Microsoft Responds to 'Save XP' Petition

DaMassive writes "Computerworld Australia is running a story with a response from Microsoft to Infoworld's SAVE XP petition Web site, which has gathered over 75,000 signatures so far. Apparently Microsoft is aware of the petition, but says it is "listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs, that's what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially, and what will continue to guide us" — a somewhat strange response given that the vast majority of people signing the petition ARE Microsoft customers! The Save XP movement has attracted the attention of the software giant, despite its claims that Vista has sold more than 100 million copies and its adoption rate is in line with the company's expectations. "We're seeing positive indicators that we're already starting to move from the early adoption phase into the mainstream and that more and more businesses are beginning their planning and deployment of Windows Vista," the company said. Nevertheless vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and more recently NEC, all offer the opportunity to downgrade to XP Pro."

Comments

OH GOD

[barkeyrogers]

So what they are basically saying is, directx 10 costs $300 and youll never ever have it without ruining your computer

Re:OH GOD

[CastrTroy]

I thought there was some efforts by third parties to get directX 10 running on Windows XP. Does anybody know if any progress has been made on that front?

Re:OH GOD

[mrxak]

I know I can play Halo 2 on XP using a third-party tool that basically tricks Halo 2 into thinking it's on Vista. I'd link to the site, but I just checked and it's been taken over by advertiser domain squatters.

Re:OH GOD

[i.of.the.storm]

Except for the part where Vista Home Premium costs around $200, and $100 if you get it OEM when building a new computer (or not, newegg really doesn't care). And it doesn't ruin your computer, but thanks for trolling.

Re:OH GOD

[Anonymous Coward]

Not gonna happen anytime soon. The games that were hacked are ones that ask for a DX10 interface but only use DX9 features.

DX10 depends on the different video architecture in Vista to work correctly. Look up the Wikipedia article.

Re:OH GOD

[Jugalator]

DirectX 10 isn't all of what Vista offers, but speaking of that, I'm one of those who have played DX10 games on Vista and a Geforce 8800GTS w/ 640 MB RAM, and all I can say is that I agree with this. Yes, still. Even after new driver releases and even games. I thought that part would mature over time, but no. DirectX 10 games really do seem to cut about half the performance in bad cases.

Re:OH GOD

[causality]

Except for the part where Vista Home Premium costs around $200, and $100 if you get it OEM when building a new computer (or not, newegg really doesn't care). And it doesn't ruin your computer, but thanks for trolling.

To quote a Monty Python episode ... "You're no fun anymore!"

Re:OH GOD

[vux984]

I know I can play Halo 2 on XP using a third-party tool that basically tricks Halo 2 into thinking it's on Vista. I'd link to the site, but I just checked and it's been taken over by advertiser domain squatters.

That's because Halo 2 doesn't actually need directx10. It has a 'is this vista check', and it might use a couple of minor new directx 10 direct3d calls (which can easily be captured and reimplemented in direct3d 9).

The real features of directX10 like Video memory virtualization and gpu multitasking (which allows Vista to have multiple direct3d accelerated applications (including the desktop) all running at the same time in (possibibly overlapping windows).

-That- is (amongst other reasons) why Vista has a new driver model, which in turns needs kernel support. -That- is why it hasn't been backported to XP. -That- is why its not likely to ever get backported to XP.

DirectX10 itself is a MAJOR milestone for windows, for the windows desktop, a step that brings it to parity with what linux and osx can do, in fact.

You aren't going to get a proper Compiz or Aqua class desktop for XP because XP simply can't do this stuff. Vista/DirectX10 can. But, this isn't really important 'for games' and games requiring directx10 is mostly marketing puff using minor features that can be easily redirected via a directx9 wrapper.

This is unfortunately because it undermines just how major directX10 really is, leaving gamers with the impression that its just a cheap tactic to sell Vista. (Which, to the extent of its use by current games; requiring directX10 IS a cheap tactic to sell vista.) But directX10 is quite a bit more than what these games are using. And this cheap tactic is masking that.

Re:OH GOD

[Torvaun]

Can't be done. XP doesn't allow the needed kind of hardware access. You're more likely to see it on Linux than on XP.

Re:OH GOD

[milsoRgen]

-That- is (amongst other reasons) why Vista has a new driver model, which in turns needs kernel support. -That- is why it hasn't been backported to XP. -That- is why its not likely to ever get backported to XP.
That is not correct, maximum pc had talked with a Microsoft developer that said there is no technical reason directx10 cannot be used with WinXP. The real reason is that Microsoft wants to use it as a dividing point separating Vista from XP.

Re:OH GOD

[Gerzel]

No. I think what they are basically saying is that:
"We at M$ will never admit openly that Vista was a vast failure and are still hoping that our market share will eventually force users to adopt the new system and pay us 300 bucks."

Re:OH GOD

[petermgreen]

As you imply but don't explicitly state directx 10 isn't really about games, immersive games have always been written to monopolise the system and I don't see that changing any time soon. Sure some of them can run in a window but it doesn't tend to be very practical.

it is about the 3D desktop but most 3D desktops so far have been either highly buggy or underwhelming so that is a feature there is little demand for.

Re:OH GOD

[Molochi]

I think I've gone nutz, because not only did I understand (I think) what you typed but I believed it. Maybe it's the vodka.

Re:OH GOD

[Molochi]

Or Windows98? :X

Re:OH GOD

[MeNeXT]

Yup, but if you run any type of business and have any risk from a BSA audit then it is not an option. Otherwise you might as well pirate it and save the $.

Re:OH GOD

[vux984]

That is not correct, maximum pc had talked with a Microsoft developer that said there is no technical reason directx10 cannot be used with WinXP. The real reason is that Microsoft wants to use it as a dividing point separating Vista from XP.

Right, they'd just have to update the kernel, and require a bunch of manufacturers to release new drivers to support the new features. Another not-insignificant issue is the DRM stuff, which is part of directx10, and again needs kernel and driver support. Nobody wants to deal with the mess that would be. For all our MS and DRM bashing, given what the situation is it makes technical sense to use it as a dividing point, even if those technical hurdles could be overcome.

That said, there is nothing stopping MS from backporting just the new directx10 direct3d api for shaders etc back to XP and calling it directx9.2 or even really muddy the waters and call it "directx10 xp edition", and letting the games have feature parity on both platforms.

But as I've said, MS wanted to use DirectX to lure people to Vista. Although I've heard rumours that they might now release a direct9 update for XP to add the direct3d features and appease gamers.

Re:OH GOD

[purpleraison]

Funny thing but, after 6 beers I think I understand too.

Oddly enough I just want to play COD4 on the computer I am building just for that purpose!

**NOTE: I use a Mac for everything else, but sadly the requirements for a uber-high-end vid card meant I had to build a new WinXP 64-bit computer to chomp this game to bits :)

Re:OH GOD

[i.of.the.storm]

What isn't an option? I would think businesses would get volume licenses anyway. OEM is for system builders like myself. If you were going to pirate it, you might as well pirate XP or run Linux since I think if it's worth pirating for someone, it's worth paying for.

Re:OH GOD

[sconeu]

And if you need to connect to a domain controller?

Forget about Vista Home.

Re:OH GOD

[evwah]

what a sad state of affairs where one has to specify that its a monty python quote in order for people to get it.

shame on you slashdotters. turn in your nerd cards.

Re:OH GOD

[i.of.the.storm]

Then you wouldn't be buying Vista Home anyway, you'd get a volume license or a business version preinstalled with new computers or OEM. Either way, it's nowhere near the $300-400 people keep throwing around. Hardly anyone should be actually buying the retail full priced versions, just like any other Windows version. Most users will get it when they upgrade to a new computer that has it preinstalled, a few will use an upgrade version, and a few system builder types will get the OEM versions when they build their own. People upgrade based on their needs, and they aren't going to upgrade from XP Pro to Vista Home on a whim.

Re:OH GOD

[fimbulvetr]

No, No, No, you got it all wrong. It's like this:

These are sad times when passing ruffians can say "You're no fun any more", at will to (old) slashdotters.

Re:OH GOD

[ACMENEWSLLC]

There is talk on the Wine page about adding support of DirectX 10 *soon* and that it might be an option to run Wine in Windows XP to provide DirectX 10 support.

I wonder if they are overly optimistic, or if they have truely looked into DX10 and think they can pull it off?

Re:OH GOD

[Benaiah]

Oblig.

Please correct article. Some manufacturers still allow users to "upgrade" from Vista to XP Pro.

Re:OH GOD

[trawg]

Shrug, Bill Gates himself could stand up and say "XP is technically incapable of running DX10" (or any of the lead engineers who worked on DX10, or any Windows XP engineer, or Jesus), and people would still say its all a plot to get you to upgrade.

Re:OH GOD

[hairyfeet]

DX10 for XP. I haven't gotten a chance to really try it since I don't have a DX10 card,but Halo 2 plays nice. And if I HAVE to take Vista for DirectX10, then I simply won't run DX10 games,and I'm sure there are a lot of people that feel that way. I have tried RC2 and RTM and both ran like a slug on my 3Ghz with 2Gb of ram, while XP SP3 really flies. There is just no way I'm going to build a new machine or deal with such lousy performance just for DX10 games.There are still plenty of games out there I haven't played yet as well as classics I can always revisit. So no Vista for me,even though I have adopted every other Microsoft OS(and yes I did get burned by WinME and I STILL think Bill Gates should apologize for that steaming pile of crap!!!)

Re:OH GOD

[billcopc]

I would be fine with the performance hit, if it came with a visual improvement to justify the slowdown.

DX10 looks pretty much the same as DX9. _Maybe_ it's the game's fault for not taking advantage of DX10's new features... or maybe it's all just a whole lotta nothing with a ton of hype.

One prime example: Lord of The Rings Online. It recently added a DX10 rendering mode - the big difference is that ponds and rivers now crash "realistically" onto shore, instead of overlapping abruptly like the ignorant polygons they are. There's no reason why DX9 couldn't do this, just look at the first level of Far Cry for a years-old example of gorgeous beach effects.

Even worse example: Lost Planet. Wow. I mean I thought the game was gorgeous in DX9, and I've yet to find a screenshot in DX10 that sports any noticeable differences. Just because the shadows are darker, doesn't mean squat! Darker lighting is NOT a feature of the display engine.

If anything, DX10 is making game developers lazy. They're dropping effects in DX9, perhaps because they're easier to implement in DX10 and thus "not worth the effort". Or maybe they're getting a bit of a push from Microsoft to cheapen the DX9 renderer and sugarize the Vista-infected version. Who knows... today's gaming industry is a terrible aberration, looking more and more like the dreaded film industry with each passing year.

Re:OH GOD

[omeomi]

Shrug, Bill Gates himself could stand up and say "XP is technically incapable of running DX10" (or any of the lead engineers who worked on DX10, or any Windows XP engineer, or Jesus), and people would still say its all a plot to get you to upgrade.

Of course they would, because it is a plot to get you to upgrade. They wrote DX10, so they could have made it work with XP, but they chose not to.

Re:OH GOD

[Mongoose Disciple]

Adoption of the DX10 stuff has been slow, and even a lot of the games that support it currently only use it for a few things.

For example, the water effects in Bioshock look amazingly better in DX10... but as far as I can tell that's the only difference vs. DX9.

Re:OH GOD

[Cyberax]

Sure, you'll need new drivers for DX10, there's nothing unusual. You also needed new drivers for DX9, DX8, DX7 and so on.

And of course, I think most of people will gladly agree to leave DRM parts of DX10 unported.

You don't need new driver architecture for DX10, it can work well enough with the old one. You just won't get hot-swap support and other goodies.

Oh, and using multiple D3D applications simultaneously was supported since DX2 (via DirectDraw Clipper object). Vista allows to make _composite_ applications, i.e. a D3D surface which is in turn mapped into another surface.

So there's NO good technical reason not to port DX10. In fact, there are projects to make DX10 emulation using OpenGL features.

Re:OH GOD

[ozphx]

Theres nothing stopping Microsoft from backporting all of Vistas new features to XP.

In fact theres nothing stopping them backporting the whole lot to Win 95. Sure - it'd be a big upgrade and all, probably replacing everything except notepad.exe - but I have a legit license for 95!

I WANT FREE STUFF DAMMIT!

Re:OH GOD

[paganizer]

Looks pretty interesting; Something I would want to have a good 10 hours of sleep and a free day before taking a crack at it.
I read over the site cursorily and didn't see the answer to the BIG question; is there a DirectX 10 for win2k?
Give us that, and someone at Microsoft release the we-finished-it-but-decided-not-to-release-it 64-bit CPU patch for Win2k, and Life will be pretty darn awesome.

Re:OH GOD

[Frantix]

Does Jesus have Microsoft stock? :)

Re:OH GOD

[Frantix]

Great post, thanks for the link! Actually if you read through a bit it looks like theres something about getting shader support with non-DX10 cards. I too didn't take too much time in reading... I wanted to bookmark it and revisit for a possible attempt this weekend. :) Thanks again for the link!

Re:OH GOD

[Splab]

And $0 if you are MSDNAA member.

Re:OH GOD

[vux984]

You also needed new drivers for DX9, DX8, DX7 and so on.

Not quite the same ballpark. In terms of MS Office dx7-dx8-dx9 is Office 2000 to Office XP to Office 2003. DX10 is Office 2007 with docx and ribbons.

Oh, and using multiple D3D applications simultaneously was supported since DX2 (via DirectDraw Clipper object). Vista allows to make _composite_ applications, i.e. a D3D surface which is in turn mapped into another surface.

I'm sorry. I meant simultaneously hardware accelerated d3d. You know, so if one program has a spinning rendered textured and shaded cube at 120fps in one window, and you switch to another program in another overlapping window with its own rendered texture mapped shaded spinning regular polyhedron, the cube in the first one doesn't drop to a framerate you can count on your fingers... its 2008. They should both be able to spin at full speed. While a movie is playing in a 3rd window, on a desktop with 3d shadow effects if that's what the user wants.

These things don't even begin to get near where I'm talking about:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa919937.aspx

You don't need new driver architecture for DX10, it can work well enough with the old one. You just won't get hot-swap support and other goodies.

Only someone in marketing would suggest that. "Hey, lets take all the revolutionary big features out of DirectX10, backport it to windows 98; and claim we've got directX10 working on Windows 98" Because, hey, you could do that. You could even show some program that checks for directx10 and makes a couple directx10 api calls to prove your programming mojo.

But, sorry, that isn't directx10.

In fact, there are projects to make DX10 emulation using OpenGL features.

See above. That isn't dx10 emulation. That's adding support for some dx10 api's using dx9/ogl. That's great if you want to run Halo on XP or something, but try something actually impressive... get AeroGlass running on XP, while playing a DVD movie in one window and WoW in another. Then click the start menu without having the other two windows choke up.

Re:OH GOD

[Cyberax]

Not quite the same ballpark. In terms of MS Office dx7-dx8-dx9 is Office 2000 to Office XP to Office 2003. DX10 is Office 2007 with docx and ribbons.

So? DX5/6/7 came out roughly every 1.5 years and driver developers somehow managed to write good drivers. And now they have several years to port DX10.

 

I'm sorry. I meant simultaneously hardware accelerated d3d. You know, so if one program has a spinning rendered textured and shaded cube at 120fps in one window, and you switch to another program in another overlapping window with its own rendered texture mapped shaded spinning regular polyhedron, the cube in the first one doesn't drop to a framerate you can count on your fingers... its 2008. They should both be able to spin at full speed. While a movie is playing in a 3rd window, on a desktop with 3d shadow effects if that's what the user wants.

That was supported since late 90-s. You can create several accelerated graphical contexts and they will work along nicely. Try to run several 3D-graphical applications on XP - it just works. Now, XP heavily balances CPU/GPU power in favor of the foreground application (which makes sense), but it's a purely tuning matter. If you don't believe me - look at Linux, Compiz can work along nicely with 3D applications.

 

These things don't even begin to get near where I'm talking about:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa919937.aspx

Yep. DirectDraw Clippers were available SINCE DIRECTDRAW 2.0 IN 1996 - the earliest version of DirectX (DirectDraw 1.0 was known as Game SDK). I know, I myself wrote applications for science graphics rendering with several graphical contexts.
 

Only someone in marketing would suggest that. "Hey, lets take all the revolutionary big features out of DirectX10, backport it to windows 98; and claim we've got directX10 working on Windows 98" Because, hey, you could do that. You could even show some program that checks for directx10 and makes a couple directx10 api calls to prove your programming mojo.

But, sorry, that isn't directx10.

Sorry, but what is DirectDraw/Direct3D? I somehow thought that it was a 3D API. 3D applications don't care about hotswapable graphic cards, they only care about that 'several API calls'. That API calls can certainly be ported to Windows XP, there's no great technical barriers.

 

See above. That isn't dx10 emulation. That's adding support for some dx10 api's using dx9/ogl.

Nope. New DX10 features are already present as OpenGL extensions. So these projects just build DX10 API on top of OpenGL. It's not emulation, it's translation.

 

That's great if you want to run Halo on XP or something, but try something actually impressive... get AeroGlass running on XP, while playing a DVD movie in one window and WoW in another. Then click the start menu without having the other two windows choke up.

Not a problem. I can run Compiz while playing Quake 3 and running a DVD player in Linux. All with current OpenGL.

Re:OH GOD

[n dot l]

That's because Halo 2 doesn't actually need directx10. It has a 'is this vista check', and it might use a couple of minor new directx 10 direct3d calls (which can easily be captured and reimplemented in direct3d 9).

Correct. A lot of the rest, well, not so much. And I appologize in advance for tearing into you over this, but I do 3D graphics programming for a living and it just pisses me off to no end how MS's marketing statements have somehow morphed into technical truths when they are clearly not true at all.

In a nut shell, DX10's rendering features can be (and are, under OpenGL) implemented under the old driver model. Vista's shiny 3D desktop and ridiculous DRM (which are separate from Direct3D 10), however, cannot. Microsoft consistently choses to confuse the two, but they are distinct technologies that shouldn't probably don't rely on each other to any significant degree. Details follow.

The real features of directX10 like Video memory virtualization and gpu multitasking (which allows Vista to have multiple direct3d accelerated applications (including the desktop) all running at the same time in (possibibly overlapping windows).

This is all possible on XP with both OpenGL and Direct3D 9. Seriously, get a couple of 3D programs that run in windowed mode and drag them around your monitor. Overlap them. It works fine on XP. Managing the GPU resources is simply done inside the driver. All Vista's model does is move some functionality that used to be common to all drivers up into the kernel, because refactoring things this way allowed them to remove some of the overhead from most D3D API entry points - overhead that exists in D3D 9 (which is obviously not crippled or useless because of it).

The D3D10 feature set could be implemented in XP without rewriting the kernel. There might be more overhead when calling rendering functions, but it probably wouldn't be worse than calling D3D9 functions (and D3D9's API is a lot chattier than D3D10's). There is no D3D10 feature that requires the Vista kernel rewrite.

If you don't believe me then go put a GeForce 8 series card in a XP machine, install the latest driver, and then download GLEW. Get it to dump out a list of available OpenGL extensions (visualinfo.exe in the bin directory, assuming you downloaded the Win32 binaries). Note these extensions in particular: GL_EXT_geometry_shader4, GL_EXT_texture_array, GL_NV_transform_feedback, as well as a few others I don't care to list. Those are all the OpenGL equivalents to the new D3D10 feature set. If NVIDIA can expose D3D10 generation features through OpenGL on an XP driver running on the old XP kernel, Microsoft can do the same thing through Direct3D 10. They simply choose not to.

The only thing the old driver model can't actually do is share graphics resources among multiple processes, something that pretty much no 3D graphics application would ever really do in the first place (because launching processes and getting them to talk to each other is really expensive on Windows), and something which is not required for useful D3D 10 support. Read on to find out why they stuck in a useless feature.

You aren't going to get a proper Compiz or Aqua class desktop for XP because XP simply can't do this stuff. Vista/DirectX10 can.

The shiny 3D desktop thing in Vista is the only thing that really requires the new driver model, as it is what actually makes use of the ability to share D3D resources among multiple processes (it basically shares any 3D app's render surface into its own texture set). And note that the shiny desktop doesn't even use D3D10. It just uses D3D9 plus the extensions to D3D9 that are only available under the new driver model - extensions which only serve to notify applications that their device will (almost) never be lost (mundane window/D3D device setup thing, has nothing to do with actually rendering) and expose th

Re:OH GOD

[dmsuperman]

That's not even the case. It's a DirectX9 video game, it just relies on some code that's only implemented in Vista. I'm not exactly sure which code it was, but when I was installing the game on my XP machine I had to run an installer to install the code framework so it would run on XP.

I had it on reserve at gamestop forever, but when I found out it was Vista only I was pissed. I used to have a Vista partition just to play Halo 2, I've given up on it now though. If I patch it and play on XP I can't play network play, which was what I intended it to be played in the first place.

Re:OH GOD

[toadlife]

No need to spread BS FUD. Anyone can purchase OEM Windows versions of software, and there is no hardware purchase required. The limitations on OEM Windows purchases are that there is no support included and that you cannot move it from computer to computer.

Re:OH GOD

[Calinous]

"That- is why its not likely to ever get backported to XP."
      I am sure there was a similar reason why USB could not be implemented into Windows NT.

Re:OH GOD

[neveragain4181]

Why? There is no real reason to run DirectX 10.

It's been out for getting on to 2 years now and there is nothing (repeat *NOTHING*) that works well (or 'better') with it.

I play a lot of PC games and even the latest releases, i.e. Crysis render faster and just as well in DirectX 9. Even mythical DX10 improvements to Microsoft titles like Flight Sim X haven't worked out either, with the results being a cut in framerates and a slight different 'look' (which is subjective if it's better). I got fooled into purchasing a 'DX10' card (8800 GTX) and of the last 10 or so games that I've bought, all have work better in DX9 (even if they had a DX10 mode, which most don't or even plan to).

DirectX 10 has been a damp squib. I don't know why people ask about it anymore. Adoption has not happened, and it's certainly no reason to buy Vista.

Re:OH GOD

[igb]

You know, so if one program has a spinning rendered textured and shaded cube at 120fps in one window, and you switch to another program in another overlapping window with its own rendered texture mapped shaded spinning regular polyhedron, the cube in the first one doesn't drop to a framerate you can count on your fingers... its 2008. They should both be able to spin at full speed. While a movie is playing in a 3rd window, on a desktop with 3d shadow effects if that's what the user wants.

It's not just if the user wants, but if the user is prepared to pay (or, more to the point, if their employer sees a reason to pay). In a tightening economy, with computers `good enough' to run a typical workplace mix or to run a single high-end application in isolation, the question becomes ``what is the benefit to being able to run two graphics intensive applications in parallel, and what is it worth to me?'' Microsoft are hoping the answers are, respectively, ``a lot'' and ``a lot''. Others think the answer might be ``a bit'' and ``not much''. The market will decide, but it looks horribly (for Microsoft) as if the market HAS decided.

ian

Re:OH GOD

[AbRASiON]

True true, it doesn't cost that much and it doesn't ruin the computer.
It does however perform ridiculously slowly considering it's predecessor, it also looks ugly as shit - and they botched the classic mode so that even when techs TRY to make it look firmilliar it still has niggling screwups, good times all round.

Re:OH GOD

[JasterBobaMereel]

So a 3d accelerated desktop, with DVD in a window, and a 3D accelerated program in another

BeOS (1991) - Yes
XP(2001) - No
Mac OSX (2002) - Yes
Compiz (2006) - Yes
Vista(2007) - Yes

MS Innovating ... or playing catchup as usual ....

Note most game consoles (and game PC's) do not need to do this as they run full-screen.....So it's not a gaming feature...

Re:OH GOD

[Hal_Porter]

Tests show the water in Bioshock is 76.5% more badass in DX10 than DX9.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/dx10-part2_2.html

Re:OH GOD

[Hal_Porter]

Is it me or is the juxtaposition of MS and DNA a bit chilling?

Re:OH GOD

[neveragain4181]

I have this game, and for 'nicer water' I don't want to lose 20% of the frame-rate. It doesn't /play/ as well with lower FPS, just makes nicer screenshots (if you squint and stare).

Besides, Bioshock on the XBox360 (which cost less to buy than my 'DX10' graphics card) manages similar effects, and that's basically a DirectX7 with customizations. They could have done this on DX9 if they wished.

When DirectX 10 was first pitched as a 'game changer' and a reason to get Vista I don't think anyone would have thought it would have been as weak as 'slightly nice water'. DX10 will probably be a technology dead alley for early adopter suckers (like me) and be surpassed next year by an incompatible DX11 as MSFT get's the plan together for the successor to the XBox360...

Re:OH GOD

[ZorbaTHut]

I'm sorry. I meant simultaneously hardware accelerated d3d. You know, so if one program has a spinning rendered textured and shaded cube at 120fps in one window, and you switch to another program in another overlapping window with its own rendered texture mapped shaded spinning regular polyhedron, the cube in the first one doesn't drop to a framerate you can count on your fingers... its 2008. They should both be able to spin at full speed. While a movie is playing in a 3rd window, on a desktop with 3d shadow effects if that's what the user wants.

I regularly run several copies of Eve Online in XP simultaneously. My record for "visible copies" is two on a 90-degree-rotated monitor, 800x600 each, with another one at nearly 1600x1200 on my main monitor. A bit of slowdown on the rotated monitor, but there's slowdown with just one running, so I assume 3d acceleration and 90-degree-rotated don't play nicely together.

I've run 5 copies simultaneously in windows behind each other, sometimes with some visibility between them. Works fine. I've played Youtube videos at the same time.

Welcome to 2008, enjoy your stay.

Re:OH GOD

[TheRaven64]

The real features of directX10 like Video memory virtualization and gpu multitasking ...were dropped from the final release because nVidia couldn't implement them in time and might be resurfacing in DirectX 10.1. Please don't confuse the planned virtualisation features in DirectX 10 with the ability to have multiple applications running 3D accelerated. You've been able to create multiple accelerated 3D contexts for over a decade (much longer on SGI hardware) and the windowing system doesn't have to do much beyond set clipping regions for each one to have them displayed on the same screen (even overlapping). Rendering them to a texture and then compositing them has been possible to do quickly for at least 2, possibly 3, generations of GPU.

The proposed features which were dropped allowed full GPU partitioning, so Vista in a VM could have access to a virtualised GPU and the host version of Vista could manage compositing. The thing that makes this hard is the requirement that the guest GPU be able to save its state and restore it at a later date. Everyone except Microsoft is just doing this at a higher level in the software stack (e.g. store the OpenGL pipeline state and reinitialise the GPU to correspond to that state later), but Microsoft wanted to make device manufacturers do it in hardware.

Re:OH GOD

[TheThiefMaster]

Actually even notepad.exe has changed since Windows 95, IIRC gaining a status bar and Unicode support.

Re:OH GOD

[Ross D Anderson]

How many people actually hot swap graphics cards anyway?

Re:OH GOD

[ozmanjusri]

Except for the part where Vista Home Premium costs around $200

Where's that from?

Home Premium costs AU$455.00 retail here, at current exchange rates that's $410 US dollars. Even Home Basic sells for around AU$350

Re:OH GOD

[Magada]

More to the point, how many boards are there that support this?

Re:OH GOD

[Hal_Porter]

I didn't say 'slightly nicer water'. I said 76.5% more badass

Re:OH GOD

[neveragain4181]

Since I've played both DX9 and DX10 versions (in fact I just nipped back and looked again), I'll go with my 'slightly nicer water' judgement thanks.

If you like I could amend it to 76.5% more ass, but only if I can get a cut of the Vista marketing dollar.

Re:OH GOD

[couchslug]

"I read over the site cursorily and didn't see the answer to the BIG question; is there a DirectX 10 for win2k?"

Microsoft has no reason to update Win2K. They don't have to respond to the customer, because the customer has no place to go. They don't need you. 2K makes them no money.

Works for me. It is my hope that their tactics punish their user base so harshly that those customers ditch Windows. Everyone who buys from Redmond is funding the enemy, and if their experience is sufficiently unpleasant they will stop.

Re:OH GOD

[couchslug]

"I WANT FREE STUFF DAMMIT!"

See the nice Penguin. The Borg ain't interested.

Re:OH GOD

[Stonent1]

The sales figures from Microsoft may be misleading. Companies buy computers in bulk all the time and regardless of what OS is installed, they wipe it and put on their own image. I knew a company that used NT4 for 3 or 4 years after Windows 2000 came out. All the PCs they got from Dell had Windows 2000 license stickers on them. The other day I was looking at Dell Inspiron laptops and they had one that if you ordered it with XP instead of vista home premium, they charged you $129 extra even though all the hardware specs were the same.

Re:OH GOD

[i.of.the.storm]

OK fine, but in general when people specify dollars they mean American dollars. Those are US prices. Btw, that sucks. Can you just buy an OEM version off newegg or even a retail? I suppose shipping would be a bitch though, probably negating any price advantage.

Re:OH GOD

[OldeTimeGeek]

Except that the cheapest MSDN subscription (MSDN Operating Systems) is $699. The cost goes up rapidly from there. If you're not doing development or testing, it's cheaper to buy a cheap PC with Vista than a MSDN license.

Re:OH GOD

[hairyfeet]

No, I am NOT trolling,and the one I called a RTM was an actual retail release given to me by Microsoft for beta testing,which I understand was what you got in the store. But after trying Vista on several machines I can tell you that if your machine wasn't built specifically for Vista(such as an off the shelf Dell) then it will SUCK!!! I build my own and have since the days of Win95,and have no intentions of going back to "one size fits all" just for Vista. My gaming rig is an Intel Celeron 3.06 with 2Gb of DDR RAM,a Geforce 6200,and at the time I was running Vista dual 200Gb hard drives.Not warp speed,but great for the kinds of games I run

I TRIED to like Vista,I really did.But the bootup was three times as long,the network would just die or drop to dial up for no damn reason(and only a reboot would help),don't even get me started on file copies,and the worst part was the thing would just get unresponsive for 5-35 seconds at a time.Just long enough to really piss me off.I haven't actually seen this kind of suck since Win98 vanilla,before the SE upgrade.Even WinME didn't suck THAT bad out of the box,at least until you actually tried to run applications on it,LOL!

I am sure if you bought a brand new $1000 Sony or Dell that came with Vista you might get it to run great,but as a system builder that just isn't acceptable to me.I build my machines for long term and typically only replace every 5 years or so,although the machine I type this on is a Win2K Pro that is 8 years old and STILL flies for Internet and email usage.Having to toss a 3Ghz machine when I can simply upgrade it with a 7600 or 7900 AGP just so I can have the Vista "bling" which I already have better than thanks to a hacked shellstyle.dll is just insane.

And thanks to freeware I can have the flip3D,thumbnail preview,bitlocker style encryption,etc. I just don't have a need and with XP SP3 giving me a good 15% speed boost I don't see that need for several years.And I am hoping that by then Wine or Cedega will just let me run my games on Linux.I do NOT want tons of DRM,or my OS phoning home constantly,or any of the other crap that MSFT placed in there for big media.Maybe they will think of their customers and give us an option next time instead of trying to stuff us into their pissing contest between Apple and them. So I hoped that answered your question,although by your tone I would guess that you are probably one of the "Vista is great" apologists I have been seeing lately.Funny thing is,the last time I saw that was with WinME.Funny how whenever MSFT has a bad OS that there are always some who will jump to its defense.But after nearly 2 months of trying to like Vista I can honestly say I think MSFT jumped the shark with that OS.

Re:OH GOD

[Ilgaz]

I know I can play Halo 2 on XP using a third-party tool that basically tricks Halo 2 into thinking it's on Vista. I'd link to the site, but I just checked and it's been taken over by advertiser domain squatters. If it really works, someone should sue them for claiming false things about DirectX 10 and tricking people to buy/upgrade to Vista.

Sad thing is, directx junk somehow made into OS X thanks to Intel chips and lazy/lame developers. Those Cider based games from EA etc. stuff.

Re:OH GOD

[statusbar]

But microsoft IS thinking of their customers... The thing is, the users of the operating system are not their primary customers!

At some point, if their user base dwindles then their real customers will not be happy. But vista is typically not a choice anymore when someone buys a new non-apple computer. It is typically forced upon you...

And even though I own apple mac's, make no mistake, apple is poised to go even further than microsoft in these regards (I have to pay $1 to convert my own compositions into a ring tone, dtrace unable to trace itunes, code signing of iphone software). I hope I'm wrong.

But in the meantime I love my linux based asus eeepc ultra-ultra-portable laptop!!!

--jeffk++

Re:OH GOD

[vux984]

Sorry, but what is DirectDraw/Direct3D? I somehow thought that it was a 3D API.

DirectDraw/Direct3D is not DirectX. It is a small (but high profile) part of directX.

Nope. New DX10 features are already present as OpenGL extensions.

DirectX is MORE than than just some 3d api stuff.

Not a problem. I can run Compiz while playing Quake 3 and running a DVD player in Linux. All with current OpenGL.

Well aren't you clever. But Compiz doesn't run on XP now does it. So I fail to see how that would be a solution for XP.

If you don't believe me - look at Linux, Compiz can work along nicely with 3D applications.

Yes, linux can do this. XP can't. I'm glad we agree.

Re:OH GOD

[vux984]

MS Innovating ... or playing catchup as usual ....

I never said it was innovating; I said it was an important step for windows. Given its something all the other OSes can do, don't you think its a good idea that MS catch up?

If they didn't implement it that you'd be mocking them for not having it yet.

Re:OH GOD

[vux984]

It's not just if the user wants, but if the user is prepared to pay (or, more to the point, if their employer sees a reason to pay).

1) Both linux and mac os can do this. So MS has to do it to keep up.

2) It doesn't cost extra. Go to best buy and look at the computers. They all have vista, they all can do this stuff. And they aren't more expensive then they used to be. If anything, they are cheaper. Sure it might not be worth it to UPGRADE TODAY, or to buy Vista and load it on your old PC. But you can bet your next computer, whenever you do decide to upgrade, and assuming you choose windows, will come with all this.

Re:OH GOD

[Cyberax]

DirectDraw/Direct3D is not DirectX. It is a small (but high profile) part of directX. So? We're not speaking about DirectSound (which was _crippled_ in Vista, BTW) or DirectPlay. We're speaking about D3D, which is supposedly impossible to port.

 

DirectX is MORE than than just some 3d api stuff. So? Other DirectX part were not changed much in Vista.

 

Well aren't you clever. But Compiz doesn't run on XP now does it. So I fail to see how that would be a solution for XP. Still don't understand? DX10 can be ported to XP (and other platforms, in fact) as an OpenGL-DX translation layer, no fancy new graphical architecture is necessary. That means XP is perfectly capable to support all relevant DX10 capabilities.

Of course, Microsoft wouldn't even need to bother with OpenGL-DX translation - they can directly add missing feature to DX core.

It's only a matter of marketing - MS doesn't want DX10 on XP. There are no valid technical reasons for this.

Re:OH GOD

[Oktober Sunset]

There is some notebook that has a switch to swap between proper graphics and intel joke graphics (to save power), but I dunno if that counts.

Re:OH GOD

[igb]

It's not just if the user wants, but if the user is prepared to pay (or, more to the point, if their employer sees a reason to pay).

1. 1) Both linux and mac os can do this. So MS has to do it to keep up.

So what? I have the good fortune to have used computers daily for over twenty-five years and never been a regular Windows user, so I don't exactly defer to Microsoft. But it's pretty unlikely that Microsoft is worried that it has to match Mac or, even more ludicrously, Linux in terms of desktop features. How many people really regard edge cases of 3D performance as determining issues? Gamers aren't the issue here, as they are tied to whatever platform their game du jour runs on. Who else?

2) It doesn't cost extra. Go to best buy and look at the computers. They all have vista, they all can do this stuff. And they aren't more expensive then they used to be. If anything, they are cheaper. Sure it might not be worth it to UPGRADE TODAY, or to buy Vista and load it on your old PC. But you can bet your next computer, whenever you do decide to upgrade, and assuming you choose windows, will come with all this.

So, at best, Microsoft have spent five years and a zillion dollars producing a new range of software (Vista and Office 2007) which no-one is going to buy, and which isn't going to drive any additional sales, but which people will get by default the next time they buy hardware? They could have done nothing and achieved the same result: would XP in 2009 really cause the Windows market to erode towards alternative platforms to an extent that justifies the cost of Vista?

ian

Re:OH GOD

[An ominous Cow art]

I found the similarity to "GNAA" even more chilling :-).

Re:OH GOD

[vux984]

Correct. A lot of the rest, well, not so much. And I appologize in advance for tearing into you over this, but I do 3D graphics programming for a living and it just pisses me off to no end how MS's marketing statements have somehow morphed into technical truths when they are clearly not true at all.

I agree MS could easily backport the DirectX10 direct3D API to XP.

But direct3d isnt't directX10. I agree a lot of people equate d3d with directx, and judging from the other responses on this thread, for a lot of people that's the only part of directx they care about.

And when people write 'directx10 emulators' all they are really doing is emulating the directx10 direct3d api. But that's NOT directX10.

And I agree that it was cheap and underhanded to rely on the confusion/conflation between d3d and directx to state directx10 can't happen on XP, which is TRUE (at least not without a LOT of work, which result in XP essentially becomming Vista). And MS knew full well gamers would equate directx10 with the new shader features of dx10-d3d, even though d3d shaders are only a small high profile part of directx10 that can in fact be easily backported to XP.

That said, I was in error about basic multitasking. Thanks for correcting me on that.

The main issue in terms of multitasking is the desktop integration not the multitasking itself. I thought overlapping windows was enough to highlight the issue, but apparently not. Doing an OSX expose type of feature etc, for example, would still be out of reach for XP though, unless I'm still mistaken.

Re:OH GOD

[immcintosh]

This can probably be chalked up to familiarity as much as anything. Just as in DX9, I'm sure DX10 has dozens of little "gotchyas" and other important considerations in order to make a well optimized renderer. Problem is, with the almost complete API overhaul between the two, I'm guessing that DX10's considerations are completely different (I've only ever done any real programming in DX9). The problem, of course, is that it's brand new and everybody is probably still trying to program for DX10 as if it were DX9, which is causing the performance hits. My two cents anyway.

Re:OH GOD

[vux984]

So, at best, Microsoft have spent five years and a zillion dollars producing a new range of software (Vista and Office 2007) which no-one is going to buy, and which isn't going to drive any additional sales, but which people will get by default the next time they buy hardware?

Yup. Seems like it.

They could have done nothing and achieved the same result:

Sometimes you have to keep moving just to stay in one place.

And remember, they didn't set out for Vista to have a dismal launch. They wanted people to want to upgrade, but as the requirements escalated, features were removed, delays mounted, and the final result still had a lot of compatibility issues it didn't work out that way. Vista is a project that they lost control of, and it went sideways on them.

That doesn't mean they shouldn't have tried.

would XP in 2009 really cause the Windows market to erode towards alternative platforms to an extent that justifies the cost of Vista?

Interesting question. I don't think it would have eroded that far, but yeah it would have eroded further. But I don't think Vista should be viewed as an end result. Its more a stepping stone. People -needed- to be forced to get off the administrator account for example. That HAD to happen. And that's all by itself has caused a lot of pain.

The new shiny desktop? No, that's not a must-have feature. But it is important in terms of marketing and sales; people see XP next to OSX and they can see flat 2d vs shiny 3d and it matters to them even if its not important in the big scheme of things.

The end result: people will migrate to Vista gradually as they upgrade to new computers. The software will mature and adapt to Vista's new higher security, etc. And when the next OS comes around, it will probably be a much smoother transition for everyone.

And if they had done nothing at all, they'd just be that much further behind when it came time release the next OS. They'd still have the 'don't run as root' battle ahead of them, and so on. They'd be a laughing stock in terms of what the desktop looked like compared to the alternatives, etc.

Re:OH GOD

[vux984]

We're speaking about D3D, which is supposedly impossible to port.

No we're talking about directX.

So? Other DirectX part were not changed much in Vista.

Nah. Just the foundation was just rewritten from the ground up. It interacts with drivers differently. (New driver model remember.) Features that used to be in the drivers and in applications are now in directx, and the kernel. But the developer facing api's are much the same, so I guess nothing's changed much.

It's only a matter of marketing - MS doesn't want DX10 on XP. There are no valid technical reasons for this.

And you can get Compiz on Redhat 3 too if your willing to patch it enough. No valid technical reason you can't.

At some point that line of argument becomes silly. We've crossed the mark. The amount of work to get directx10 (not JUST direct3d) into XP would pretty much amount to upgrading XP to Vista.

That said YES you could backport the new directx10 shader stuff to XP without much difficulty. And YES, Microsoft doesn't want to do that for marketing reasons.

Re:OH GOD

[mpeskett]

The way I've heard it, there was originally a real reason why DX10 wouldn't be compatible with XP, but then they scrapped some of the things they had planned, including the barrier to XP compatibility. They then proceeded to make it Vista-only anyway for their own nefarious reasons.

Re:OH GOD

[Hal_Porter]

He said MSNDAA

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/academic/bb676724.aspx

College pays $499 a year and downloads whatever operating systems and development tools they want and installs them on as many PCs as they want.

Re:OH GOD

[igb]

Interesting question. I don't think it would have eroded that far, but yeah it would have eroded further. But I don't think Vista should be viewed as an end result. Its more a stepping stone. People -needed- to be forced to get off the administrator account for example. That HAD to happen. And that's all by itself has caused a lot of pain.

My only Windows machines at home these days are a few VMs for specific purposes, but even those run with the user logins non-administrators. When there was a Windows machine in production in the house, it similarly had a dedicated admin account and all the users used non-admin accounts. This didn't require a new operating system: it's been possible on NT-series kernels since forever.

people see XP next to OSX

Do they? I doubt many people line the machines up next to each other and go ``hmm, which eye candy do I like best?'' I think the buying decision has been made long before then, especially as more and more Apple get is sold through Apple store and by direct mailorder. I don't know what the factors are that make people choose Apple, but I don't think shiny shiny desktop is that high up the list. Shiny shiny hardware might be: I had surprisingly few problems from my wife for the iMac. I made my original switch to Mac a few years ago on the basis of ``What's the best Unix box I can get that will run Office and therefore shut my management up about the subtle problems with Office-format files that I deliver out of OpenOffice?'' and checking the versions of gcc, perl and emacs that shipped were up to date, but I'm not the mass market.

ian

Re:OH GOD

[vux984]

This didn't require a new operating system: it's been possible on NT-series kernels since forever.

I guess you didn't do much with it. A wide swathe of games including high profile titles like HalfLife are a royal pain to get working in a standard user account. Not to mention a certain unnamed accounting software package I've had the misfortune of working with, software that I use to program two-way Motorola radios (all it does is communicate over a serial port).

Still other software I've used, will only run properly on the account it is installed in, and of course you can only install it as an administrator. Which means you can get it working in a limited account if you elevate the account to an admin, and then turn it back down to a limited account afterwards which is a hassle, (and not really an option in Vista) if it doesn't just work with run as administrator -- which because its running as administrator installs to the administrator profile instead of the logged in user. etc etc etc

but I'm not the mass market.

No your not. Quite the opposite.

The local best buy has macs and PCs lined up, and yeah, people did gravitate to the Mac's first because of the ooo shiny. And then a bunch of PC OEMs started releasing all their screens as 'glossy' and suddenly those looked the shiniest... and so Mac's also launched the 'glossy' screens... this idiotic game of making it shiny may seem irrelevant to you... but it makes a much bigger difference to people than you might believe, or want to believe for that matter.

Re:OH GOD

[n dot l]

But direct3d isnt't directX10. In terms of technology, DirectX is nothing more than the group of Direct3D, DirectSound/XACT, and DirectInput/XInput. It used to include DirectDraw (which got rolled into Direct3D a while ago) and DirectShow (which is now considered an OS component and is no longer distributed as part of DirectX). Oh, and DirectPlay, but that died a long time ago, and good riddance to it. When MS's marketing drones speak of DirectX they always follow it with the version number of the most recently updated component, however, as it currently stands the most recent DirectX components are:

• Direct3D 10 (D3D 9 still has current documentation as well)
• DirectSound 8
• XAct/XAudio/whatever (this is a confusingly named/versioned sound framework that's been around since the DX9 days and is probably implemented on top of DirectSound 8 - correct me if I'm wrong, sound is not my forte)
• DirectInput 8
• XInput (API that's parallel to DirectInput, been available since the DX9 days, exists to support the XBOX 360 controllers)

You'll have to explain what you mean about DX 10 being more than just D3D 10. The rest of it is identical to DX9 and is already supported on XP, except for the minor extensions to D3D9 I mentioned previously.

And MS knew full well gamers would equate directx10 with the new shader features of dx10-d3d, even though d3d shaders are only a small high profile part of directx10 that can in fact be easily backported to XP. Sorry to be somewhat pedantic, but the shaders are huge when it comes to 3D programming, and Shader Model 4.0 (the DX10 stuff) is a massive update. In fact, the changes are significant enough that I bought the whole "well, they need the new driver to do it all" line without question - right up to the day NVIDIA released the specs for the equivalent OpenGL extensions and confirmed that they would, indeed, be available in their XP drivers almost from day one.

The main issue in terms of multitasking is the desktop integration not the multitasking itself. I thought overlapping windows was enough to highlight the issue, but apparently not. Doing an OSX expose type of feature etc, for example, would still be out of reach for XP though, unless I'm still mistaken. That's correct. The old driver model supports multitasking just fine, it just doesn't let the OS hook it at the points necessary to implement Expose/Compiz type effects properly. This (and DRM) is why they rewrote the graphics stack, not the new features in D3D 10. The shiny desktop is not part of DirectX - and while it is tied to the new driver model it has nothing to do with D3D 10 (like I said, it runs on D3D9 + Vista extensions + hooks in the new kernel/drivers).

Re:OH GOD

[ozmanjusri]

Yeah, I understand Microsoft's gouging Europeans too.

Newegg doesn't ship to Australia, though some US online sellers do, and you can save some money that way, though not a lot. That's fine for geeks, but when my niece believed the advertising and bought Home Premium from Officeworks for AU$459, it was a big burn for her.

It hurt even more a month later when she had to admit it was awful, and reverted to XP.

Re:OH GOD

[Captain Nitpick]

So a 3d accelerated desktop, with DVD in a window, and a 3D accelerated program in another

BeOS (1991) - Yes

You should have just said "a movie in a window" instead of DVD. The DVD spec was finalized in December 1995. BeOS had its awesome points, but playing data storage media from the future wasn't one.

Re:OH GOD

[i.of.the.storm]

Wow, that sucks. I hope she was able to get a refund or sell it to someone else who wanted it.

Re:OH GOD

[hairyfeet]

That is why I'm hoping the the Crossover and Cedega folk have good luck with the work from Wine and hope they get DX10 running.Yes,I know both are based off of wine,but after trying wine it just doesn't compare with the ease of use I get with the Crossover that came with Xandros Business 4.01.I have Microsoft Office 2K along with several of my favorite games running on a laptop that would be a slug trying to run those games on XP.And the installs were even simpler than in Windows.I especially loved the simulated reboots that allow me to keep working while my machine "reboots" in the background.

For those who haven't tried it,Xandros has a free trial of business and home on their website.I have tried both and thanks to the deal with MSFT where they paid for access to the APIs that they needed it works wonderfully with windows networks.Just use business if you need AD support,and home if you don't.For those of us who have to work with windows intranets it is a godsend.Hell,I even have both IE 5 & 6 for those companies who have those crappy intranet websites that demand IE.And both home and business come with Crossover.

I honestly tried to like Vista,if for no other reason so I would have experience dealing with the problems that I'm sure my customers will be bringing me.But after two months I will tell them that I would not run Vista unless they are willing to invest $1000+ in a pc.And that they should hope whatever thing they pick up from Best Buy has parts that I can track down XP parts for or else they are just boned.It should be illegal to sell a machine THAT underpowered with Vista home ANYTHING.MSFT needs to delay the death of XP,if for no other reason to give the Best Buys of this world a chance for Dual Core and 2Gb of RAM to become standard on sub $500 machines.Until then XP will run like a champ on a Celeron with 512Mb.Vista---HA HA HA HA.

Re:OH GOD

[Cyberax]

No we're talking about directX. So let's see:
1) DirectPlay - deprecated and has not changed much since DX8. Certainly doesn't require any new driver models.
2) DirectAudio - crippled in Vista (no hardware acceleration), no major changes. OpenAL still works fine and Creative now has drivers which interceptes DirectAudio calls and translates them to OpenAL. Again, all can work fine with new and old driver models.
3) DirectInput - no changes since DX8.
4) XInput - no changes since DX9.
5) Direct3D - all the touted improvements.

So everything except D3D can readily be ported back to XP.

Nah. Just the foundation was just rewritten from the ground up. It interacts with drivers differently. (New driver model remember.) Features that used to be in the drivers and in applications are now in directx, and the kernel. But the developer facing api's are much the same, so I guess nothing's changed much.
Sure, but the foundation is not a big part of DX - it needs to deal with low-level things like surface setup and memory management. Almost everything other should not be changed much.

Grab WINE sources and see their DX emulation layer. The base code is fairly small compared to things like shader support.

And you can get Compiz on Redhat 3 too if your willing to patch it enough. No valid technical reason you can't.
There's a small difference - almost nobody uses RedHat 3 now, while XP is the most used desktop OS.

At some point that line of argument becomes silly. We've crossed the mark. The amount of work to get directx10 (not JUST direct3d) into XP would pretty much amount to upgrading XP to Vista.
No. The rest of DirectX has not changed much at all. So it's trivial to port it. The main changes are in D3D.

D3D can also be ported without problems, at least parts relevant to gaming. You won't get Aero on XP, but DX10 games should work fine.

Re:OH GOD

[JasterBobaMereel]

BeOS was technically DVD ready on launch (Be was aware that DVD was coming) and as soon as the spec was finalised could play DVD's

It could however play DVD quality (and above) movies in a window on launch ....

Re:OH GOD

[el_benito]

I think the point here is that parts of DX10 can be ported, but not the entirety of it. You, Cyberax, say that since those are the important parts, then it's still DX10. Vux is saying that if it's less than DX10, then it's not DX10. But it's all moot because MS isn't interested. Now everybody hug and make cookies.

Give 'em time

[Fleet Admiral]

They will push Vista as hard as they can, as soon as they can. Its nice to appear friendly to the XP clients in the meantime, but in the end they want to make sure every computer now comes equipped with their latest VistaWare.

Re:Give 'em time

[deadlinegrunt]

Exactly.

"...listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs..."

Hearing Microsoft use the term partners and customers always strikes me as resellers and vendors not consumers of Microsoft products.

Re:Give 'em time

[therufus]

Partners and Customers != end users.

That just about sums it all up.

Re:Give 'em time

[SpaceLifeForm]

Partners and Customers == US Government, NSA, AT&T.

Re:Give 'em time

[DigitAl56K]

I don't see how they can possibly kill off XP this early. It's pretty evident that Vista in its current form is not as solid as it ought to be for many people, and SP1 has only just gone RTM. Your next generation platform ought to be solid before you ask *cough* force *cough* people to migrate.

Customers.

[gnutoo]

The MAFIAA are their customers. You are what they sell.

Downgrade???

[Z80xxc!]

"We're seeing positive indicators that we're already starting to move from the early adoption phase into the mainstream and that more and more businesses are beginning their planning and deployment of Windows Vista," the company said. Nevertheless vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and more recently NEC, all offer the opportunity to downgrade to XP Pro."

I'm sorry, did I see the word downgrade there? I'd consider Vista to XP an upgrade myself. Anyhow, kudos to the OEM's for providing XP as an option. It would be nice if more of them also offered linux as an option when selecting the OS. At least Dell does. (Thanks.)

It would be nice if Microsoft would at least extend the System Builder and OEM licenses for a while longer; there's really no reason not to people like XP, and they get money whether people buy Vista or XP. If they stop offering XP, then people may choose to use Linux or macs, and in the end MS may end up losing money.

Re:Downgrade???

[jkrise]

kudos to the OEM's for providing XP as an option.

I don't think the OEMs are doing it out of their interest to the customer. They seem to be offering XP bcos else the customer will take his business elsewhere, never to return.

If history is any indicator, it is obvious that big OEMs like HP and Dell (even Intel, with their chipsets) are hand-in-glove with Microsoft to make sure customers are forced to pick the latest MS offering of OS for drivers and support. If the end corporate customer rejects Vista, then Dell and HP will start losing business to system builders and assemblers who offer XP.

Inteteresting times ahead.

Re:Downgrade???

[Miguel de Icaza]

Why hang on to the old?
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, silverlight.NET and OOXML powered Office 2007 are brilliant. Going forward vista will be the only way to get the latest version of .NET, moonlight and windows-update. I really have a mancrush on Steve Ballmer, too. I love Microsoft! I want a job at Microsoft!

Re:Downgrade???

[pizzach]

Now what would be ironic is if Major OEMS charge more upgrading to XP than downgrading to Vista.

Re:Downgrade???

[Vectronic]

"I don't think the OEMs are doing it out of their interest to the customer. They seem to be offering XP bcos else the customer will take his business elsewhere, never to return."

So in other words, they are providing what the customers want... instead of providing what the customers want? I see...

Re:Downgrade???

[electrosoccertux]

Eh, I hear if you turn off UAC or something it stops bugging you left and right just because you want to turn NumLock on.

By the time XP no longer receives security updates (2014, or over 6 years from now) I'll probably move on over to Vista, turn off UAC because I don't like repeating myself, and turn off the minimize/close/maximize Aero animations (they make Vista feel sluggish).

I imagine that will be suitable for another 5 years, at which time we can take a look at Windows 7 or holding out for the next thing after Windows 7.

I'll probably upgrade to something just so I feel the need to upgrade my computer again, because that is fun, and my last computer already ran XP perfectly.

Re:Downgrade???

[boarder8925]

If they stop offering XP, then people may choose to use Linux or macs, and in the end MS may end up losing money.

Don't count on it.

Re:Downgrade???

[cyphercell]

If they offer XP for too long, Linux and Mac will begin to look significantly better, not to mention projects like Wine and Reactos are being allowed valuable catch up time the longer Vista sits rotting on the vines. Vista like all Microsoft projects is a forced upgrade, if the upgrade does not occur then there is no vendor lock-in, no lock-in, no Microsoft. Microsoft is stuck between a rock and a hard place now and it shows prominently with rumors of Windows 8 looming in the intarwebs.

Re:Downgrade???

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I don't think the OEMs are doing it out of their interest to the customer. They seem to be offering XP bcos else the customer will take his business elsewhere, never to return. That's ... um, kinda the way it's supposed to work, isn't it?

Re:Downgrade???

[jkrise]

That's ... um, kinda the way it's supposed to work, isn't it?

Except... it didn't work that way when Win2K was pulled out and XP was the only option. HP belatedly offered Win2K + SP4 as an alternative for some corporate customers, but one had to plead with them.

There's no way any sane customer would inflict Vista on himself; despite the pressure from OEMs. Which probably means they will force MS to extend XP availability well until the post-Vista successor to Windows becomes available.

This is certainly a change from past practices of forced upgrades.

Re:Downgrade???

[wile_e_wonka]

It would be nice if more of them also offered linux as an option when selecting the OS. At least Dell does. (Thanks.) I checked on the Dell web site just a minute ago, and no--they still don't offer a Latitude with Linux.

Re:Downgrade???

[Drinking Bleach]

How modded this down? It should be +5 Funny :)

Re:Downgrade???

[SeaFox]

I'm sorry, did I see the word downgrade there? I'd consider Vista to XP an upgrade myself.

Sadly, I actually saw the word "upgrade" in the summary and had to reread the sentence to make sure of what had actually been written.

Re:Downgrade???

[Firethorn]

It's probably a sign of how much MORE problems they're having with corporate customers and Vista - XP, while it would certainly have the occasional problem that 2000 didn't, it was rare enough to be a special case.

That they're offering it mainstream like this indicates to me that you have double digit percentages of customers requesting sticking with XP.

Re:Downgrade???

[therufus]

OMG!!!!

You just broke my sarcasometer!

Re:Downgrade???

[kylehase]

True, it's can't really be called a downgrade especially since most OEMs offer

[ ] Vista business add $0

for XP Pro machines. If they want to market it as a downgrade they should differ the price for XP and Vista to give the appearance of increased value in Vista or perhaps call it a Free Upgrade! . Unfortunately though I think a price difference would not only save XP fans a few dollars but also turn some potential Vista customers XP.

Re:Downgrade???

[dwillden]

Anyhow, kudos to the OEM's for providing XP as an option

Which ones, or rather for who? It seems this option is mostly only available for big business purchases. I tried to find a Home user model machine with XP as an option. I could get it on a low end machine that really shouldn't try Vista anyway, or in the Business lines that didn't have the graphics capabilities I wanted, but in order to get the Processor, ram and Video capabilities I wanted I could not get XP, not online, not via the phone. And that went for Dell, HP and Toshiba. I gave up looking after that, and just bought the highest power machine I could afford in order to offset the pains of Vista. Now I've got most everything set up, but I am still tempted from time to time to d/l a crack of XP and give my machine a performance boost.

Re:Downgrade???

[cyphercell]

In a all the years I've posted to slashdot I have never bitched about a moderation, until now. Seriously, Internet Explorer lost market share because it sat there, unimproved, for years. I'm very certain that Microsoft is looking at XP vs. Vista and saying "we've got to look innovative, Now!", I mean I honestly think that most current Linux distros are way more advanced than XP, Mac is more advanced than XP, and if XP looks better than Vista, what the fuck do you think Microsoft is thinking when they schedule a release date for windows 7 (oops! ok, I get it now) next year. I think that if Microsoft doesn't get something out next year, they *will* lose market share, and more of it the longer this situation stands. XP is good enough, but when you can get something good enough plus real tangible perks (unlike a Vista deployment), it's a no-brainer - CIOs are NOT going to let their budgets dry up.

Re:Downgrade???

[Z80xxc!]

Here's some dells
What about an HP?
Dell Business, can have up to a 512MB 8800GT, 4GB RAM, Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz.
You asked for power

That took me all of about 10 minutes to find. Dell has been the best about providing XP to both businesses and consumers as an easy-to-find option; HP seems to be a bit less cooperative.

Re:Downgrade???

[tygerstripes]

Here's a very well-written article describing the upgrade from Vista to XP.

It gave me the confidence I needed to make the switch, and I think it'll do the same for you...

Re:Downgrade???

[nickyj]

Also www.alienware.com is still offering XP (home or pro) I just ordered myself a new machine with bells and whistles. I could have built it myself, but I'm a lazy bastard. I put XP Pro on it, and will eventually get Vista if it ever becomes stable. Basically I wait until my work place rolls it out and then if it works well there, then I will "upgrade".

Re:Downgrade???

[oyenstikker]

They are providing what the customers demand instead of providing what the customers want. The distinction is significant. Customers want a lot of things, but they only demand a few.

Non-monopolies focus on supplying as much of the demands as they can, with a few of the wants. That way they can keep throwing in a few wants here and there as upgrades to keep the money coming in.

Monopolies (usually) focus on maintaining the monopoly, customer wants and demands notwithstanding.

Re:Downgrade???

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I agree that this is a change, but my whole point was that it was in response to consumer demand. Companies seldom do anything because they're feeling warm and fuzzy about their customers; instead, they must always look at their bottom line. With Win2K->XP, the bottom line wasn't affected enough (or much at all, really -- more on that momentarily) to justify continuing to offer Win2K. WIth Vista, it is. It's that simple.

"But the businesses!" you cry. And I agree, to an extent. The thing is this -- the truly large companies that make up the most lucrative part of HP/DEll/etc's business don't care all that much. They will continue using the older versions until they're good and ready to upgrade. If the machines come with XP or Vista, they'll downgrade themselves as part of standard deployment. I say this from experience -- in the companies I've worked for -- each with tens of thousands of desktop systems -- the first thing that we do is install the standard approved Win2K image.

You can bet if the big companies actually refused to buy new PCs (in significant number) from 2k->xp, then they

Anyway, I digress. My whole reason for posting is to say that they are responding the way that they should in a healthy market; and I'm not sure I understand why you found that remarkable. Demand is sufficient, so suppliers meet it.

Re:Downgrade???

[dwillden]

Not so easy to find it for Laptops.

Definition of business partners and customers

[syousef]

int isBusinessPartnerOrCustomer(user) {
      if (isBusinessPartner(user))
            return TRUE;
      if (isCustomer(user) && accountSize(customer) > TenMillion) /* Thin the herd */
            return TRUE;
      return FALSE;
}

Re:Definition of business partners and customers

[Lord Ikon]

Lets clean this up a bit:

bool isBusinessPartnerOrCustomer(user)
{
            if (isBusinessPartner(user))
                        return true;
            else if (isCustomer(user) && (user.getAccountSize() > 10000000) ) // Thin the herd
                        return true;

            return false;
}

Re:Definition of business partners and customers

[poot_rootbeer]

That doesn't look like MicroSoft code to me

iInteger isBusinessPartnerOrCustomer(pUser) {
      if (isBusinessPartner(pUser, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, '0'))
            return TRUE;
      if (SYSTEM.UNDOCUMENTED.isCustomer(pUser)
          && accountSize(pCustomer) > NUMERICX.NUMBERS.INTEGERS.EN-US.TenMillion)
/* Thin the herd */
            return TRUE;
      return FALSE;
}

There, better.

No Thanks, Microsoft. I'll Run Linux

[NeverVotedBush]

Because what I want to do today is get my work done.

Re:No Thanks, Microsoft. I'll Run Linux

[NeverVotedBush]

Accomplishing something means administering multiple compute clusters, writing documents, editing spreadsheets, building the occasional presentation (all in OpenOffice), reading and writing e-mail, researching things on the web, and even playing games.

There are plenty of "real" applications for Linux. If you had a clue what you were talking about you would know just how many real applications there are. But you don't.

Might I suggest the Vista to XP downgrade? It might make you a wee tad more pleasant.

Re:No Thanks, Microsoft. I'll Run Linux

[BronsCon]

On frequent coffee breaks, while my desktop reboots. That's why I run Vista at work!

Re:No Thanks, Microsoft. I'll Run Linux

[dbIII]

The above coward is correct. A Vista machine would be functional for those tasks with the simple step of installing an X windows server (eg. Exceed, Xorg for windows from cygwin etc) and a simple ssh terminal program like putty. Once you do that you can log onto a more capable machine and do all of those tasks as if they were running on the local machine.

It's not really Vista's fault. Clusters are something that Microsoft has only recently noticed and the whole remote administration situation does not scale at all on Microsoft products.

Re:No Thanks, Microsoft. I'll Run Linux

[Zencyde]

Hmmmm, doesn't Vista cost money in order to legally run? Maybe you should stop trolling and figure out that the FOSS movement isn't about free shit, it's about actually being able to control one's own computer. Not to mention the fact that Linux makes a better-functioning server than Windows. SSH anyone?

Re:No Thanks, Microsoft. I'll Run Linux

[Lonewolf666]

In case you didn't notice, GP asserted that there are no worthwhile applications on Linux.

Quote GP:

Dunno wtf you'd use Linux if you wanted to accomplish something...

Unless "accomplishing something" means "fucking around w/ VI editting config files all afternoon"... ..it's not like there're ANY real applications that you can do anything productive with for working in the REAL world (as opposed to the purple-pie-in-the-sky-world FOSSIES live in)...

Parent was rebuffing him for that, and rightly so.
All you have shown is that Vista can also do what parent suggested for Linux. In the case of games, admittedly better (but that is due to the games being written for Windows in the first place).

Vista marketing strategy:

[QuantumG]

NAH NAH NAH NAH I can't hear you NAN NAN NAN NAN

Re:Vista marketing strategy:

[syousef]

NAH NAH NAH NAH I can't hear you NAN NAN NAN NAN

Funny. I read it as "We can year you. You're just unimportant".

Re:Vista marketing strategy:

[Herby Sagues]

> the vast majority of people signing the petition ARE Microsoft customers But the vast majority of customers are NOT signing the petition. So you are asking for Microsoft to base a vital business decision based exclusively on a request by .01% of their users? At the same price, and with the same availability, Vista is outselling XP by a wide margin. So I think they ARE listening to their customers. Anyway, you probably said the same thing six years ago. At least you are consistent.

Re:Vista marketing strategy:

[Dark_MadMax666]

You know it is because must probably 99.999% are ignorant and/or would never bother with something like a silly online petition . That doesnt mean though that all that 99.999% are perfectly happy with it. In fact given that very few ppl would even bother with petitions seems like 75k translates into a very large percentage of unsatisfied customers (if ,say, out of all customers 100k would use the petition and 75k did it that would be a decent shot at saying around 70% of customers like XP back)

Re:Vista marketing strategy:

[louisadkins]

Vista Marketing Strategy or White House Political Plan?

Re:Vista marketing strategy:

[shanen]

Basically off topic, but I see by your sig that you seem to agree with me on the meta-topic of moderation. One of my [rather numerous and vigorously ignored] suggestions to improve the moderation might amuse you:

I suggested that they decide on a (relatively) small number of dimensions of moderation, and moderators be allowed to give + or - mod points in each dimension, and the dimensions would then be accumulated and subject to interpretation. As it applies to your sig, I think a classic troll post would have a profile like -5 true, -5 sincere, and -5 polite. Actually, I'm not sure about including the "true" dimension there, since it is quite possible for a troll to use some parts of the truth, but almost surely not +5 true...

Part of this particular idea was to associate the mod dimensions back to the posters (as multi-dimensional karma) by tracking how their posts are moderated. For example, if a lot of your posts are moderated wise (or insightful), then you'd wind up +5 wise--and your wise moderations would also count double. (Another part of the idea was that more people should have mod points...)

Re:Vista marketing strategy:

[syousef]

Interesting.

But it sounds like a lot of work...

I'm actually of the opinion that we have so many trolls and rednecks now that we'd be better off getting rid of moderation.

The other dimension to the slashdot illness is rednecks who know a little latin insisting on carrying on and on with a ridiculous point of view, claiming they're superior and you're just out to attack them, while...you guessed it, making all manner of numerous personal attacks themselves. The trouble is if you do prove a point against them they just ignore it, and if they ask you to prove it and you say they can see for themselves they call you a liar. A special flavour of these nutjobs is the religious zealot who believes themself to be more rational than the average bear.

In any case it's the ingrained nature of this board and I don't think any of this nonsense will go away. As it sinks into trolldom its popularity will fade. It's sad. At its height slashdot was glorious.

Funny,,,

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always read XP as an emoticon.

Re:Funny,,,

[BronsCon]

Me too, and I'm including this somewhat longer-than-need-be run on sentence to get please the lameness filter.

I always thought the progression was something along the lines of:
:)
:|
:/
:(
X(
XP

Re:Funny,,,

[urbanjay]

You have changed my perception forever, I will never look at XP the same way again. Thanks for the laugh !

Re:Funny,,,

[dbIII]

I've always read xp as "remove, replace".

Re:Funny,,,

[corsec67]

XP (|)

(This being slashdot, that is purely hypothetical, of course...)

Re:Funny,,,

[kypper]

:(

Ahh, Windows ME... good times.

Re:Funny,,,

[BronsCon]

We know. You're on /.

Re:Funny,,,

[tsalaroth]

vi FTW!

Is it sad that I've installed gvim on my workstation? They're forcing me to use XP.

Wait...

To traslate:

[calebt3]

No.

Wow.

[greenguy]

I never thought there would be a day when XP would be considered a step up from the current state of affairs.

Then again, these days, Nixon would be considered a step up from the current state of affairs, so...

Re:Wow.

[xs650]

"I never thought there would be a day when XP would be considered a step up from the current state of affairs.

Then again, these days, Nixon would be considered a step up from the current state of affairs, so..."

30+ years ago when things turned to crap, I used to say "sometime these will be the good old days". It was kind of funny then.

Re:Wow.

[Jugalator]

IMO, Windows XP was never really that bad, and I've always considered it a step up from Windows 2000. Most people annoyed about XP was due to the crappy skin, but that's remedied in some time less than a minute by switching to the classic skin (and saving system resources in the process). After having done that, I can only note that XP has better stability than 2000 (ya, rly! I've had registry crashes on 2000 on a magnitude I've never seen on XP; actually XP with good drivers quite rarely crash for being a consumer OS), much improved hardware support, driver rollback support, fast user switching, networking over FireWire & Bluetooth, etc.

And since XP is getting pretty old, the recommended specs to run it fairly well is still just about 256-512 MB RAM or so on a 300+ MHz CPU.

Re:Wow.

[Shados]

The original WinXP ran like garbage on a 300 mhz CPU. 256 megs of RAM was ok-ish, but 500 mhz was needed to run it better than Vista-on-512megs-and-1.5ghz speed. With SP2, totally forget about running it on that kind of hardware.

Btw, the registry crash of Win2k was fixed a the second service pack, if I remember well (I know for a fact it was fixed, but I dont remember exactly which SP had the fix in it).

Re:Wow.

[techno-vampire]

Nixon did a fine job of screwing up your health system.

Yes, but at least I got VA benefits out of the deal. And, I'll probably be getting Agent Orange compensation RSN, thanx to the courts throwing out the old rules about "boots on the ground."

Re:Wow.

[GrEmLiN76X]

Personally, next system I build... which will probably be a really high-end gaming rig, I really plan on running with Win2k Pro. Until support for it gets SO shitty that I've no real choice. Meanwhile I've got a legit Vista Ultimate disc sitting under my glass of rum and coke.

With Win2k Pro on this hardware configuration, I ran the system for about 10 months, no reboots. It was rock solid. (Actually, funny that; A utility company showed up to the neighbor's house to do work and cut power to the wrong house by mistake, which is what ended that 10+ months run.) I used the PC every single day (save for a few days that I left it on and went on vacation) and I did gaming on it (HL2 and other demanding games), I did Photoshop work on it, I left FireFox running with tons of tabs open, I always had crap going on it, constantly. Any windows updates that came along I installed and chose "Restart Later" and kept goin'. NO stability issues, no warnings or errors or programs crashing. NOTHING.

With XP, even with it battened down a fair amount to use a minimum of resources under normal operation, after about 10 days programs begin to act weird, Explorer will do funny things and eye candy will screw up (shadows from windows getting stuck to the desktop when dragging a window, for instance).. Everything just starts to royally fuck up and fall apart after about 10 days. Reboot and things are OK, but XP just sits and shits on itself, and I fucking hate it. Windows 2000 Professional is by far my favorite Microsoft product; Second only to Microsoft Bob.

Re:Wow.

[SilentOneNCW]

XP SP2 runs quite well on my 350MHz w/ 256 MB of RAM.

Re:Wow.

[BenoitRen]

Have you actually tried to run XP on those specs? Because it will crawl, I tell you.

Re:Wow.

[ncryptd]

switching to the classic skin (and saving system resources in the process)

That saves a tiny bit of memory, but you get far more substantial savings by disabling the Windows Theme service entirely. After you've switched to the classic skin, disable the service using services.msc, and XP won't bother loading the uxtheme engine at all. Or you could use 2000 and avoid even installing the theme engine ;-)

The only downside: it makes your login window look a bit unattractive.

Re:Wow.

[Blakey Rat]

I never thought there would be a day when XP would be considered a step up from the current state of affairs.

It's considered a step up from the current state of affairs... by about a dozen loud posters on Slashdot. "Dozen loud posters on Slashdot" != "Reality".

Re:Wow.

[saintlupus]

I think he looks more like Kevin Spacey's creepy older brother, myself.

--saint

Re:Wow.

[adolf]

It should be noted, at this point, that Vista dropped support for networking over Firewire.

Bloody shame, really. I've only used it a couple of times under XP, but both times it was so fast it felt like I was working with local disks instead of network shares.

It was simple, too: Plug in, automatically get assigned an addresses in the 169.254.x.x range for both ends of the connection, type the name of the remote machine into Windows Explorer, and go.

I guess it was too good of an idea.

Re:FRISTY POSTTY!!!

[Macthorpe]

Troll you may be, yet I think I'll find this comment slightly more insightful than the avalanche of "durhurhur XP is an upgrade" comments that about 30 people will think they're original and/or funny by saying.

If only...

[ichbineinneuben]

...we had drawn the line in the sand with Windows 2000, the last honest OS they made (honest = an attempt to meet users needs; dishonest = corporate marketing strategy comes before users, and it isn't spyware if we say so).

customer = serf;

[Scrameustache]

"listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs, that's what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially, and what will continue to guide us" -- a somewhat strange response given that the vast majority of people signing the petition ARE Microsoft customers! Serfdom is the socio-economic status of peasants under feudalism, and specifically relates to Manorialism. It was a condition of bondage or modified slavery seen primarily during the Middle Ages in Europe. Serfdom was the enforced labour of serfs on the fields of landowners, in return for protection and the right to work on their leased fields.

Instead of plowing a field, we're moving bits and bytes.

Microsoft listens to the lords and barons, not to the serfs (barring a massive uprising and the occasional symbolic act of obligatory good faith).

Re:customer = serf;

[frup]

Brings a whole new meaning to free software then :P. We who use it are the freemen, our great barons and lords who write our software kind and generous and our system of monarchy, much like Sparta has two great kings, Linus and RMS.

Re:customer = serf;

[Scrameustache]

Brings a whole new meaning to free software then :P. We who use it are the freemen, our great barons and lords who write our software kind and generous and our system of monarchy, much like Sparta has two great kings, Linus and RMS. Linus is more of a mason than a spartan :)

"Customers" vs. "Consumers"

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that this has been mentioned before in the Apple/ATT discussions over the iPhone. Let me see if I can explain it any more plainly:

I have a friend that works in "Consumer Relations" for GE - basically, that means dealing with you and me. The "Customer Relations" department deals with the likes of Sears.

When Microsoft says they are listening to their customers, that means they are listening to OEMs, Best Buy/CompUSA type stores, or Fortune 500s with huge install bases.

You and I are, once again, the consumer - and we'll get what's available based on what people want to sell us.

It makes sense that companies like Dell will respond to people's demands for XP, just as they did with Linux - we are their customers, and we affect their bottom line. And unless Michael Dell is signing that petition, then it's not going to amount to a hill of beans.

However, the Dells of the world have other lines of communication with Microsoft, not some poxy little web petition.

Anyone who thinks that a web petition is going to get results probably thinks that singing Bob Dylan songs on the National Mall will end the war in Iraq.

Why wait a coupla years

[EmbeddedJanitor]

You can install Vista and get screwed today! Get a 2 year head start on your friends!

Incompetence hangs in the air like...

[Futurepower(R)]

Quote from the article: ... a Microsoft spokesperson in the US told Computerworld: "We're aware of it, but are listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs. That's what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially, and what will continue to guide us."

So much of what comes from Microsoft seems depersonalized, as though employees just go through the motions, realizing that nothing they do will change the basic nature of the fundamental failures in the company.

Incompetence hangs in the air like the cold stench of death.

Re:Incompetence hangs in the air like...

[jo42]

Microsoft can't say that they are going to extend XP support based on a petition. This would be an admission that Vista is a pile of poop. They have to save face and spout brain-dead corporate marketing nonsense. Welcome to the modern, corporate, world.

Re:Incompetence hangs in the air like...

[NickDoulas]

This actually seems perfectly appropriate given that they do not really have millions of consumers as their customers. Their customers are mostly big corporate hardware manufacturers. That is why millions of people complaining to Microsoft won't mean as much as if people stop buying from hardware manufacturers that do not offer what people want.

Re:Incompetence hangs in the air like...

[Blakey Rat]

Be honest with me:

Is there any statement they could possibly have said that wouldn't result in 400 Slashdot comments talking about how crappy Vista is? What would this statement look like?

In any case, is this a surprise? They're saying that the 100k retails they sell every year don't influence their opinion as much as the 250 million that Dell and HP are selling every month. Duh? It kind of reminds me of the old woman in Futurama who goes to the stockholder meeting with one share and demands to be heard.

Re:what about small businesses!

[Macthorpe]

Making the Areo interface mandatory 5 words in and your comment failed. Aero is not mandatory.

Try again, grasshopper.

Re:what about small businesses!

[Shados]

Ok, so I have 2 computers running Vista side by side. One of them is on Vista Ultimate, which is my own personal machine. The other one is my job's supplied computer, which is running the business version of Vista (telecommuting and all), both hooked with a KVM switch.

Now, let see. My computer, yes, Vista Ultimate, yes, Aero at on, yes. All good. Now, switch to the other machine, ok, now let see....no Aero, hmm....strange, since its mendatory as you say... Now now let see... oh yes, because my work machine isn't graphically powerful enough to run it, so I had to disable it...now now, how could that be....

Re:what about small businesses!

[frup]

From my experience home basic is the worst. It's being sold on 512mb ram machines and it is just so sluggish. Everyone I know who has bought home basic machines has now switched to Ubuntu with my help. Home premium on the other hand comes on decent machines with 2GB+ ram runs a lot better. Obviously it's more resource intensive but the machines it is sold on are so much better that it doesn't seem that way. Most windows users who have home premium are reasonably satisfied. It's a lot harder to get them to switch. Home premium runs fine with aero turned off in Virtual box when it is given 2GB of ram too...

In otherwords..

[agendi]

That is MS speak for we will see if the partners (read manufacturers) want it otherwise we will keep pushing a system that requires people to update their hardware. I don't get the feeling that the "customer" they are listening to is the general WinXP using consumer...

Re:Your mom is a small business!

[Fx.Dr]

Funny, that's the sound my budget made when running the numbers on the cost of upgrading my client PCs to Vista...

Funny.

[Trogre]

How many of us back in 2001 could have imagined the day when we would be fighting to save Windows XP?

It is a strange world.

Re:Funny.

[MT628496]

It's interesting how we seem to fear new technology that comes from Microsoft simply because it comes from Microsoft. Reading that thread, I see quite a few people that had little desire to migrate and now, it's been established that XP turned out quite well.

I wonder if in time, Vista will be the same way. After everyone saying not so great things about it for so long, will everyone praise it a few years from now?

It seems that one of the possibilities is that it's simply fashionable to dislike initial Microsoft offerings. I hardly use Windows of any flavor, so I can't really speak of Vista or XP all that much. But, I hope that this isn't just a 'Vista Sucks' because we hate Microsoft kind of deal. How many people from that original thread still have such negative feelings towards XP? I don't think many do.

Re:Funny.

[FoolsGold]

(one or two years into the future, after Windows 7 has been out for a while...)

How many of us back in 2008 could have imagined the day when we would be fighting to save Windows Vista?

It is a strange world.

Re:Funny.

[Petrushka]

How many of us back in 2001 could have imagined the day when we would be fighting to save Windows XP?

To be fair, back in 2001 WinXP was a steaming pile of donkey poo, perhaps almost as bad as Vista is now. With service packs it improved. In a not entirely dissimilar fashion, think back to the difference between Win98 and Win98SE. Basically, for Microsoft new OS releases are downgrades; only the service packs are upgrades. They're very consistent about this.

Re:Funny.

[dedazo]

Man, people just can't come up with new material.

Re:Funny.

[Belial6]

Well, it could be worse, MS could still be making OSes that completely wipe out your entire hard disk like they did back with good old DOS 6.0.

Re:Funny.

[gotzero]

I remember getting Windows 2k on a new laptop after XP came out, by request...

Re:Funny.

[regiegnahtanoj]

You never realize what you have until you're about to lose it...

Re:Funny.

[Mex]

Wow! I'm surprised. I seriously expected to see all "XP sucks +5 insightful" posts, but there's many that outright said that it was a great OS.

Re:Funny.

[Britz]

Compared to Windows 2000 it might have been a downgrade (and some people I know still think it is), but compared to Windows ME? The only Windows at that time that could compete with XP was 98SE, and that was because 98SE had more drivers available and less hardware requirements. But still XP had some major improvements like real multi user support, including switching users.

Does Vista carry any improvements except eye candy? I heard that security was supposed to be better. Is that the case?

Re:Funny.

[CmdrGravy]

Fascinating ! It is interesting though that there are a fair amount of positive comments about XP and most of the moaning is just cautious types saying they'd prefer to wait for SP2 and the stick in the mud types saying Win2k is good enough for them.

Nothing like these modern Vista threads where many people are actually saying Vista is worse than XP.

Re:Funny.

[couchslug]

Who's "we", Kemosabe?
I'd like to see MSFT drop XP as fast as possible, cram Vista down users throats, and not listen to anyone asking otherwise.

Re:Funny.

[StikyPad]

That's not just MS, and it's not limited to operating systems -- the first new model of anything follows a similar trend. Vehicles, appliances, mobiles, computer hardware, and so on. It's basically a given that a subsequent revision will have both higher reliability and more and improved features. On the plus side, OS revisions are typically free. Good luck getting Toyota to put '08 features in your '05 Camry free of charge (or even sell you an '05 with '08 features at a fraction of the original price). Patience is a virtue, and waiting for a given product to mature is almost always more rewarding than falling into the trap of early adopting.

(The same goes for kids, BTW.. I recommend waiting until they're 3-4 to adopt. Anything newer almost universally exhibits constant leaks and alarms, difficulty interpreting commands, and garbled output.)

100 million copies?

[mathnerd314]

despite its claims that Vista has sold more than 100 million copies How many of these copies were pre-installed on computers, and then deleted when the user gave up on Vista and installed Linux instead?

Re:100 million copies?

[mattgoldey]

Probably about 5.

Re:100 million copies?

[Robber Baron]

despite its claims that Vista has sold more than 100 million copies How many of these copies were pre-installed on computers, and then deleted when the user gave up on Vista and installed Linux instead? ...and how many of those copies are open/select licenses that have had XP installed in place of Vista as is the right of the license holder?
I've bought open Vista licenses, but I've yet to install it one time.
Besides, VLK 1.0 is a lot less onerous to deal with than Vista's 2.0! 25 license minimum plus an activation server?!? Fuck that! I got more important things to do than set up servers so that Micro$oft can activate and validate their shit! Are they signing checks with my name on them? I didn't think so...

Re:100 million copies?

[flyingfsck]

and if any one is still running Vista, show him Linux with Compiz and then he'll go and buy a Mac...

Upgrading because we have to!

[mattgoldey]

I wonder how many of those businesses that are planning on upgrading to Vista are only doing so because they feel that they have to? Where I work, we are heavily invested in Windows. We have over 20,000 workstations and hundreds of servers all running Windows. We have in-house custom-built applications that run in Windows. For the foreseeable future, we're using Windows, and at some point we won't be legally able to install XP. This means, like it or not, our future is Vista, which we are in the process of preparing for.

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[Shados]

If you have 20000 workstations, you can get Microsoft to cough up anything for you. I worked for a company that, while they were in the top of Fortune's list, had maybe half of that amount of workstations (not big in the office department for their side), and we could still get Microsoft to print us Windows ME (rofl) CDs if we wanted. They won't support it (then again, cough enough dough and they will. Actually, cough enough dough and they'll actually let you look at the source code, btw), but you can get it.

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[BronsCon]

I work for a company that has over 80,000 windows desktops and over 6,000 HP-UX servers spread across over 2,000 locations. There has been a lot of very serious talk of replacing the old XP desktops with RedHat in 2010, keeping HP-UX on the servers until the support contract is up in 2013, then running RedHat there, as well. At least two locations are running RedHat servers on the racks right next to the HP-UX boxes for testing purposes. That's about all I have to say on the issue.

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[HiThere]

From what I heard (several years old) the code that a sufficiently large customer can get MS to show them is not something that can be compiled. So you really have no way to check that what they show you matches what they deliver.

Perhaps this has changed, but that's not the way I'd bet.

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[Shados]

No, it hasn't changed. You see it through a kind of "code browser". As far as I know, it is what they deliver, because usually the people who get access to it do pretty low level stuff (to even need to know about the code...its usually not pro-OSS dude who wants to look at it for shits and giggles who will), that if it was wrong, they'd notice pretty quick.

Will never know I guess, considering you need to sign off your first born in the NDA.

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[KeyboardMonkey]

That's about all I have to say on the issue. Is that you Forrest?

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[BronsCon]

I'm not in control of the decision. I'd simply be a user.

To that end, I should detail the tasks carried out by the machines in question.

They SSH in to one of the HP-UX servers and run some CLI apps (via a text-based menu system).
They browse the corporate intranet, with limited access to supplier websites, and run flash-based training apps.
They run custom ordering software, which is written and maintained in-house.

That's it, and the majority of daily use is SSH. The several hundred thousand users of these systems are already as trained as they would need to be in the event of such a switch. All back-end infrastructure is already running on a UNIX platform (HP-UX) and we all interact directly with it on a daily basis.

Even the ordering apps which currently run on the desktop are being slowly migrated to web apps, accessed via the intranet. If RedHat can't do that, I have no clue how I've been running an entire PR and marketing firm on Kubuntu and CentOS.

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[The_reformant]

Yuck ... HP-UX ... I feel for you!

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[MrNemesis]

Wow, you must work for Microsoft :D

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[Just Some Guy]

Only an idiotic company would try to replace XP desktops with Linux. I could picture the day when the employees come in and have to get familiar with using Linux. You make me laugh.

Interestingly enough, that quote still works perfectly if you replace "Linux" with "Vista". Honestly, if you're going to throw the user out into the cold anyway, you might as well move them to the Free system.

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[BronsCon]

I don't have to admin it. I'm simply a user. Thank you, though. I'm sure you'd have even more sympathy for me, were I to tell you where I work (I'm not going to).

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[TheLink]

Vista is almost as different from XP as KDE is.

Microsoft Office 2007 is far far more different from Microsoft Office 2003 than Open Office is. And AFAIK there is no Classic mode.

I couldn't even figure out how to get the version number/patch level of Excel 2007 in the short time I allocated for that task (I wasn't going to be the end user of 2007, so I gave up caring and downloaded and installed all the service whether or not it was needed - turns out it was needed- fixed the stupid Excel 2007 "65535=100000" bug). For most apps it used to be Help, About... And the Help menu item normally is the rightmost item.

They changed things so much with Office 2007 for very little gain IMO. If I'm in charge of a big corp I would not switch to either Office 2007 or Vista - you pay the retraining for very little benefit, most of the benefit goes to Microsoft and the MAFIAA. The stupid bugs in it also don't give me very much confidence.

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[immcintosh]

Because nobody would ever think to set up a KDE desktop for their users that's virtually identical to a Windows XP desktop (really quite easy to do)? Because OpenOffice is so very different from Office 2003? I'm going to assume you're just a troll, but on the off chance that's not the case, have you considered the difference between XP/Office 2003 and Vista/Office 2007 vs. XP/2003 and KDE/OpenOffice? I'll tell you right now, I can set up a KDE/OpenOffice desktop that's closer to what XP users are used to than anything you can accomplish on Vista. Hell, I could even pick up a skin and make it look nearly identical, although I would never really be so cruel.

The only real concern is whether you have hardware and proprietary third-party applications that require Windows to run and you absolutely can't replace with any Linux-compatible equivalent.

Re:Upgrading because we have to!

[toddestan]

Why not? The typical office user only needs the PC for a set number of basic tasks. They wouldn't need to do anything like install their own software, figure out how to get X piece of hardware working, or ever have to look at the command line.

Re:what about small businesses!

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, but even with Aero disabled, Vista is unbearably slow. I have a laptop which came preinstalled with Vista. 512 MB of RAM, and Celeron 1.7 GHz. Even with all unnecessary services turned off, it still runs extremely slow. XP on a similarly powered machine would run just fine. Good thing I run Mandriva 99% of the time. That allows me to have all the eyecandy using Compiz, and still lets my computer run very quickly.

Re:Lucky Downgraders...

[GuyverDH]

I'm running 64 bit applications today on my xp installation... Windows XP x64 Pro...

Hmmm - now where's your stooopid answer?

Vista will never run on any system of mine....

Re:what about small businesses!

[CastrTroy]

I'm one of those people. Except I'm running Mandriva. The plus side is that I was able to get a really nice Linux laptop for $CDN 500.

Re:what about small businesses!

[jo42]

Except that when you turn Aero off, and all the other eye candy, Vista looks worse than XP. They spent all that time and effort on the bling and forgot to make it look good when bling free. Last month when I was rebuilding my main work machine, I had a choice between XP and Vista. So I installed Vista on a test machine and proceeded to install all the tools that I need. Some of them didn't work right and one caused Vista to keep on trying to Windows update .NET 1.1 SP1 in an endless loop. I then installed XP on the same machine and installed the same tools. They all worked fine. And the XP install felt snappier and more responsive. So now I'm back on XP and have relegated Vista to the "Another Pile of Poop from Microsoft" heap.

Gullible fools...

[Spy der Mann]

... so they think they can make one of the most evil corporations on the planet do a good deed with just a bunch of signatures? (cue evil maniacal laughter)

Evil corporations cannot change. Well, they could change, but they WON'T. Terefore, they must be defeated. I wonder what would happen if all of the 75,000 people signing for XP would have donated 20 dollars to the ReactOS project. $1,500,000 bucks doesn't sound any bad at all.

On the other hand, this democratic exercise can help to open the eyes of the ignorant masses so they can realize that Microsoft won't change.

Re:Gullible fools...

[owlman17]

I wonder what would happen if all of the 75,000 people signing for XP would have donated 20 dollars to the ReactOS project [reactos.org]. $1,500,000 bucks doesn't sound any bad at all. Wow, now that's a thought. The folks working on that one are pretty strapped. $1.5 million would make a big difference, maybe even push it to beta sooner than we think. Or think about what that amount of money could do for wine, which is far more polished by now. Wish I had some mod points.

Re:Gullible fools...

[Blakey Rat]

It's so shocking, because usually Internet petitions can make wide-ranging changes to our society, business and politics!

Re:Gullible fools...

[Grishnakh]

... but what makes a Company evil? I understand individuals can be evil but how is a company evil? Is the janitor evil? Are the junior programmers evil? What makes it "Evil"? Are they possibly dealing unethically with their users sure but how have they risen to the level of evil?

This is simple. To misquote Forrest Gump, "evil is as evil does".

Just because a company isn't one person, but a collection of people, doesn't mean it can't do evil things. Did various nations in WWII commit evil acts? Of course! Those weren't individuals doing those evil acts, they were entire nations composed of tens and hundreds of millions of citizens, and they acted in an evil manner.

It's just the same as with companies. MS has done many arguably evil things over the years; things to unfairly stifle competition, to destroy competing superior technologies in favor of its own inferior technologies, etc. No, those things aren't nearly as evil as acts committed during a war of course, but the world would be a horrible place if we ignored all small evil deeds and only focused on very large evil deeds. If I push your kid on his face on the sidewalk because I think it's funny, should I be given free pass to do that because it's only a small evil deed?

Anyway, MS has done evil things. Are the janitor and programmers evil? No, not really; they're just working there. However, they do contribute to the company's success, so in a sense, they are supporting evil. Unfortunately, just about every large organization (even Google) seems to do some evil at some time; it seems to be an unavoidable fact of human nature and human organizations. Is there any nation out there that doesn't have a little blood on its hands? I think the only way for anyone to avoid evil completely would be to live completely alone, in a wilderness, with no contact with other humans at all, which obviously is impossible now. So, we do the best we can.

Ultimately, because of this fact that all organizations seem to commit evil acts sometimes, the blame has to rest at the top, as the people in charge are the ones who make the real decisions, and who can also make amends when someone under them does something wrong. In MS's case, I think Steve and Bill are definitely evil people, as they make all the real decisions about the company's actions and direction, and they've shown over and over that they don't want to play fair. Personally, I think they're definitely sociopaths, as are the CEOs of many/most large companies. Their behavior lends a lot of support to this theory.

If I or any normal person were running MS, things would be really different. If I were running the company, even if I actually liked MS technologies, I simply wouldn't do the kinds of things MS does to get ahead. I'd just make our products the best we can, and try to satisfy customers. If someone else came along and made a better product, and the customers liked that better, I'd say, "oh well". I'd try to improve our product in response, but I wouldn't do anything underhanded or uncompetitive to hurt that competitor. After all, MS is a huge company and the people running it are extremely wealthy; how much more money do you need in life? There's no reason to stoop to dirty tactics in a business like that, unless you're a mentally deranged person who just has to win at all costs, regardless of who it hurts.

Online petitions...

[saleenS281]

I hate to break it to you, but given the absolute 0 work/commitment required for an online petition, no business worth their salt would bother basing critical decisions such as the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars MS would have to spend to continue supporting XP in the manner demanded. How many of these petitioners have bothered to write a letter, or make a phone call?

And finally... 75,000. Out of how many copies sold? That's not even 1% of their user base. Why would the EVER even consider such a request? I hate to break it to you vocal majority, but for most of us, Vista is as good, if not superior to XP. This is the same game that was played when XP was released. "OH NOES, 2000 IS SO MUCH BETTER!!!" It wasn't and XP isn't.

Re:Online petitions...

[m.ducharme]

I can't speak for anyone else out there, but I can say for myself that the problem with Vista isn't that it's so much worse than XP, the problem for me is that it isn't any better. I think that's a problem for a lot of people, actually. Regular users are getting frustrated with changing OSs every five years or so, because they "have to", with no real benefits. There are normal, uninformed users now who've been through probably 4 or 5 different versions of Windows, and their new computers don't run any faster than their first computer did. In the mean time, Apple is pouring out the marketing shiny, making products with spiffy user interfaces and whispering "it doesn't have to be this way....come look at this machine here....sure it's a few more bucks, but you don't have to buy anti-virus..."

I was a computer salesman when the switch from ME to XP happened (most people I sold computers to had never used 2000), and even then people were tired of it. Now, more casual users own iPods, have seen friends with MacBooks, and may even have seen their geeky nephew's linux box, and they're wondering if switching to a different OS altogether is really any harder than switching to Vista. And when they ask me, I tell them it's not. Because that's my personal experience. The last windows OS I bought was XP Pro, and I bought it so I'd have something for Bootcamp to play with, when the time comes that my household sees the back of it's last Windows box. Not because Vista is really bad, but because Windows is bad. Comparing Vista to XP is like, to paraphrase jPod, comparing the taste of cat shit to the taste of dog shit. Do you really care which tastes worse?

The whole time I've been writing this, my wife, who was a Windows user exclusively until 3 years ago when she bought a Mac (as an accessory for her iPod), has been complaining bitterly about having to use an XP box in her new job. The experience for her is horrible, the computer crashes daily (it's brand new), settings options are non-intuitive, and the computer is slow and unresponsive compared to her 3 year old iMac (did I mention the PC was brand new? Like, last week new?). Now, tell me, given all this, why would anyone voluntarily upgrade to Vista? Why is it so surprising that businesses want the option to "downgrade" to XP? Better the shit you know, at least you know how bad it's going to taste.

Re:Online petitions...

[MeNeXT]

When you ignore your clients be it by phone, mail, email or any other method you risk alienating them forever. Assuming that these people would pay $100 for another XP version it would be more than the cost of maintaining XP. You do the math.

The idea that I need to scrap my 5 year old computer which allows me to surf and email because it wont run the latest and greatest is absurd.

Re:Online petitions...

[dedazo]

What are you talking about? Online petitions are super great and meaningful! For example, there's an online petition right now to force Wikipedia to remove images of Muhammed (Peace Be Upon Him). Apparently images of Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) are forbidden, and so humanity in general should not be allowed to gaze upon the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him). That like totally makes sense.

I'll let you take a guess as to how seriously Wikipedia is taking that one - probably about as seriously as anyone would take this one. But boy, no one ever lost any ad revenue by reporting the alleged plight of people who "sign" online petitions.

Re:Online petitions...

[saleenS281]

The whole time I've been writing this, my wife, who was a Windows user exclusively until 3 years ago when she bought a Mac (as an accessory for her iPod), has been complaining bitterly about having to use an XP box in her new job. The experience for her is horrible, the computer crashes daily (it's brand new), settings options are non-intuitive, and the computer is slow and unresponsive compared to her 3 year old iMac (did I mention the PC was brand new? Like, last week new?). Now, tell me, given all this, why would anyone voluntarily upgrade to Vista? Why is it so surprising that businesses want the option to "downgrade" to XP? Better the shit you know, at least you know how bad it's going to taste.


You almost had me going right up until your last paragraph. Sorry, the bullshit-o-meter just went off full blast. There is no way a 3 year old imac is faster than a *brand new* pc running XP. Period. Not happening.

I've got a brand new imac sitting on my desk at work, and a dell m4300 that I use for travel with a new install of vista. Any *brand new* desktop has 2GB ram to support vista, which is way more than enough for XP. OSX doesn't have magical fairy's inside that somehow make the hardware infinitely faster. The interface while nice, still thrashes around in swap when you have too many apps open, no different than XP. And if you aren't going to swap, there's absolutely no reason XP or OSX should be running slow.

Not to mention... 3 years ago the imac was still running the G5 chip. You honestly want me to believe a G5 is faster than a brand new core2duo? Now THAT is laughable. Maybe if you were running xfce... definitely not with a full blown OSX GUI.

Re:Online petitions...

[saleenS281]

Oh, and one more thing I forgot to mention. Hypocrite much? You can sit there with a straight face and whine about Vista not being *much better* than XP, but then go on to talk about how great apple is? Did you notice that whole tiger to leopard thing.

Re:Online petitions...

[m.ducharme]

1) Tiger/Leopard: We haven't upgraded. I'm waiting to see if there is significant improvement to make it worthwhile. I'm also waiting for the bugs to be fixed. The point isn't that Leopard is a great improvement over Tiger, it's that (in my opinion) Leopard/Tiger are both better than Vista/XP. A lot better.

2) I don't appreciate being called a liar by some prick on the Internet. It's not worth my time or energy to lie to a bunch of faceless strangers I can't see, don't care about, and whose opinion doesn't really affect my life. Having said that, let me point out that it's my wife, not me, complaining about her work PC. She likes to run a lot of software, all at the same time. Tiger handles this gracefully, XP (not Vista, despite being new, they don't want Vista at work, surprise, surprise)does not. Now to be fair, it is a new computer, and I did tell her to see if the drivers and firmware had all been updated, and failing that, to see if they can do RAM testing, to see if that's the issue, but the fact remains that she hates using XP, and isn't going to like Vista any better. I could itemize all the reasons why, but I'm at work now, and I've already taken up too much time on this.

We both know that anecdotal evidence is not really evidence at all, so try to take my original post for what it was, a description about what many (by no means all) normal computer users are feeling, not a dispassionate review of two or three different operating systems. You are happy with your Windows experience, I've become tired of the Windows experience and have decided to bail out. A lot of people are thinking of bailing, more and more all the time. The whole "Vista sucks, XP rocks!" is just a side effect of that.

Re:Online petitions...

[StikyPad]

And finally... 75,000. Out of how many copies sold? That's not even 1% of their user base.

True, but you have to consider that for every 1 signature, there's probably AT LEAST 0.75 individuals who feel the same way.

Re:Online petitions...

[immcintosh]

For me the problem is that the things that DID change did so, on the whole, for either no apparent reason at all (random UI changes that accomplish nothing), or for the worse (UAC GODDAMN YOU, as well as DRM and general inexplicable slowness every once in a while).

Same shit, different date

[That's Unpossible!]

I've read all the same stories 6 years ago.

Except back then people were bitching about the upgrade from 2000 to XP.

The end result is Microsoft will fix some of the most annoying things in Vista (or offer alternatives), but 95% of their customers will swallow Vista within the next 2 years, and only the anal-i-will-die-proving-my-point types will still run XP... err excuse me, Windows 2000.

Re:Same shit, different date

[Shados]

It happens everytime really. The amount of machines I had to downgrade from 2k/XP to Windows ME (ME!!!!!!!) back when I did that kind of work, was rediculous. Its just that there was such a large time period between XP and Vista, that people forgot. Its like how hell froze over when MS released IE7...it had been so long since an IE "upgrade" (I use the term loosely) that a lot of companies that had made web applications had actually STARTED -after- IE6 came out, and had no clue how to handle a transition like that...

Same old same old.

Compiler Error:

[Mantaar]

OP.java:4: cannot find symbol
symbol : variable customer
location: class org.slashdot.it
if (isCustomer(user) && accountSize(customer) > TenMillion) /* Thin the herd */
^
1 error

Re:Compiler Error:

[The_reformant]

Also no type on user so i predict it fails on line 1 rather than line 4.

Re:what about small businesses!

[Shados]

I personally wouldn't run XP SP2 on 512 megs. Heck, a few years ago when I was Linux-only, I wouldn't have touched an average Linux distro (with Gnome or KDE though, its OK if you use a leaner environment) on those specs. Unbearable. (I realise Linux is faster now though, I just didn't use it enough to make an educated opinion, thus why I have to use an older experience).

I guess its what you're used to. On 1 gig of RAM and 2ghz, Vista with all the bells and whistles enabled is actually fairly zippy, thats all I can say.

Re:what about small businesses!

[T-Bone-T]

It looks worse? My laptop isn't capable of running Aero and I still think XP looks ancient compared to Vista. Vista's attention to metadata makes it so much easier to use, as well.

microsoft style

[meta coder]

function isBusinessPartnerOrCustomer(user as variant) as variant on error goto microsoft if isBusinessPartner(user) = true then return TRUE end if if (isCustomer(user) and accountSize(customer) > TenMillion) ' Thin the herd return TRUE end if return FALSE microsoft: inputbox('Please enter your serial number to continue', 'activation required') end function

Re:microsoft style

[RobBebop]

function isBusinessPartnerOrCustomer(user as variant) as variant on error goto microsoft if isBusinessPartner(user) = true then return TRUE end if if (isCustomer(user) and accountSize(customer) > TenMillion) ' Thin the herd return TRUE end if return FALSE microsoft: inputbox('Please enter your serial number to continue', 'activation required') end function

Did you intentionally mess up the line breaks? Because if I had mod points you would have gotten +1 Funny for incomprehensible code and +1 insightful for the real crux of your joke.

Re:microsoft style

[shanen]

Looks fine to me using Firefox from Ubuntu. What are you browsing with?

Re:what about small businesses!

[T-Bone-T]

512 MB of RAM, and Celeron 1.7 GHz

There's your problem. I wouldn't even want to run XP on that.

Re:Cock

[kemushi88]

I don't have a great amount of experience with this particular part of OS history, but from my experiences in my school's computer lab, when they upgraded the iMacs from OS 9 to OS X, they became more responsive, crashed significantly less, and ran overall faster. The same couldn't be said for the computers I saw upgraded to vista. When I upgraded my laptop (an original MacBook Pro) from Tiger to Leopard, its performance noticeably increased, despite the fact that it was not apple's top of the line anymore. Apple's upgrades generally seem to increase performance across the board but Microsoft's just target the latest and greatest. But I am only speaking from my own experience. Yours may be different and I could be wrong.

Windows 7?

[eebra82]

I agree with Linus Torvalds on what he said about operating systems. Basically, a regular user who's upgrading the OS should not notice a too big difference, nor should he have to upgrade the computer. The big problem with Vista is that it runs significantly slower than XP. Most of the annoyances are gone now that a year has passed since the release, so after a year of Vista, I am finally pleased (except for the exceptionally steep hardware requirements).

If only Microsoft can make Windows 7 blazing fast again, I have no doubt it will be a huge success. Imagine the millions of users out there who switch from Vista to Windows 7 to notice that things are running fast like hell now. That's what we need. Linus was right.

Re:Windows 7?

[dmbrun]

I've got good news for you. It's only three years down the road.

http://www.news.com/2100-1016_3-6197943.html

Re:Windows 7?

[RiotingPacifist]

From what ive read windows 7 will be more modular and do less by default.
the problem you face with an OS is marketing, its either all you do and you have to cram all the bells and whistles in and end up with a horrible product" or you do no marketing end up with a product that is perfect but nobody knows about because you were too busy making it. I think mac have hit a happy middle by getting a dictator to run the company so its always his bells and whistles.
to give vista some credit it didnt have any zero day exploits like xp did. Thats because they beta tested like any good product ( or previously any good OSS product), next windows 7 will be more modular and offer more choice in setting it up ( e.g with my 256 @ 1.2 GHZ laptop, i can run it for speed (fluxbox + gtk apps) or i can run it for eyecandy ( compiz and all the shizzle) ).

I think the main problem for vista which will probably be worse for windows 7 is that weve finnaly hit the '640k' limit, the only people who NEED more than about 2ghz & 1GB are geeks, the only people who will even notice an improvement over 4GHZ & 2GB are geeks and theres only so long consumerism can keep you buying stuff you dont need (especially as computers are !cool)*. So the best way an OS can improve is to work better on existing hardware (but that doesnt work for MS as 90% of theyre sales are through OEM ). The other kick in the balls for microsoft is the swing back to client-server computing meaning
1) clients can run anything with a web browser
2) as running the servers is non-trivial most will run on BSD/Linux
3) in 10 years time google will be stupidly rich ( lets just hope theyre not evil** )

p.s shouldnt the borg be balmer now

*if it wasn't for high tech appliance getting everywhere id say we were about 5 years away from a recession,
**I dont think they are evil, theyre the cool kid whod still talk to the geeks. By playing nice with geeks they can easily hold microsoft sized monopolies without people complaining too much. also the internet is a much more open place there are no OEM, the closest they can get to vendor lockin is a changable preference in a browser.

Re:Windows 7?

[orin]

Linus also said that the Mac filesystem was crap last week and that OSX was worse to program for than Vista http://www.theage.com.au/news/technology/utter-crap-torvalds-pans-apple/2008/02/05/1202090393959.html but that little nugget didn't seem to make its way to Slashdot (though a story about what RMS thinks of the OLPC did).

Re:Windows 7?

[StikyPad]

a regular user who's upgrading the OS should not notice a too big difference, nor should he have to upgrade the computer.

Yeah! Thanks to Linux, I haven't
bought any new hardware since the
Commodore 64, and I don't notice ANY
difference! X still won't run, and all
of the shell commands still result in
?SYNTAX ERROR. But it boots WAY faster
than XP!

That petition is repugnant

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as they were collecting email addresses, they just couldn't resist inserting a few "yes, please contact me about special offers for my convenience" checkboxes. So Microsoft doesn't take them seriously, and I'm having considerable trouble to not do the same.

moderation

[Scrameustache]

"listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs, that's what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially, and what will continue to guide us" -- a somewhat strange response given that the vast majority of people signing the petition ARE Microsoft customers! Serfdom is the socio-economic status of peasants under feudalism, and specifically relates to Manorialism. It was a condition of bondage or modified slavery seen primarily during the Middle Ages in Europe. Serfdom was the enforced labour of serfs on the fields of landowners, in return for protection and the right to work on their leased fields.

Instead of plowing a field, we're moving bits and bytes.

Microsoft listens to the lords and barons, not to the serfs (barring a massive uprising and the occasional symbolic act of obligatory good faith). The topic is "Microsoft petition", the reply is in the form of a metaphor.

Reply "I don't get it" instead of downmoding, sheesh.

downgrade?

[crhylove]

I would like to give points to the most disastrous use of the word "downgrade" ever. Going from Vista to XP is the same kind of downgrade as going from a Geo to a Lexus.

I'd like to go ahead and downgrade my house into a mansion please.

Re:what about small businesses!

[Macthorpe]

Your video card can run Windows Vista Basic, and Vista will automatically default to Basic when it realises your card doesn't support Aero.

So, to summarise there are two options here. Either:

a) you're saying you've never tried to install Vista, or
b) you're full of crap.

Hard to choose, hard to choose...

yeah but how many of these are real sales?

[BlueshiftVFX]

How many of these 100 million were honest to goodness, "I'm going out to buy Vista" rather then the "I am getting a new PC but it came with Vista, so I am going to have to use my old XP disk on it when I get home". I bet the sold number differs from the registered users numbers

Re:yeah but how many of these are real sales?

[jcatana]

The company I'm working for bought over 12000 machines with Vista preloaded, wiped the machine and installed our corporate XP image. The licensing allows for either to be used and when Vista is stable we might upgrade to it in a few years. I'm pretty sure these count as Vista sales, although we aren't running Vista anywhere.

Re:what about small businesses!

[Ethanol-fueled]

The major headache here are the laptops. It's becoming more and more difficult to find XP laptops. Linux(as an alternative to vista) will run on desktops just fine, but laptops are very proprietary and a lot of their functionality is lost when they run 'nix. XP Just Works(Tm). Microsoft should consider Vista the new ME and quietly move on to their next OS.

Re:what about small businesses!

[CannonballHead]

Interesting that ++Linux posts get modded well and --Linux posts don't, just by default. And I even run Linux. Preferred.

Anyway. Anything on 512mb and a CELERON 1.7ghz is going to be bad. You can run compiz with ALL the eyecandy on? I sincerely doubt you. I have an ATI Mobility x1400 running the 8.46 (I think it's .46, I forget now) drivers, dual-core Intel (albeit in a year and a half old), with 2gb of RAM. I ran Compiz back with 1gb of RAM. I'm running OpenSUSE 10.3. I couldn't run "all the eyecandy using Compiz." It was really slow and xgl ended up using 500mb of ram.

Unless "very quickly" refers to text editing or something like that, I'd seriously wonder.

At any rate, XP would at least work on it. I remember helping someone pick out a laptop, and there were laptops that had those similar specs and were "running" Vista. I told her that she should not get a laptop with less than 1gb of RAM and no celeron processor, or she wouldn't be able to really do anything well.

On that note, the *minimum* RAM amount for Vista is 512mb... but, if I remmeber correctly, even most games nowadays require at least 512mb, and most everyone has at least 1gb, it would seem. It's cheap enough. I got 2gb for my laptop for $40, and my desktop has 4gb. I don't think the tech requirements for Vista are actually that unrealistic.

(may as well say that if the operating system requires something better than a P2 processor it's too much of a hog... hehe)

*anticipates troll-ness*

The difference between XP and Vista

[Neo-Rio-101]

The difference between the XP launch (and the hesitance to upgrade) and the Vista launch is this:-

XP was LEAPS AND BOUNDS better than win98/ME, which was what a lot of people had at the time
Vista is only marginally better than XP

Re:The difference between XP and Vista

[vux984]

XP was LEAPS AND BOUNDS better than win98/ME, which was what a lot of people had at the time
Vista is only marginally better than XP

XP was also a 0.1 upgrade to windows 2000; it wasn't that different at all. It used the same drivers and so forth. Businesses had relatively few troubles migrating because it was essentially the same platform.

Consumers on the other hand got a windfall:

1) XP was leaps and bounds better than 98/ME
2) XP by virtue of its close 2k/NT heritage was already effectively several years old when it launched. So by the time joe home consumers got their grubby little hands on it the drivers were largely mature and stable, and supported much of the hardware they already had... even a lot of the 'older stuff', because if there were 2k drivers, you were set.

Vista in contrast to XP is a major upgrade as far as businesses are concerned, and so its more work. And its new, really new, with a new driver model and everything so hardware even 6 months old is largely unsupported, or "coming soon". On top of all that its biggest feature is enhanced security -- which doesn't wow consumers and in fact annoys them.

Me, I've had Vista now for about 8 months, and frankly I'm very happy with it. I put it on new well supported hardware so issues of it being a resource hog, or driver issues ... haven't been issues at all. Basically I took the same care in selecting my Vista platform as I would selecting a linux platform, ensuring things like the wifi, raid, etc were all supported before I purchased.

The UAC stuff really doesn't get in my way. Fortunately I don't have a lot of programs that need to be 'run as administrator' in order to function. (And programs that DO need this were defective all along IMO; it only took Vista's forcing the issue for us to notice... and then so many blogging idiots blame vista. I mean seriously, not naming any particular software, but why should your personal accounting software need to run as root anyway?! If your annoyed that your software is constantly needing elevation, blame the vendor.)

Vista really doesn't ask for elevation much more than OSX[Unix] or Linux. Its just that the latter two OSes have a long history of security so there isn't 20 years worth of crud out there that thinks it should be running as root. The only complaint I have about UAC, is that I should be allowed into Device Manager and other places without elevation; I should only need elevation if I want to change things... they really should have copied the 'lock' metaphor from OSX. But that's a pretty minor issue. I don't go into device manager THAT much, and even then I go in a lot more than most people. My inlaws bought a new Vista laptop... I doubt they've seen more than 5 UAC elevation prompts since they got it.

Re:The difference between XP and Vista

[radarsat1]

XP was also a 0.1 upgrade to windows 2000; it wasn't that different at all. It used the same drivers and so forth. Businesses had relatively few troubles migrating because it was essentially the same platform.

On the other hand, a lot of businesses didn't bother to upgrade at all, because it was essentially the same platform, until they were forcibly cut off.

Re:The difference between XP and Vista

[immcintosh]

I know for the brief time I had Vista, I got UAC prompts whenever I attempted to rearrange my start menu. Now, I'm assuming this was because I was changing items that were cascading in from the "All Users" start menu, but it really annoyed the hell out of me. I like to have an orderly start menu (I would keep everything under a few root "categories" such as Games/Office/etc..., exactly the same way I later discovered is basically the default for all Linux desktops). Definitely was the last straw for me and Windows, petty as that may sound.

Oddly, I've found sudo'ing around almost infinitely less obnoxious for whatever reason. Can't really explain it.

Re:The difference between XP and Vista

[vux984]

Now, I'm assuming this was because I was changing items that were cascading in from the "All Users" start menu, but it really annoyed the hell out of me.

Sounds about right.

Consider this: Vista will actually let you drag icons around from system folder to system folder that you don't have permission to modify (which is what the all users start menu really is), but it will prompt you each time for escalation, while Linux would just say 'Access Denied' if you tried that.

The right way to make a lot of changes to the start menu structure without a ton of UAC prompts would be to run a file explorer as administrator. (sound familiar -- akin to sudo running a file explorer in linux.)

As I said, the lock metaphor from OSX would be ideal... you open the lock, then make as many changes as you like.

That said, worrying about the start menu is less of an issue with Vista, because most people just use the search function of the vista start menu, the the first few letters of the program, rather than browse the menu structure directly. The same as thy do on OSX using spotlight.

i think...

[Mr Stubby]

what MS meant by saying they listen to their customer is - A petition is just an for malcontents with an axe to grind not reliable "evidence" that their customers are saying anything. If the first question on the petition was "have you ever paid for a copy of XP or ever used Vista?" there'd prolly be 5,000 signatures :P

Re:what about small businesses!

[flyingfsck]

Hmmm, Mandriva Linux 2008.1 with a full blown KDE runs just fine on my 500MHz Asus Eee PC. That Celeron would be a screamer.

Re:what about small businesses!

[Vectronic]

I dunno.. I ran XP on 512 for about 2 years, it all depends on how much trimming you do, and I wasnt using it for just Web Browsing and E-Mail either... LightWave, 3dsmax, Office, Photoshop, etc... all with WinAmp and MSN couple other minor apps running constantly...

I even had XP running on a 266MHz for about a year (personal File server)... which even impressed me, I thought that was only Linux territory... (these days)

However, I'd be hard pressed to call Vista "zippy" on 1GB @ 2GHz... closest system I have to that is 1.5GB @ 2.6GHz... and its still "putt-putt-ee"... I guess it depends on what you expect from your OS or Computer... however most of the "lag" in Vista seems mostly to be a cosmetic thing, not neccisarly even the actual speed of the interface, but the layout of things seems to make it appear slow, even when it isnt... im sure there is some technical (and also psychological) words for it that hardcore programmers use when designing the UI... but, I just call it "shitty"... (although i like the Taskbar and Start Menu)

Although, with KDE4 (or 4.2 or whatever) when it gets a little more 'Windows' friendly, might be a great alternative shell for Vista, admitedly I find that somewhat blasphemous, doesnt mean that will prevent me from trying it since its my favorite Shell/Window System for Linux...

Im currently 'Tri-Booting'... XP/Vista/Slackware...but at the moment Vista is just dead space till I swap it out for Server2008...

Run your old XP in a window on a Unix OS

[gig]

The only way to upgrade XP is to wrap a virtualizer around it as a prophylactic. You need to keep the top the same to run the apps and such, but the guts should not be touching the metal.

A Mac plus Parallels plus the XP you already own keeps all your old stuff working (XP apps on XP) while also opening up new stuff like iLife and Unix and uptime and 64-bit RAM access. XP needs to be frozen in time like a compatibility library, not improved or changed. If you can get by with a non-Mac Unix then that is an excellent solution for running your virtualized XP also.

Vista is different from XP, but not improved enough to make the switch worthwhile. If Vista had Win64 and a XP-in-a-window then that would be worth considering. No matter how much Microsoft wants to ignore it, the fact is you have to upgrade an old application platform to be compatible with a modern system. Win32 was created to run standalone or hooked onto a LAN where you trust everybody, and in 32-bits. Investing more money and time in that at this point is ridiculous.

Re:Lucky Downgraders...

[GuyverDH]

ROFL....

I don't run a LOT of 64 bit applications, mostly because there aren't that many...

But I do have 64 bit versions of my system tools - such as anti-virus, diskkeeper, etc...

As more come out, I'm sure that most will run fine unless they are written to need vista crap.
  At which point, I'll switch to OpenSolaris...

Go ahead, buy those XP Licences..

[Nemilar]

I doubt Microsoft really cares if you buy XP with your computer instead of Vista. They way they look at it, it's even good for them - Vista is a Juggernaut that will eventually be standard on modern desktops; people who choose XP instead of Vista are going to have to buy a copy of Vista down the line.

So from Microsoft's standpoint, people buying XP is great for them - they get paid once for their old OS, and then they get paid again when you buy a boxed copy of Vista down the line.

Re:Go ahead, buy those XP Licences..

[Baki]

I think XP will be my last windows, and I'm not the only one. By the time XP support runs out, I have moved all my gaming activities to some console and for the rest: either linux or OSX.

Re:what about small businesses!

[CastrTroy]

Yep, it sure is a screamer. I'm running Mandriva 2008 with Compiz and KDE 3.5.8. Flies. I have no problem doing web development and some simple graphic editing (for the web, no 30 MPixel images here) on this computer. It really is amazing what you can do on a computer when you install an OS that is actually attempts to be efficient.

Re:what about small businesses!

[jbengt]

I wouldn't try Vista on it, but XP runs fine on my laptop with a 1.6Ghz Pentium M and 512MB memory. The Celeron processor might be another matter.

Re:what about small businesses!

[CastrTroy]

It does run with all the Eyecandy. Using an Intel GMA 950. Sometimes I turn on the rain just for the fun of it. It doesn't seem to slow the machine down at all.

If Microsoft Listened to Custers then...

[Il128]

There would be two working versions of Vista for the desktop, Home and Work and one for servers. Monopolies are bad.

Microsoft...The matrix has you

[gVibe]

Your living in a dream world Microsoft. Making up fake statistics does not make it true. No matter how badly you want them to be true. From a vantage point of someone with a tech support background, I personally have helped several of my friends, and family, downgrade their new systems (and a few old ones) that came with Vista, back to XP. Most reasons were simply, "I just don't like it!"

Re:Cock

[trouser]

Yup, unless you have a G3 or a G4 slower than 867MHz in which case you can't install Leopard. Not really the point I was almost sort of making in my own peculiar flamebaity fashion. XP has been with us for 7 years. Vista is a big change. Change is bad. Vista is bad. Even if it's good it's different so it's bad. I don't mind it. It's Windows. Same shit different smell or something like that.

Re:what about small businesses!

[jbengt]

Did you guys read the original comment?
He says that he runs Mandriva on it with the Compiz eye candy turned on and it runs fine. (XP should run OK on it, too, I've run XP acceptably well on as little as a 900Mhz Pentium with 512 megs) So no, it's not the hardware by itself, it's the inefficient software.

SERIOUSLY scary: Corporate drones pretending...

[Futurepower(R)]

"They have to save face and spout brain-dead corporate marketing nonsense."

I'm sure glad that not MY job, spouting brain-dead corporate marketing nonsense.

Do you think horror movies are scary? I never have. If a filmmaker wanted to make a really scary movie, he or she would make a movie about corporate robots whose entire lives involve turning some crank, pretending that what they do is important, most of them not even realizing they have reduced themselves to sub-human drones.

Actually, as a developer in a Microsoft Partner

[the_Bionic_lemming]

We've tested our in house , and outside applications in Vista, but we make sure to put on all new machines a "no vista" tag.

We are the top leader in our sector of software development in business automation, and are scaling our applications to vista, but have absolutely no intentions of adopting vista in any form for internal use.

Adoption rates...

[Firethorn]

With this, you simply have to think about the standard 4 year replacement schedule - most businesses and homes replace their computer every four years. It used to be 3, but has slowed down a bit.

Going by that, you're going to have better than 50% penetration of at least windows machines in 3 years by essentially forbidding sales of XP on new machines.

It's kinda like the switch to digital television - except the replacement rate for a TV is more like a decade, so if they'd started requiring a digital tuner in 2003 instead of 2006(or so), you'd have half as many TV's requiring a converter box.

XP, updates and delayed Vista upgrade

[Firethorn]

Personally, unless they do something more extreme than the XP service pack 2 updates, I figure I'll probably try to stick with XP and skip Vista in favor of the next OS, leaving it in the dust heap like millenium.

Assuming I stick with a MS OS, of course. I like gaming too much at the moment to NOT have a microsoft OS.

Re:XP, updates and delayed Vista upgrade

[suckmysav]

"Assuming I stick with a MS OS, of course. I like gaming too much at the moment to NOT have a microsoft OS."

I've been pretty much this way for about 8 years now, but as I get older I find that I have less inclination to play games. Maybe it's because games these days seem to be all glitz and no substance (much like Hollywood) or maybe I'm just reaching "auld phart" status, I dunno.

I still do get the urge to play the occasional game though, I've been playing Quake 4 a bit lately which runs natively on Linux. A few other games work using Wine or Cedega (far less than some people will have you believe though). Both Call Of Duty and C&C Generals both worked fine (CoD would hang on exit but apart from that was excellent). Lots of other stuff just won't work at all of course, so I simply don't bother. I couldn't be bothered maintaining a dual-boot environment just for the sake of a few games.

I'm thinking of maybe getting a Wii for games anyway, but then again I have an xbox and I only ever play that with my son so . . . .

Re:XP, updates and delayed Vista upgrade

[electrosoccertux]

Me too; although I think it's part of growing up not necessarily games getting less good.

I still play FPS's though for the simple adrenaline rush.

M$ wants people to upgrade..

[kahrytan]

On a lighter note;
Since Microsoft wanted people to upgrade, i decided to given in and upgraded to Linux.

Serious note:
And those who can't upgrade and prefer Windows, Older computers just can't run Vista and Microsoft are to much of dumbasses to realize that. XP must remain until older computers are dead. Thanks to M$, Viruses will spread more rapidly. M$ will make it easier for hackers to take control of XP machines that can't upgrade. So in a couple years, you can blame M$ for rapid spread of computer viruses because of their discontinuation of Xp Support.

Re:M$ wants people to upgrade..

[wouter]

> Since Microsoft wanted people to upgrade, i decided to given in and upgraded to Linux.

I tried that. I had Vista, and KDE4 came along. I installed it on my laptop (2Ghz, 1GB RAM, Vista speed index of 2) which ran Vista 'okay' with Aero, to be found in KDE4 in which my graphics card had not enough power to offer me all the promised eye candy KDE4 has.

Now running Vista SP1 again; nothing to complain about. But then again, I have been using Vista since beta 2, and still use XP on a daily basis on a ThinkPad T60 with centrino duo. I don't see much speed difference.

Re:M$ wants people to upgrade..

[kahrytan]

  Actual KDE4 doesn't run in windows. And it never will.

Re:M$ wants people to upgrade..

[wouter]

I didn't make myself clear enough: I installed Kubuntu's Hardy Alpha with KDE4.

Re:M$ wants people to upgrade..

[kahrytan]

I didn't make myself clear enough: I installed Kubuntu's Hardy Alpha with KDE4. And yet, it is called ALPHA for a reason. And there is a reason why Kubuntu 8.04 won't include KDE4 as default. Maybe it's just been released and not entirely ready for mainstream. It's got kinks and growing pains to be worked out still.

Re:what about small businesses!

[Firethorn]

You might think it looks ancient, but even today one of the first things I do on a vista box is change the theme to 'windows classic'.

I like the new start menu options, but that's about it.

100 million copies?

[c6gunner]

I'm sure someone's already posted something similar, but here goes:

For the last 6 months, I've been part of a group of 20 individuals taking a course together. Many of them have made computer purchases within those 6 months. And over the last 6 months, from that group of 20 people, I have had no less than 7 requests to downgrade a newly bought computer from Vista to XP. Even assuming that every person in that group (not including myself) had purchased a new computer within the last 6 months, that means that the rejection rate for Vista would be around 36%. However, as far as I know, only those 7 individuals have actually purchased new computers during that time period, meaning that the rejection rate for Vista amongst my acquaintances has been around 100%. The only reason these people are "buying" Vista is because it comes bundled with their computers, and most of them will get rid of it at the first opportunity.

Microsoft employees incubate innovations...

[Futurepower(R)]

Many Microsoft employees seem to function as an incubator of innovations for contributions to the value chain.

Vista isn't actually selling well

[nevesis]

Despite its claims that Vista has sold more than 100 million copies and its adoption rate is in line with the company's expectations.

Vista's sales are high for one reason.

Every Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc that you purchase with XP is actually sold as a computer with a Vista license and a XP downgrade license.

Classic Microsoft.

Re:Vista isn't actually selling well

[hughk]

Not entirely true and for Dell this means Vista Business (or ultimate)->XP Pro and only if you have an XP compatible hardware configuration. For example the Latitude may be XP compatible but the .n wireless lan cards are not.

Re:what about small businesses!

[Shados]

XP SP2 is almost as different an OS than different versions of MacOSX, when compared to the original XP or XP SP1... it simply doesn't have the same hardware requirement... It was "working" in its original version on my 366 mhz celeron of old... (though crawling). With SP2, it just got a lot beefier...that would be crazy, I think.

And you're correct about Vista's lag being cosmetic. It depends what you're looking at. browsing folders and stuff... yeah. Its actually not cosmetic, its the security sub systems. If you disable UAC, you remove the file indexing, etc, then its just barely slower, and its truly only cosmetic. When I said it was zippy though, I meant actually using it to do some work on it. The application caching system (don't know the real term) is pretty freagin good... I wouldn't be able to stand doing my job (using multiple instances of Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, douzans of browser windows with tons of tabs each, Office all over the place, etc) on XP on that machine: doing the actual work would be the same, but just opening and closing application would get on my nerve real quick, but on Vista its fine.

We'll see how things evolve I guess. Or we may never know, I, too, will be trying out Server 2008...it looks sweet.

Yeah, but

[das_magpie]

100 Million copies maybe, but I bet 75 million of them want XP back.

Not ONE person I know is happy about there Vista everybody I know hates it with a passion. All of them have been devoted Window$ users in the past.

Enough already.

[westlake]

This is becoming tiresome:

Microsoft posts record performance in its Windows client division.

In office products. In servers. In console gaming...

15-20% growth in the first and second quarters of fiscal 2008. The U.S. economy is weak. The tech sector is down. But Microsoft is on a roll.

The Slashdot response is denial.

In a crapflood of posts that put a increasingly desperate spin on news that - more realistically viewed - would silence a Twitter.

Re:Enough already.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are you fooling?

Sure, if you measure success by economic growth, m$ has always been "on a roll" . However, most slashdot users, unlike you, tend to measure succes of a software/tech firm by the quality of their products.

This "crapflood of posts" as you call it, isn't about economic success.
It's about m$ being arrogant by pushing a product that is not seen as a technical improvement compared to its predecessor, despite all their marketing efforts trying to let you believe otherwise.

Sure I sense some desperation in all those posts too, but I don't believe for a second this is because of economic success of m$.

The fact is that more and more people are frustrated with m$, whether or not it is making more money or improving performance, and as long as m$ isn't going to take a more humble attitude, you can bet
that this "increasingly desperate spin" will continue.

This savexp petition and m$ response to it proves this.

Re:Enough already.

[westlake]

m$

I have little patience with a poster who spells Microsoft with a dollar sign and in his next breath claims that this isn't about success in the marketplace.

as long as m$ isn't going to take a more humble attitude, you can bet that this "increasingly desperate spin" will continue.

The tech sector is not known for humility. But it was the Intel exec, not Microsoft, that estimated Linux's share of the desktop at 0.8%. It is the retail customer who has been giving 67 cents out of every new dollar spent on software to Microsoft Office.

This savexp petition and m$ response to it proves this.

The online petition proves nothing except that the Geek has a taste for lost causes. You can ask Ron Paul about that.

The CDW poll points to a softening of enterprise IT negative attitudes toward Vista. Familiarity, it seems, has bred content: IT departments are happier with Vista's features, particularly in the area of security, and less concerned about the hardware costs of Vista than they were a year ago.

Another year will bring further declines in the relative cost of PC hardware -- and make a lot of corporate desktop hardware look even more antique. Only a major economic downturn would be likely to derail current estimates of another strong year for PC sales, so even if Vista remains tied to hardware sales it would do well, and corporate upgrades could finally kick in as old hardware is upgraded. This has been a year when Vista has had its rough edges knocked off, and the marketplace has adjusted its expectations. By Vista's next birthday it should be more differentiated and acceptable for both its consumer and business marketplaces. Assessing Windows Vista On Its First Anniversary

Re:Enough already.

[tokul]

15-20% growth in the first and second quarters of fiscal 2008. The U.S. economy is weak. The tech sector is down. But Microsoft is on a roll.

1. Microsoft sells software outside of US.
2. It sells that software at inflated prices. 1 USD=1.2 EUR
3. Accounting still shows it as 1 USD = 0.8 EUR.

Re:what about small businesses!

[Shados]

I'm not as much of a hardware buff as I used to be, but aren't Pentium Ms a bit special? That is, a 2 ghz Pentium M is much, MUCH faster than a 2 ghz Pentium 4?

Re:Lucky Downgraders...

[Miseph]

When I installed XP 64, I was told by numerous people that I would have headaches and incompatibilities as well. Oddly enough, my only headache is with an el cheapo wireless card that has a very non-standard driver installer, and I have solved it by simply running a cable; incidentally, this is the first device I have encountered which actually works better and more reliably with a simpler and more straightforward driver install in Linux (I dual-boot Ubuntu) than in Windows.

I have yet to encounter a single program that will not work completely or has any particular performance issues.

I guess it's just another one of those software issues I am magically immune to, like Firefox's memory leak or OpenOffice's incompatibility.

downgrade?

[techwizrd]

Downgrade to XP Pro? Don't they mean upgrade?

Vista SP1 time to stop the Vista bashing.

[joshtheitguy]

Even the Vista SP1 release candidates show that Vista outperforms XP in several areas including startup/shutdown times, application starts, file saving, and overall desktop performance. I'm currently running SP1 and Microsoft did something right, they must have been listening because my gaming performance has increased significantly.

All the games I tested before hand and after I installed SP1 increased by either slightly or I got a huge performance gain. The biggest gain was in World of Warcraft, I am now getting the frame rates that I once got when I had XP installed.

Vista is not as bad as everyone claims it is and with SP1 installed I'd take Vista over XP any day.

Re:what about small businesses!

[techno-vampire]

I like the new start menu options, but that's about it.

Damning with faint praise indeed. Tell me, you've used it, is there really any reason in the world to install Windows iCandy?

Well may we say...

[neonsignal]

Well may we say "God save Windows XP",
because nothing will save Vista Ultimate.

[with apologies to the eloquent Gough]

Anyone else...

[deblau]

remember this?

Who do you think you are kidding?

[westlake]

How many of these copies were pre-installed on computers, and then deleted when the user gave up on Vista and installed Linux instead?

Only on Slashdot would this ridiculous notion be modded up as insightful.

Sales have been strongest fot OEM Vista and Ultimate, The laptop with a dual core CPU, 2 GB RAM, the 320 GB hard drive, integrated WiFi, NVIDIA GeForce graphics, etc, etc, etc.

The odds are good that Office 2007 will leave the store in the same cart, along with a multifunction color printer-scanner with a Vista driver.

Your ISP supports the Vista OS.

You haven't a clue where to find support for your DIY Linux install.

DVDs play out of the box.

The USB keychain HDTV tuner is $90. ReadyBoost flash $30.

High performance DX10.1 cards for the gamer's desktop start at $170. The Pioneer Blu-Ray drive for HD media play is $200-250.

Re:Fail at armchair mogul.

[Macthorpe]

I always assumed that Ballmer ate his dog, to be honest.

In his defense, it might have been a dachshund, and they look a lot like sausages.

Re:OH GOD: Worth Pirating

[blavallee]

"I think if it's worth pirating for someone, it's worth paying for." In my very non-scientific study of torrents, I found less than 2,000 seeders for Vista -and- over 10,000 for XP.

Obviously, XP is still worth paying for.

Next step in a very successful campaign...

[vikstar]

Slurm Queen: Yes! Which is why we'll market it as New Slurm. Then, when everyone hates it, we'll bring back Slurm Classic, and make billions!

Re:OH GOD: Worth Pirating

[i.of.the.storm]

I never said it wasn't although perhaps you didn't mean that. What I'm saying is that given all the constant complaining about Vista on the internet, I would think that if someone was going to pirate it then they obviously want it for some reason. Also, as I said in another post people are going to be upgrading based on their needs, and most peoples' needs do not include Vista or DirectX 10. However, when they buy new computers they'll get Vista, because most people really don't care either way.

Re:downgrade?

[xtracto]

That reminded me of this joke where the father is taking his son for a ride in his old VW Sedan, while they are traveling a guy with a Lamborghini passes them, and the boy says "wow, that guy shurely has money" to which his father answers "he is just an fucking asshole", then the pair continue until they pass above a huge mansion and the little boy says to his father "wow, those people surely live happy" to what his father answers "they are just a bunch of fucking assholes". Lastly, the pair arrive to the supermarket, and when they are entering, they see a guy with 4 beautiful girls grabbing his arms. The boy says "wow, that guy shurely is very lucky", to what his father answers "bah, just a simple fucking asshole".

WHen they arrive home, the son gets down of the car and enters and the first thing he does when watching his mother is tell her "mom, I know what I want to be when I grow up, I want to be a fucking asshole".

(yeah, it is not that funny...(

MS forces Vista

[jhoegl]

Over Christmas it was almost impossible to find XP pre-installed. Most people who did not know better had to purchase a PC from the major manufacturers with Vista pre-loaded. There is a program in place to "downgrade" the OS, but MS is quickly pulling in the reigns on this.

Get used to Vista.... MS hasnt learned yet from ME, and they will force us to purchase Vista so their stocks will go up a quarter of 1%.

Re:MS forces Vista

[superpulpsicle]

I personally know people who withheld from buying a new computer in stores due to vista. Who would have thought an OS finally gets so much bad rumor it is causing negative sales.

Mod parent up after fact check

[75th Trombone]

Dude, if that's true it needs to be like +12 Informative.

You have a source on that?

Re:Mod parent up after fact check

[initialE]

When I buy my HP notebooks they come with 2 install disks - one for XP and the other for Vista. And the sticker CD-key is for vista, not that you'll need it, because the OEM disk hacks the OS into not requiring a key even for reinstallation.

Pfff

[tsa]

Face it guys. XP will be history very soon. Get over it. Use Vista or OS X or Linux, but quit whining.

Re:what about small businesses!

[linuxrocks123]

> laptops are very proprietary and a lot of their functionality is lost when they run 'nix.

That used to be true, but laptops have gotten a lot more standardized in the past 5 years. I'm able to run Slackware on my HP Pavilion zv6000 and everything works (including suspend/resume), except that I've disabled 3D acceleration for my graphics card because it saves power (I did have it working at one time, though).

I think that, today, about the only problems you might have with Linux on laptops are with 3D acceleration on ATI cards (but that's getting better now that AMD owns ATI, as has been widely reported) and (if, like me, you don't like to use ndiswrapper,) with wireless support. And, well, okay -- if you actually still care about modem support, you might have to buy or pirate Linuxant's proprietary modem driver. But, Linux in general works pretty much fine on laptops these days.

Computer tax

[uvajed_ekil]

I didn't so much "buy" one of their 100 million copies of Vista last fall as much as I paid the "MS new laptop computer tax." I would much rather have bought my computer without no OS, Linux or some free OS, or XP Pro (in that order of preference), and I compared prices of those few models available without Vista. In the end I found it to make more sense for me to buy the one I wanted and pay a bit more than I should have to for it.

I'm sure a LOT of consumers who "buy Vista" do so only because cause their hardware is only available with it pre-installed, and as a result many of them suffer with a crappy, bloated OS or delete it altogether. Vista now occupies only a small partition on this notebook for the very rare cases when I must have real Windows compatibility, which is only true because the manufacturer ahs not seen fit to develop XP drivers for it.

Vista rocks - my 10 favorite Vista improvements

[dougnaka]

Vista has brought me *back* into the Windows using fold.

1. Vista's security is a huge step up. It's a *good* thing that it asks you before changing things, don't disable it.
2. Vista's improved memory management and added features (using extra RAM to cache disk -stolen straight outta Linux), being able to use a flash drive as swap.
3. Improved stability.
4. Start menu search rocks.
5. My absolute favorite, copy->merge. I no longer have to connect my usb disks to my linux box and rsync them, I can just drag the entire folder over on Vista and answer 2 dialogs (one for the folder and one for the files) and I can merge/update my 195GB photo archives, Vista will do this on 2 USB drives in about 15 minutes, my rsync to the USB drives is at least 45 minutes.
6. Scheduled backups go into zip files in directories, not some custom archival format.
7. Folder layout and display is neater.
8. My older laptop (Lenovo T43/1.5gb ram) runs it flawlessly.
9. Fixing the start menu so it doesn't scroll all over the desktop
10. Uptime with Hibernate and sleep. I close my laptop and it hibernates. I don't have to reboot with Vista like I did every other day with XP.

Now if I could get all my key bindings working and have my Vista on one facet of my cube, a VMware OS X on another, and 6 more for terminals and Linux programs I think I'd be happy.

Re:Vista rocks - my 10 favorite Vista improvements

[marzipanic]

Vista has sent me more into the linux using fold.

It is all Vista eye candy and my notebook is basic so no Aero, but some of the Xfce and Gnome desktops are *much* nicer. On the technical side of things it is slow, very slow and I am not an avid gamer... to each their own though.

I am thankful for my PS2, imagine: Zang He is asking permission to smack Lui Bu over the head with his axe. Do you wish to let him continue?

Re:Vista rocks - my 10 favorite Vista improvements

[Perky_Goth]

I don't usually comment, but...
1. Vista's security is a huge step up. It's a *good* thing that it asks you before changing things, don't disable it.
You don't like to have a proper start menu, right? Because otherwise, it takes you 6 clicks to move something. How great. Not to mention navigating control pannel.

2. Vista's improved memory management and added features (using extra RAM to cache disk -stolen straight outta Linux), being able to use a flash drive as swap.
Yeah, because if you google it you can clearly see that flash drives are faster than hard drives. Not.

3. Improved stability.
Debatable, depends on hardware drivers, yadda yadda.

5. My absolute favorite, copy->merge. I no longer have to connect my usb disks to my linux box and rsync them, I can just drag the entire folder over on Vista and answer 2 dialogs (one for the folder and one for the files) and I can merge/update my 195GB photo archives, Vista will do this on 2 USB drives in about 15 minutes, my rsync to the USB drives is at least 45 minutes.
I didn't know that, cute. It's a shame copying files within hard drives takes forever, which is kind of more important.

7. Folder layout and display is neater.
It still can't decide whether the display configuration is per folder of global, and doesn't mind changing it whenever it pleases.

9. Fixing the start menu so it doesn't scroll all over the desktop
So you like scrolling a tiny piece of your screen?

10. Uptime with Hibernate and sleep. I close my laptop and it hibernates. I don't have to reboot with Vista like I did every other day with XP.
Maybe you should update XP or complain to the manufacturer. Every laptop I've seen does that with XP.

yeah right

[black_lbi]

But some are supportive of Vista. This from Zygote, posted January 21:

"Have any of you nay-sayers actually used Vista for any length of time? Remember the learning curve when we went from 98/2000 to XP; Same thing, put some effort in and you might not be so negative about it. I've had Vista on my laptop virtually since launch and I haven't had any major issues with it."

This guy seems to be totally clueless ... How can you put windows 98 and windows 2000 in the same basket? Just because in his mind they look alike? XP is blue, right, so it's totally different.
What is the learning curve for going from 2000 to xp? For the casual user it's the same thing, except the uglier interface. Under the hood it's also the same thing, with some improvements (well, that really is debatable).
It really amuses me when guys like that get quoted as if they knew what are they talking about.

Great misconception

[ThePhilips]

[...] the vast majority of people signing the petition ARE Microsoft customers!

Microsoft doesn't sell directly. Amongst users of Windows there is no M$ customers.

M$'s customers are channel partners - those who sell Windows/Office/Server/etc for them.

M$ eagerly listens to its customers on how they can together make even more money. Right - not how to make product better - but how to secure more sale deals. That's the concept.

But then again, M$' channel partners sell the ware to IT departments. And we all know that IT is dead end as end-users are concerned. Nor IT does use even half of the product they procure.

So in the long chain to M$, your silly petition is just empty whining to them. After all, you already bought both Vista and XP - deal's sealed and done. So why you are whining then???

Re:what about small businesses!

[chance2105]

Thanks for noticing that.

I hear people here constantly say "Turn off Aero, it's slow!" and I'm left scratching my head.

Yes, disabling Aero will gain you a ballpark of an eight percent improvement in UI responsiveness. But when XP with Luna is s UI latency decrease of 80%, there's no comparison.

The same goes for XP. "Turn on the classic theme!" But 2000, right ouf of the gate, is orders of magnitude faster. Turning off Luna will net you nothing. You get, in effect, a Windows XP speed classic theme.

Re:Cock

[Weedlekin]

"Yup, unless you have a G3 or a G4 slower than 867MHz in which case you can't install Leopard."

This free hack allows Leopard to be installed on many older Macs:

http://www.mac.profusehost.net/leopardassist

Positive (but biased) indicators

[BarfooTheSecond]

What irritates me is MS proudly claiming millions of Vista sales. Of course they sell millions, actually you can't buy a new PC without Vista pre-installed and it already becomes painful to find XP drivers for new hardware, when you want (or need) to downgrade...

You have no choice but to pay your Vista pre-install. So, where's the glory, where is the fame?...

MS biased claims don't talk about their deals with resellers, Intel and other PC manufacturers, nor about users downgrades...

Eric

Perfectly Highlights

[polyp2000]

Why sticking with a closed source / single vendor operating system is a bad idea. When they stop supporting it or the company goes under you are screwed. Let that be a lesson learned...

Vista is a broken POS

[scharkalvin]

The company I work for makes whole house audio equipment and programmable remote controls.
Our equipment is set up by an installer using a windows based application that downloads
configuration data to the microprocessor based equipment. It can also download firmware
updates. Our configuration / firmware update application communicates to the equipment
over ethernet, or a USB-serial link. The PC application is written using M$'s "Dot Nyet"
framework. It works great ... under XP. Under Vista however, there are all sorts of problems
up to and including corruption of the data and firmware update leaving the equipment being
configured a "brick". We don't yet know what the problem is, (bad drivers, in-compatible
dot-nyet dll's with Vista, ???). What a hunk of junk! M$ you screwed the pouch!

Re:what about small businesses!

[nra1871]

Dual core, 2 GB, and it still feels pokey.

You are not Microsoft's Customer

[Prototerm]

Microsoft's customer is the OEMs and the resellers, not you. They don't really care if nobody ever uses Vista, so long as they keep selling it. That is why they will nod politely at petitions like this, but in they end, they will ignore all such attempts to pressure them into keeping XP. XP (and all previous versions of Microsoft Office) are now The Competition, to be eliminated from the marketplace at the first opportunity. That is why (IMHO) the next version of Office for Windows (post-2007) will not support any of the old file formats, only the new ECMA standard. If they could safely do so, they would eliminate support for XP and 2000 from Windows Networking support as well.

Even big corporations will oftentimes purchase a new OS as part of a maintenance agreement, but not use it for one reason or another, so again it's the sale that counts, not whether anybody *wants* the bloody thing.

Oh, entirely off-topic, I have yet to "upgrade" from Windows 2000 to XP, never mind Vista. The only difference between XP and Vista is that Vista is a bigger oinker, that's all.

WAKE UP!

[Highlander15]

You people are just going to have to wake up and realize that XP is dead, by decree of Microsoft and their ability to do so. They are a business and they will do what they feel is best for their bottom line, it's what companies that stay in business DO. The customers they listen to are the large corporations with Enterprise Agreements and OS counts in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, not you. Get used to it.

They won't kill it, just keep raising the price

[1shooter]

of XP-Pro until it costs too much for anyone to buy. They've already moved the price of the retail pack to $299. While there are some discounted packages and OEM versions are around half the price it will surely see more increases as a way to get that pesky consumer to straiten up and get right with Redmond. That way they can just let it expire quietly.

Re:They should make XP free in say... a year.

[timster]

Let's see. A free (as in beer) Windows XP would compete with Vista and win. Microsoft would lose billions of dollars in revenue.

I'm with you so far! Any downside?

Re:what about small businesses!

[CastrTroy]

The M is for mobile. So it's essentially a low power processor. It would probably run about the same speed as the 2 GHz Pentium 4.

Re:what about small businesses!

[CastrTroy]

But that's what came on the computer. I didn't buy Vista separately. I know better, I never planned on using Vista, I just wanted a Linux box. But to those people who are less computer savvy, I would say that it's highly misleading. To sell a computer with those specs with Vista pre-installed is misleading the consumer. I would expect that if you're selling a computer with a certain configuration, that it should run reasonably well under that configuration. I'm convinced they got kick backs from Microsoft for increasing the Vista computer count by releasing an extremely cheap laptop which had Vista installed.

Leopard is far more broken than Vista

[Alexpkeaton1010]

I have "downgraded" my Leopard back to Tiger due to constant crashing issues (the computer completely locks up and I am given a message to hold down the power button). I have never had that kind of lockup in Vista. Sure programs have crashed, but I can always kill them with Task Manager, much like you can Force Quit everything in Tiger without the entire computer locking up. So in my personal sample size of 2 computers, Vista was much better than Leopard for stability.

Re:what about small businesses!

[Cro Magnon]

(may as well say that if the operating system requires something better than a P2 processor it's too much of a hog... hehe)

Well, it is true that my old 8088 was faster with DOS than my AMD64 was with Vista. One would think that faster machines would actually run FASTER than the old stuff, but thanks to MS, they don't.

Re:what about small businesses!

[Cro Magnon]

There are certain crimes where waterboarding is an acceptable punishment. Loading Vista on underpowered boxes is one such crime. Just my 2 cents.

Customer Feedback

[framauro13]

Apparently Microsoft is aware of the petition, but says it is "listening first and foremost to feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs, that's what informed our decision to extend the availability of XP initially, and what will continue to guide us" -- a somewhat strange response given that the vast majority of people signing the petition ARE Microsoft customers! I'm guessing Microsoft is responding to data reported through the Customer Feedback program built into the OS's and their other products (Media Player, Office, etc...).

I would imagine the data coming back via that venue is much more informative than a petition with names on it. Whether they use that data or not is debatable :)

Vista shmista.....

[blankoboy]

It's not only Vista that's causing me to switch to Mac but also (more so?) Microsoft's Genuine Advantage garbage they have pushed on to their 'customers'. This is this single biggest nail in the Windows coffin for me. It is the straw that broke this paying camel's back. They can kill XP and move to Vista for all I care. I'm packing it in, done...Microsoft isn't getting another dime from me, ever.

I think you are missing the point.

[Futurepower(R)]

Yes, I could write a better statement. However, that would not reflect the truth of the social disfunction at Microsoft as well as the Microsoft statement.

They sell so many copies because they have a virtual monopoly. They have arranged, by possibly illegal means, that every hardware seller must include a copy of their operating system. Microsoft was already convicted of that once.

Danger of monopolies

[mlwmohawk]

The more irritating part of this is that this is proof that Microsoft has monopoly power.

Any software company in a competitive environment would bend over backward to give paying customers what they want. Microsoft's monopoly position allows them to say "Nope, you have to buy our new product." If there were an actual competitive environment, customers would say screw you, I'll use someone else's product.

Now, this power over the market has also allowed Microsoft and the MAFIAAS to push anti-consumer nonsense that never would have been possible in a truly competitive.

Does anyone remember software "dongles" back in the 80s? Companies could not sell software with a dongle. People didn't want it. It was something the treated paying customers like criminals. We now have the same crap in DVDs, HD televisions, HDMI, and more. People don't want it, but the huge multinational corporations have conspired to push this crap on us. In the old days, the FCC would have put a stop to it, but like other previously protective regulatory agencies, the FCC has become a tool for the industries.

Copyright USED to be for the common good of society, but now it is a way to control and justify all sorts of horrible affronts to freedom. Just think, once paper is no longer used and ISPs regularly filter all content, how will we keep accurate records? If trying to use any old newspaper report for any purpose is a copyright violation with a fine of 1.2 million dollars, how to we keep track of history? I know you are saying "fair use," but how long can it last under the onslaught?

Now, can the sheeple wrest control from the corporations?

stop imitating ...

[freaker_TuC]

Stop imitating my inner child :)

What Microsoft Should be Listening to...

[Nom du Keyboard]

Microsoft should be listening to all the people who still chose XP over Vista on new systems. They clearly don't wish to, but that who it should be.

Maybe

[slapout]

they need to stop trying to compete with Google and focus on creating operating systems.

Re:what about small businesses!

[tehcrazybob]

Yep, the Pentium M has nothing at all to do with a Pentium 4. Actually, it's based on a Pentium III and most closely related to the Core architecture (Pentium M was the predecessor to Core Solo, and I think the only difference is that Core is 64-bit). For the most part, a 2GHz Pentium M can run with a 3GHz Pentium 4.

To the other person who replied to this, you're thinking of the Mobile Pentium 4.

Do vendors really still support XP?

[Skaarg]

"Nevertheless vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and more recently NEC, all offer the opportunity to downgrade to XP Pro." Really? My girlfriend just bought a laptop from HP, and hated Vista so she wanted to downgrade to XP. We look on the HP site for drivers, and there are none. I send them an e-mail and they respond that they are starting to cut XP support from their newer models.

Re:what about small businesses!

[Shados]

Makes sense. So then i guess its not surprising to have XP zooming on that...its faster than the machine I run Vista on! :)

Thanks for replying!

Save XP (Ha!)

[Furtailloins]

Another example of why I purchased my first Mac. I understand that business and government have millions, hell, billions invested in Microsoft products and most are too committed to switch OS's, but other OS's (good OS's) are out there. SLED 10.3 is a prime example IMHO.

Why should Microsoft care?

[kmweber]

One, it's an online petition, which makes it intrinsically worthless.

Two, 75,000 isn't even the tiniest fraction of Microsoft's user base.

Three, would you expect a petition to save Windows XP to even be an accurate cross-sample of Microsoft's user base, or is it more likely that it contains a disproportionate share of people who, you know, want to save Windows XP.

That we're not hearing from people who support the move to Vista doesn't mean they don't exist in large numbers. After all, there's no reason to get vocal when you're happy with the way things are going.

What is taken into account?

[courteaudotbiz]

Do they take into account that I AM using Vista but that I deeply hate it? I got no choice to use it since I have to support it for all those people who have trouble with it, but using it is such an incredible mess! Poor network performances, ridiculous boot up time, awful application startup performance. But I use it because I need it...

Vista

[Presto Vivace]

The New Coke of technology product launches.

Re:what about small businesses!

[19Buck]

"unbearably slow/512 MB of RAM"

recommended Min is 1GB. nuff said.

Why in the world do people continue to be surprised when software runs like crap on hardware below recommended min specs?

Maximum PC Vol. 12, No. 5 Page 8

[milsoRgen]

Here's something else we learned at GDC: We all know that the only way to get DirectX 10 is to buy Vista, but there's actually nothing about the new API that would prevent Microsoft from releasing a version for Windows XP, although that's unlikely to ever happen. "That wasn't just a business decision," said Donahue. "We wanted to make Vista a dividing point between DX9 and DX10, so we could leave the legacy content behind. And Vista offers a lot of benefits beyond DX10 games. I think there's enough value in the stability and performance it offers.""

Re:Maximum PC Vol. 12, No. 5 Page 8

[vux984]

I don't see your point.

Some guy at Microsoft agrees that the DirectX10 **API** could have been implemented on XP? Ok. No question. It wouldn't be DirectX10 though. It would be a 'version of the directx10 api implemented on XP'.

Sort of like WINE. It implements Windows API's right? Would you call it Windows XP? I know I certainly wouldn't.

For them to backport directX10 to XP they either'd have to update XP to become essentially Vista which is not really an option, or the XP version would be so completely its own version that the only thing they'd really have in common is that -- it would be directX9 with some directx10 api extensions vs honest to god directx10. See the difference? Its like WINE vs Windows XP.

WINE is not windows. It can run some windows software. It implements a lot of the same API functions in a predictable and equivalent manner.. but its still not XP in any meaningful sense. At best its compatible with XP.

And yes, MS could have released something that was -compatible- with (most of) directx10 for XP, and they chose not to for marketing and so forth. But that's a separate issue.

Re:Maximum PC Vol. 12, No. 5 Page 8

[milsoRgen]

XP Display Model
Longhorn Display Model

It is my understanding the rewriting of the graphics subsystem was primarily to move the GUI onto the GPU and its local memory. I don't think the kernel updates necessary to facilitate DX10 on XP for gaming would be troublesome nor completely reshape XP. As using DX10 to facilitate the graphics for gaming could easily co-exist with the current audio subsystem in XP. Sure it probably wouldn't be as elegant solution for DX10 as it is Vista, but without the overhead of Vista anyways, would anyone notice? As for the other major changes to Vista, who the hell wants that tainting XP anyhow.

I'm by no means an expert on this, but it's fun to keep the thread going!

Stupidity

[Orig_Club_Soda]

On one hand the potential of selling Vista and future OSs has a higher potential of sales transactions is not something to easily abandon, but on the other PEOPLE PREFER XP. Why stop selling something that sells itself? Take a cue from Apple. Sell minor upgrades to a fairly solid OS. OS 10 has sold 6 versions so far - since 1999. Thats 6x$129 or a total of $774 from just about every Macintosh user. How many versions of Windows have you bought since 1999? 3?

XP SP3? Really?

[Bryansix]

This is from the whitepaper on SP3... "For customers with existing Windows XP installations, Windows XP SP3 fills gaps in the updates they might have missed--for example, by declining individual updates when using Windows Update."

No thanks! If I decline an update, it is for a reason.

SaveXP website is a spam site

[Longwalker-MGO]

I signed up at the savexp site, chose I didnt want emails from anyone. Within 12 hours, I had 3 spam emails sitting in my mailbox with my first name on them.

Infoworld should not be allowed to perpetuate this clamity.

Re:what about small businesses!

[jbengt]

True, Pentium M shares nothing with Pentium 4 except the name. At the time I got it, research seemed to indicate that a 1.6 GHz Pentium M was about as fast as a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. The real advantage, though, is that the low power and speed stepping helps the battery to last 3.5 to 4.5 hours.

For what it's worth, I also have a 900Mz Pentium 4? machine with something like 396 megs memory. (got it free from work during an upgrade cycle)
XP runs fine on it. Although it's been getting slower, I suspect a wipe and reinstall would speed it up. Not going to happen though, since my son built himself a Core 2 duo machine with 1 Gig memory and a good widescreen LCD monitor, no one at home uses the old computer with a 15" CRT monitor anymore except to access the old files on it through the network.