play just fine because they're not going through that pipeline. And if your country isn't crippled with the DMCA or alike then you can always get software that frees the content from those crippled formats while keeping the quality.
Shh.
I recently installed vista ultimate 64bit in trial mode on one of my PCs and it's light years ahead of where XP SP0 was, I personally don't find UAC bothersome at all (it asks for permission only for things I like it to ask permissions for) and the PC has been super solid since day 0 playing games (tf2, crysis demo, etc.) and trying things out.
Yeah, my pc is a bit above the minimum requirements (quad core, 4gigs of ram, 8800gt 1gig, etc.) but in dollar terms a PC that could run XP well when it came out was more expensive than what this PC cost me today. If things keep going this way I will surely buy an ultimate license when the trial period ends.
-- the cake is a lie
What is the purpose of posting this? Is it news? Is it the intention of the editors to fan a flame war? Will any reader learn anything, or will they just read statistics which either confirm their world view, or dismiss as being flawed in any of a thousand different ways? Is this just to get zealots of one flavor of another to come here and rant for a bit and possibly click an ad by mistake (probably yes to this one.)
You can spot inflamatory and ultimately useless stories like this a mile away. If it weren't for the trolls which require daily feeding, I suspect a good 20 to 30% of Slashdot articles would never appear, and we'd all be a lot better off for it.
Vista is preinstalled on 99.999% of the world's new machinss so... {blah blah you know the rest}.
No sig today...
It's not reasonable to compare how many people are upgrading to Vista from XP. XP is a far better OS than say ME was, so not as many people would want or need to upgrade to Vista. It kinda funny listening to all the yahoos whining about Vista (same as when XP first came out, same as when ME first came out, etc, etc). It's also interesting to hear Apple nuts carrying on about Vista security, when it's been proven that Vista is more secure than Apple. It's especially interesting now that Apple is actually managing to get 10% of the market and the morons who write virus/malware are starting to target Apple. If people would start to understand that a more secure, more sophisticated OS needs better hardware to run as fast as an older less secure system, then it makes sense that Vista will run slower. Yes, Vista will bug you to OK changes (just like most add-on firewall programs do if they are really any good), so what do you want, less security or more speed? You aren't going to get everything and speed, unless of couse you use a more powerful computer to run it. I've seen many, many customers runnung Vista with no problems (so long as they didn't buy an underpowered system), and yes, Microsoft needs to have a few years to tweak Vista (read fix stuff), but what system doesn't need fixes in the first year. I've heard about Leopard having problems losing files, security flaws showing up, etc. Firefox said they didn't have any bugs and techies were running around telling everybody they should use it, now they have fixed 300 hundred memory leaks with the new beta. Get real people, nothing is perfect! But I'll bet that in a couple years Microsoft will still be the top selling Desktop operating system and it'll be Vista.
Vista is preinstalled on 99.999% of the world's new machinss so... {blah blah you know the rest}.
Close. Vista is preinstalled on less new machines now than when it was first introduced. First there was the big shiny "Vista for All" unveiling, then vendors started trying to get business by offering "Downgrade to WinXP available here!" and being successful at it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
As much as we like to think we're the only ones that matter, why is it that we always look on graphs, data, trends, and feedback from geeks and draw global conclusions from them?
Since when did PCWorld.com become the de facto website that all web users visit?
More interesting to me would be the same analysis from a website such as CNN or MySpace or Amazon.Com which has a much more normalized audience. Did I just call MySpace normalized?
As for all those new Mac visits, my guess is that now that they have Bootcamp/Parallels Mac users are hopping on PCWorld to learn more about Windows and available software.
-David
Should I also remind anyone that IE8 is under progress [...] that passes ACID.
IE8 doesn't pass ACID so far, the demo was manipulated...
on the day of that demo all other browsers had an error in rendering the test (they all had the same error)
afaik it was even admitted, that the test had been changed temporarily...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
To Vista or From Vista?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Vista is the most unutterably awful pig of an OS ever created, and that is a simple fact by any benchmark. I'm not an MS hater, btw. I recently got fed up with a new machine, out of the box, running like an IBM PC300 with Windows 3.x. The folks at HP helped point me to XP-compatable drivers for my ordinary, workaday, mid-price-range Pavilion desktop. XP installed, problem solved. The argument that Vista "just needs better computers" is simply absurd. Consumer commodity software should work properly on consumer commodity computers. Period.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I haven't seen so much penetration take place on so many desktops since Brittany Spears!
rimshot!
or else!
Debian already did that! And don't try IceCat. Don't forget other products like IceApe (SeaMonkey; suite product), IceOwl (Calendar), etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
No, it can't be that Microsoft released a turd sandwich - it must be Slashdot group think! Come on, lets get real here - all the promising features of Longhorn were stripped out of XP's successor and we end up with an OS that adds little in new features but a lot of bloat, DRM, an obtuse UAC and a large performance downgrade.
Microsoft could improve the performance issues with Vista with service packs, but seriously - what does Vista offer over XP, aside from artificial obsolescence like DX 10 being Vista only when it was almost certainly developed on XP?
Please note: When Win2K came out every Win98SE lover bitched
Uh, no. It was finally possible to play games and use hardware with the ease of 98 with the stability of NT. Win2k was the greatest OS Microsoft ever produced.
I briefly mentioned this to one of MS licensing people a while back but we didn't go that much into it. They simply need to repackage the product. This is the same sort of thing that happened with windows ME except there was simply no value in ME what so ever. He seemed to think I was talking about starting from scratch which is the furthest thing from what I was getting at. The operating system itself is fine, the kernel is a superior design over what they had, a redesign. It simply all about features (positive and negative) and price and from both you get value. What's bad about Vista? DRM, it requires much more memory, and price. Step one, do some market research and find out what consumers want and what they are willing to pay for. They can keep the DRM but they have to make it opt in. If you have something raw and unencrypted it should play it and it should be able to rip raw and unencrypted period. The DRM should be modular so that there isn't just one engine, if other companies want to bargain and do a trade of with the consumer over their media then it should be up to the consumer to weigh the benefits and deficits, and then to accept or reject the deal. The new interface is nice, what they should have done is develop and promote an engine for creating third party shells and window managers. Make it easier, provide hooks for all kinds of potential features that they can't quite imagine how to use. Make it similar to DirectX so that upgrading the features of the engine isn't upgrading the operating system so they can have a rapid response to required capabilities. Keep it simple, yes it requires real programming and binaries, no script(third parties will do that). Time for them to do something with MS Works. Revise it and bundle a fully functional version into the operating system so kinds everywhere can do their homework. Include your supposedly open document format. Create a bunch of applets but this time put them under your version of an open source license and watch the interest and creativity. Make a driver emulation subsystem to emulate old operating systems for old drivers and bridge the gap between old drivers and new. And get this, the emulation can be done in kernel mode or user mode. Sure it's slower, but at least it works. Open up the design of at least the user mode portion of the operating system, talk to developers and find out what they want to see, be an operating system vendor, don't make assets feel like your the enemy. Lastly reduce the price to $200 for the premium version and restructure the server features as an upgrade or add on. The premium or "workstation" version is where you are going to make your money. The home, pro, and server monikers, were working so well but you changed them, why? If you concentrate on user land usability features and commit to a clockwork predictable two year release cycle it doesn't matter if the OS is revolutionary. Things don't have to be perfect, release the feature and think of it as a public beta. Users automatically understand the first version of anything is going to be revised anyway. Want to cut the hacker piracy in half? Give your software away legitimately to them ... if they can program or do something else that improves your software. Coupons, discounts, make them feel like they are in your elite. Make friends, not enemies.
You really need to focus on improving your PR. PR should be enmeshed with marketing, and the specifically PR people should have a vision. You need something like Google's "Do no evil" motto. If we do this how are people going to perceive us? One of the oldest jokes is... Name a small company that got rich doing business with Microsoft? Everyone really needs to stop feeling like they are in competition with you. You could turn that around in 5 years if you really wanted to. Microsoft needs a fan base like apple, so that when a new product comes out instead of customers asking if they should buy the product they are wondering when it's going to arrive on their doorstep.
Ok, I'm glad I got that off my chest...
While architecturally it was sufficient, I believe MS held off on 2k being the day of desktop NT kernel due to the lack of the 'compatibility' crud to help a lot of pre-2k apps work (i.e. fake outs to look like Win9x). Note, it's far from perfect (I actually had an easier time running Myst Masterpiece edition under linux through wine than getting it to work on a current XP install), but it's better than what 2k offered. I thought I heard rumors that 2k Professional was originally going to be accompanied by a 2k home, but it just didn't happen (maybe because of home app compatibility issues). It might be why XP was the first MS os to offer that feature, because they had to.
So yes, a lot of power users put 2k professional on their desktop (the first NT release that actually kept up on DirectX), where NT 4 just wasn't cutting it in a particular measure of features, but characterizing the home market as XP being the day MS brought a serious offering intended for the home desktop is accurate. And XP for all the ugly appearances wasn't really significantly different from 2k, so calling Win2k the greatest MS OS at the expense of XP I would theoretically disagree with (I say as I type from an Ubunut box)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Really? DVDFab on Vista works for me. Either Microsoft aren't really blocking your attempts to copy the disc or Fengtao Software are bloody geniuses.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Weird, I think the new Start menu is one of the best features -- I can use it without having half the screen taken up by nested menus. Now the new Control Panel is another matter entirely -- why the hell did they change the perfectly clear "Add/Remove Programs" to the generic "Programs and Features"?
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Oh god I'd forgotten how much I hate that start menu. You just reminded me..
Makes me wonder if they did any usability testing at all before releasing.
You were one off:
Virus Instability Spyware Trojans Adware
Possibly... However, we are supposed to believe that the windows masses never patch their systems as well are we not?
- A commodity x86 computer running Windows is a PC because it has Visual C++ Express and MinGW.
- The PLAYSTATION®3 game console is a PC thanks to Open Platform for PS3. Of course it runs Linux.
- A router that can be re-flashed with custom firmware (like WRT54GL) is likewise a personal computer.
- A Pocket PC is a handheld PC,
- as is a Nintendo DS thanks to the homebrew community.
And these devices are not PCs:- The iPhone is not a PC, but it will become one if and when Apple's iPhone SDK is released to the public.
- Wii is not a PC because Internet Channel can't run JavaScript programs from the SD card, nor are signing keys for other kinds of code distributed to the public.
- For the same reason (code signing), TiVo is not a PC; in fact, the name "Tivoization", referring to the use of code signing to make free software on a device not modifiable, references this.
The wikipedia definition says "The distinguishing characteristic is that the computer is used only (or mostly) by one person at a time, in a very interactive fashion, with no significant delay between an operator action and response by the computer." By that definition, the microcontroller in a microwave oven is a PC. And any machine used for shared-screen multiplayer games (such as a Windows box running StepMania or Midway Arcade Treasures or MAME) isn't a PC because two players are on it much of the time, each holding (or standing on) a USB gamepad.There is a significant difference between Microsoft releasing an operating system that does not fulfill expectations and the 24/7/365 FUD machine that tries by all means necessary to convince everyone that Vista is unusable, mostly by playing the DRM card and exaggerating every single flaw and small bug to death over and over again.
All that blather and you can't mention a single compelling reason for a user to switch from XP to Vista. Go ahead and enjoy your turd sandwich, fanboi.
I should wipe Vista and replace it with Firefox!
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
I'm using Windows XP Pro on a AM2 Sempron 3200+, 2gb 667mhz DDR2, 512MB ATI x1800XT, Soundblaster Audigy SE all on my trusty old nForce 500 SLI. Watching my processor usage hover around 3%. via the Logitech G15 keyboard app... which seems to mirror task managers reporting +/- 1%.
And since you mention tweaking Vista I can only assume you have a somewhat proficient level of knowledge pertaining to the PC. So now I'm really curious as to what kind of hardware you're using?
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Maybe in PC World numbers, but certainly not on the site I manage. IE6 and 7 are split, putting FF on top.
Would be stupid enough to post a journal by Twitter the Troll.
The number of PCs is an order of magnitude greater than in 2002, and the statistic cited means that Vista has more installed units out there than XP did one year out.
You know, I really wouldn't have much of a problem with Vista if it weren't such a bloated resource hog. For the most part, I like the new features, the new APIs I can use as a developer (WPF, WF, WCF), the new look, and believe it or not, I don't even mind UAC. I've actually been a fairly ardent defender of Vista on Slashdot until about a week ago, and now I'm finally starting to come back over to the pro-XP side, mainly due to performance.
My issue is this: I do not understand why Vista is so dramatically slower. It chews through resources like no ones business. Putting it on my PC was a giant performance hit, and my games run worse now than they did before just because of Vista using all my RAM. I'm having to add another couple gigabytes to my machine (taking my total to 3) to get about the same level of performance I got on XP with 1 gigabyte. Now, I know Vista has more eye candy, and if all that eye candy had to be created by the CPU as in past versions of Windows, then I would understand. But Vista requires and uses graphics cards and their hardware acceleration. Much of these animations that used to be done on the CPU are being offloaded to the graphics card (at least supposedly), and I've got a relatively new PCI-Express graphics card with 256 MB of memory. Considering the kind of 3rd games I was able to play with that card, I can't understand how Vista's menu opening animations can slam my performance so hard, unless they did no optimization at all. And if it isn't the new UI that is slowing my system to a crawl, what in the world is responsible for the massive performance degredation? XP probably had 95% of the features in Vista, so why is that extra 5% causing approximately 50% worth of additional bloat?! I just don't get it...
My other issue with the OS is the change in the networking menus... it takes many more clicks to get to the network interfaces screen from the desktop, and the "Repair..." option (which on XP was a disable and then re-enable shortcut that fixed my connection 95% of the time) which has been replaced with a thoroughly useless "Repair and Diagnosee" feature. Has anyone here ever had an issue that was successfully diagnosed by that mindless wizard? And if so, did it EVER successfully repair any problem it found? Still though, despite that massive networking step backwards, that still wasn't enough to turn me off from the new OS. It is the pervasive performance problems that do that. Maybe MinWin will save us when they create the next iteration of Windows...
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
You know, this whole Vista thing is probably a Microsoft strategy, assuming the premise that "MS coders read /. is true." See, it works like this: MS readers see repeated predictions that 2008 (or 2009 or 2010) will be the "year of the Linux desktop." After seeing all this, they create the following battle plan, as revealed by these "confidential email snippets":
Email 1: "Hey, this open source thing seems to be gaining momentum... momentum is very important in everything from sports to elections, so how do we get the momentum back?" Email 2: "We release a bloated, resource hog of an OS to the masses, and as currently nothing but a few Dell laptops are sold with anything but Windows, adoption of this OS is going to be certain, as people will have no choice. OSS/Linux will continue to gain ground and momentum, but then, in 2010, we will shift momentum so dramatically that they will be buried forever! We simply release a new version of Windows in 2010 that combines all the features originally promised for Vista that were later dropped (we'll claim time constraints were the issue and hope people forget this version of Windows had more development time than any other) with a massive performance boost that we will get by replacing the bloated core of the OS with the new MinWin. AND we will do all of this in an amazing three years... just half the development time of Vista (most people won't remember that other huge MS OS advances, like Windows 95, were done in similar amounts time). People will be so astonished and relieved at the creation of this OS that they will all move from Vista to Windows 7 (the 2010 version) in ONE WEEK, thus destroying all OSS momentum and killing Linux forever. 2010 will be the year of teh Windows, and Microsoft will reign supreme!!!!!!"
The really scary part here is that all of this sounds halfway plausible...
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
That statement actually proves nothing. Since PCs now are a lot cheaper than they were in 2002, it can be assumed that a lot more people are replacing their machines a lot more than they previously did - therefore, they're getting Vista OEM pre-installed, just like a lot of them were when XP first came out.
But the real difference here is that if you go into any PC store, you will see Vista discounted for the off-the-shelf boxed versions. This can only be because people are not buying it as an upgrade from XP and this, to my knowledge, never happened with boxed Windows XP versions.
You also need to remember that that, for most people, there were tangible benefits to upgrading to XP. Windows ME was another "white elephant", most home users were still running Windows 98 and XP brought along greater stabilility, better memory management, better security and a host of other features.
The benefits of going from XP to Vista are not so obvious to Joe Public. Plus if Microsoft have to "crowbar" people into upgrading by only making DirectX 10 available on Vista, I think it's obvious that Microsoft knows that they need to create an artificial demand for Vista becuase very few people are choosing to run it.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I simply love the way that the titles of some articles on /. are so vague and misleading from when you read the actual summary or article. I still love IE 7 compared to Firefox (although I do use FF portable sometimes). And with IE 8 on the way (they have a blog somewhere, Google it) looks like Microsoft is going to be heating up the competition (the way it should be. Competition drives innovation)
Because no one ever installs programs from the Control Panel, so the name was confusing?
Without wanting to disrespect your preferences, I find that for infrequently used programs, I'm much better off typing the first few letters in the search box which is conveniently close to the Start button. That gets the shortcuts to appear in the Start menu pretty much right away for me - far faster than I could parse the huge list of shortcuts and navigate through 2-3 submenus in XP, anyway. Personally the new Start menu is one of my favourite things about Vista. The other is the well integrated & really quite effective search & indexing. The rest, I could take or leave.
You can't just 'upgrade' one part of a Windows operating system. For example, you can not take XP and replace the visual subsystem with something else. You have to upgrade everything, because everything is tied to everything else.
So the 5 years it took Vista to be created were spent not adding features but making sure things work together as they should and nothing was seriously broken.
If your friend is happy with Ubuntu+Firefox then that's just great, and it'll certainly help with virus threats. However, I predict it won't be long before we see spyware/adware helpfully distibuted as XPIs, and your friend will no doubt be delighted at how easy it is to install it. Did you know there's a plugin to remove the XPI install delay in FF? Users care about security right up to the point it means they have to type "sudo", remember a separate admin password, click "allow", wait for an XPI timer...you know, actually do something themselves.
I had the same experience, my new computer with a core 2 duo, 4 GiB ram and Vista felt much slower than mu old Pentium-M computer with 512 MiB ram and XP.
I spend the first two weeks fighting to install my software on Vista, and connect to the office net facilities. Everything was different than previous versions of MS Windows, and great care was made in the UI to hide information about what really was going on.
But after getting so far that I could start compiling, I was first amazed how fast the compiler (Cygiwn GCC) was, and the UI didn't feel so sluggish any more.
Can it be that Vista is somehow self-optimizing, so you have to use it for a couple of weeks before it runs at acceptable speed?
What competition? IE remains the top malware delivery agent in the world!
"Approval dialogs" do nothing to make a system secure. All they do is train people to click "Infect Me" when the "Do you want to install this virus?" dialog comes up.
Apple has started buying into this corrupt philosophy, but at least they've FINALLY made the "Pop up an 'Infect me' dialog?" option (AKA "Open 'safe' files") off by default.
Windows NT (2000, XP, Vista) isn't even an insecure operating system. What's insecure is the design of the shell and default browser... and fixing them doesn't involve making the system less convenient or slower. It's not security that's slowing Vista down, it's the extra layers of encryption and extra internal checks to make sure you're not ripping a copy of that DVD you just rented. And that kind of "security" doesn't do anything to help the consumer.
Hey wow, another post with the same mantra: FF good... Vista bad... Braaaiinnnsss...
Try z/OS, and ad a few noughts.
And poor security.
But not a single blue screen, no sir, those are gone.
Rock solid software, I'm telling ya.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
MS sells you 4 or 5 different versions of the same damned software. They are artificially segmenting the market and withholding features.
That tells me all what I need to know about how good Vista is, which if it was any, would lure costumers based on merit and not in marketing gimmicks.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Until Uncle Ballmer lets lose his patent chasing lawyers, which he is explicitly threatening to do.
Well, thanks but no thanks.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I've been using it a year now. Wish I had not spent the money. Microsoft needs to concentrate on their core business and get it right. Like a lot of big companies, they are making it possible for their competitors to catch up by being incompetent.
Newman MSoftie: I still have armies in Vista
Kozmo Firefox: What Vista? Vista is Week
Steve Ballmer : Vista is not Weak. Vista is Strong
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
And how many of those hits from IE7 are from real people who installed it by choice, versus simply using it because their company's IT department upgraded all installations to IE7. Also, I don't really get the point of your "all versions of Firefox" bit, as Firefox allows you to automatically install the newest version.
Of course IE7 is going to be the most used browser out there. It's preinstalled on Vista, probably preinstalled on a lot of newer XP systems too, and comes heavily hyped by MS as part of Windows Update. I suspect most home PC users with broadband have got it already. The vast majority of computer users have probably never even heard of Firefox or other alternative browsers, much less know how to get and install one. Popularity has never been a good metric for anything.
That said, it's encouraging that Firefox is as popular as it is. Not all of those Firefox users are coming from Linux/BSD people, and most Mac people I know are happy with Safari, so it must be making good inroads in the corporate desktop world or through word of mouth.
There are definitely some folks out there who claim to be "conservative" who have scruples only when it suits them. Unfortunately, there are also plenty who seem to be irrational in the other direction. Funny how the right-wing goofs are absolutely convinced that Bill/Hillary Clinton is the Antichrist and all the left-wing goofs are certain that the Bush is Satan incarnate. For my money, all the fringe types are loony.
The important thing, in my opinion, is to have principles and stick to them. Libby, like Reynolds, should never have been pardoned. Ruby Ridge and Waco shouldn't have happened, no matter who was at the helm. Indeed, both Reno and Potts should have been held accountable--neither was. Rational people can hold to a position regardless of whether "their guy" is for or against it.
BTW, hypocrisy? Pot, meet kettle.
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Yeah, it says IE7 has 37% of the market and Firefox has 36%. So please explain to me your statement: "In the time it has come out, more people have adopted that single version of internet explorer than are using all versions of firefox combined." Only on slashdot is right...
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
What about the Mac OS? Surely, Apple sells more than .001 per cent...
How does it feel to be so painfully stupid?
Vista's weakness and Firefox's strength both mean the same thing: M$ can't compete. Here are some of the more interesting comments in the thread:
There are a ton of Astroturf posts about how Vista is not really so bad and should be used, how the browser stats are flawed and the usual garbage claiming that no one uses GNU/Linux and it sucks. All of that is now far below this because the PR crap flood pushes everything down. Ha ha, PR losers even your dirty marketing tricks are second rate. I too, "penis all over your fp. Bitch". Thanks for saving me a place in the discussion thread.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.