Vista SP1 Is Even Less Compatible

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Microsoft is now saying that Vista SP1 disables some 3rd party applications. The KB article on SP1 incompatibility states: 'For reliability reasons, Microsoft blocks these programs from starting after you install Windows Vista SP1.' It does link to several vendor support pages with updates or workarounds. Unfortunately, at least one of the suggestions consists of merely disabling part of the program, which could leave you with half an anti-virus solution."

Comments

AntiTrust concerns?

[gnutoo]

Where have I seen this before? Oh yeah, nice. New OS, same old Microsoft.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[hedronist]

I know this is /., but please RTFA.

All the vendors mentioned (ironically, with the exception of Novell) already have fixes/workarounds either ready or in progress.

I kind of doubt there are any antitrust implications when MS contacts the affected vendors in advance. TFA even notes that "this step was taken with the consent of the affected vendors."

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[houstonbofh]

Why does the whole Vista mess remind me of the end of a Benny Hill episode? They need to use the Ubuntu release cycle for a bit so people can move on to Vista +1.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[gnutoo]

AV vendors have been claiming antitrust for eight months. SP1 causes great inconvenience to their customers, what a suspicious coincidence. If the vendors were really cooperating SP1 would have contained their improvements, not a little note or a lock out.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Adambomb]

Seeing that SP1 is not even released to public on the windows update stage yet, is it not entirely probable that the companies in question will have patches by the time its the version-de-jour?

I see how there can be an issue, but where is the issue YET?

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[The MAZZTer]

Exactly. It's for this very reason public betas/RCs are given out... for devs to make sure their software will work with the final release and to give them time to fix and test.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

AV vendors have been claiming antitrust for eight months. SP1 causes great inconvenience to their customers, what a suspicious coincidence.

Yarrr, evil M$ conspiracy to take over the world with Windoze! Oh, wait. Been there, done that...

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[LocoSpitz]

Mod parent down -- and you too. Since you clearly did not take your own advice and follow the links, let me help you out with the facts. The blocked software was blocked with vendor approval. Microsoft's KB article includes links to download current, working versions of affected software.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[_KiTA_]

Exactly. It's for this very reason public betas/RCs are given out... for devs to make sure their software will work with the final release and to give them time to fix and test. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't Microsoft fix their OS so it doesn't break the software everyone's already using?

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't Linux not break their ABI with every new kernel release?

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Adambomb]

Not if the functionality being used by said software was insecure or bugged to begin with.

Now, if the AV companies legitimately do NOT have enough time before SP1 is pushed to the public, then I could see getting up in arms.

Otherwise, isnt this just common sense? Fix whats insecure and broken, advise the third parties of the changes, then release after a suitable dev delay?

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[RobertM1968]

I know this is /., but please RTFA.

All the vendors mentioned (ironically, with the exception of Novell) already have fixes/workarounds either ready or in progress.

I kind of doubt there are any antitrust implications when MS contacts the affected vendors in advance. TFA even notes that "this step was taken with the consent of the affected vendors."

So, you see no antitrust implications when the vendors already had to modify code just to get it to work on Vista's initial release (with much of the pertinent data not being given to them till the last minute, meaning no time to update CDs... like Symantec who had to put files online for tech shops and customers to download while they changed their RTMs to match due to lack of time), followed by a SP that disables their software - yet again - leaving only MS as the working alternative, with again too little time to have updates available to end users except for too late after the fact?

That to me smells of anti-trust. As for "this step was taken with the consent of the affected vendors." - what consent does it imply? "We're changing things... too bad... you have to modify your code again if you want it to work - it's either that, or your product wont run on Vista SP1. OK?" - "Uh... OK... since our choices are (a) it wont work and we lose our customer base or (b) we modify the code."

If you call that consent... c'mon. It's like a thief with a gun telling you "I'll shoot you if you don't give me all the money in your pockets... but I'd settle for half of it and just beat you up a bit... do you consent to me just beating you up a bit for half the money in your pockets?" - "Ummm... sure" - the only things they consented to was being stuck without any choice requiring them update their software - or it wouldnt work. Consent != extortion... and this borders on extortion.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Myen]

MS should try, yes, but sometimes the existing software just has bugs (i.e. violates what the API says you should do). It previously worked if the OS had matching bugs that made it work.

Kinda like how people who write web pages by testing with IE and seeing it broken in Firefox etc. because the app they tested with wasn't quite obeying the standards, really...

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the antivirus vendors bitched when Vista was released because, particularly in Vista x64, they were locked out from fucking with the kernel. This was done for security reasons and if anyone but Microsoft did it this would be considered good practice. Microsoft listened and decided that in Vista SP1 they would provide an API through which the antivirus vendors could explicitly perform the actions they wished to perform at the kernel level.

So, Microsoft listened to the complaint and fixed it which requires that the antivirus companies change their programs to adhere to the published API. Exactly what is the problem again?

Oh yeah, Slashdot. You have to complain otherwise people might notice that you're 45 and still living in your parents' basement.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[computrius]

What do you think the service packs are? There really arent enough changes with each ubuntu release to be called anything but a service pack. Hell, we are pretty much using Ubuntu 1.0 service pack 4,283 :)

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Derosian]

When I was younger in a moment of anger at Microsoft I once exclaimed "I'm gonna write my own O/S one without any bugs at all!" to which my friend sagely replied, "So your not gonna let anyone write any software for it?" This is something to think about.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[maxume]

It depends a great deal on what the changes were. If the changes were gratuitous, sure. If the changes were beneficial to the consumer, not so much.

Neither link provides details about the changes, so we can only speculate. The documenting of the incompatibilities and publishing of the workarounds at least suggests that the changes are purposeful and in the interests of consumers.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Your.Master]

My god, that is the most insane strawman argument I have ever seen. You spent the latter two out of those three paragraphs painting a fantasy scenario, then drawing a hugely hyperbolic analogy, and then concluding, based on your fantasy scenario, that this was extortion.

You could have read the article. AV vendors were locked out of the kernel with Vista, for security reasons, which are valid for all Operating Systems and not smoke-up-the-ass reasons. After complaints, SP1 *adds* a more secure API support so the AV vendors can screw with the kernel again (more carefully). This is Microsoft bending to the AV vendors' collective will. Necessarily, this means AV vendors have to change their support. So they do, and consent to this because this is precisely what they asked for.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[siyavash]

Hate to ruin your day but where I come from, posting an URL without any other description or info is called SPAM. Specially when the URL is neither related to parent or the article in question... but then again, it's Slashdot so you might even get modded up just because it's some linux distro.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[LocoSpitz]

Microsoft is not, as you say, the only working alternative. First, it's not like ALL AV or firewall software is blocked. Second, and more importantly... in the Knowledge Base article, Microsoft provides links to updated, working versions of the software. This shouldn't even be an issue -- your security software should ALWAYS be the latest version! You'd have a point if software was blocked without vendor approval, or without updates available. But that's not the case. Vendors approved the blocks, updates are available, and SP1 isn't even out to consumers yet. And your speculation about "consent" is just that -- speculation. You and I have no idea how Microsoft and software developers worked out this issue, yet half of your post is dedicated to accusing Microsoft of extortion and anti-trust based purely on speculation with zero facts behind it. Speaking of zero facts, as I mentioned, updates are available, yet you say in your post that vendors have "too little time to have updates available to end users."

Please consider actually reading the links before wasting space in the comments with your fact-free rants.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[ocbwilg]

AV vendors have been claiming antitrust for eight months. SP1 causes great inconvenience to their customers, what a suspicious coincidence. If the vendors were really cooperating SP1 would have contained their improvements, not a little note or a lock out.

Well, speaking as a customer of one of the affected vendors who uses Vista SP1, I'd have to disagree with you. I've been running Trend Micro Internet Security 2008 since December, and when I upgraded to Vista SP1 2 days ago I had no problems. Trend starts and runs just like it should. From everything that I've read, all it takes to fix the issue is for the affected vendors to release an update to their application. Since most of the applications in question are security applications that should (if installed correctly) be downloading regular definition updates anyway, it's likely that the vast majority of users will get their applications patched before they are able to download SP1. In my example, Trend Micro apparently released the fix before I downloaded SP1. Since SP1 wasn't available from Windows update at the time (the only way I know of to get a legit copy is via MSDN), then it's doubtful that many people have seen the problem at all.

I know that this particular KB article has gotten a lot of press lately, but I haven't seen one case of a user complaining that they've had the problems described. All of the press seems to be based on the fact that Microsoft found a potential issue and made a KB article about it. That hardly constitutes "great inconvenience to their customers".

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Adambomb]

I think the real question would be more "will anyone WANT to develop software for it" as you could write an extremely simple OS that use very strict scheduling and such, but to keep it simple you'd have to reduce the functionality of the API and developers would want to stab you in the face.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[obstalesgone]

Son of a bitch! He got modded up.

Debian! Debian! SUSE! SUSE! Hippopotami! Hippopotami!

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[GigaplexNZ]

AV vendors claiming antitrust? I find that ironic, considering their industry is based solely around the insecurity of Windows. It is in Microsofts and every users best interest for Windows to be made bullet proof, but then the AV vendors would sue for more antitrust violations. It is an industry that shouldn't even exist.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Goldberg's Pants]

No, you're wrong. It's none of those things. It's a cheap attempt to gain karma, and VOILA! It worked.

Ubuntu is not the solution in this case. Going back to XP is. (Since I want to keep my games and all the other cool stuff that Ubuntu just can't do.)

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[nevernamed]

I was actually trying to be funny, but I agree with you, I think that those of us who are still tied to windows for some tasks should be sticking with XP until Microsoft decides exactly how they are going to make vista work. Of course, the idea is to make sure that something is working BEFORE you release it, but when has microsoft ever gotten that right?

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[turnipsatemybaby]

And how is it Microsoft's responsibility if application vendors are incapable of following the spec? If you can't follow the API properly, and the incorrect functionality you are relying on is changed/fixed, it's your responsibility to fix your own software.

I read an interesting article way back when about how Microsoft has had to bend over backwards, replicating old bugs and inconsistencies so that existing software won't break when users upgrade. At this point, I think it's safe to say that all those efforts, combined with the other political stupidity microsoft has done (like integrating IE into the OS) is now starting to bite Microsoft in the rear. Vista is just the critical mass of all bugs piled on top of bugs on top of API changes, etc.

I think Apple had the right idea when they made OS X. Redo the whole OS, and then include the old OS in a compatibility VM. That way you get a clean start while still supporting older apps.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[shutdown -p now]

Not if the functionality being used by said software was insecure or bugged to begin with.

What's interesting here is that one of the programs on the list, NYT Reader, is written entirely in .NET and WPF, and the latter is a rather recent - slightly more than 1 year old - technology. And it's much harder to mess with the system in undocumented way with that, than it is with your usual C++/WinAPI combo (remember "The Old New Thing" for many examples of the latter).

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[RobertM1968]

No... you are reading into my post.

When working at CompUSA, it was Symantec, McAfee (and others) who told us they were not given the info they needed to release the update in time - yet oddly, MS's AV and AntiSpyware team had the info in plenty of time.

I'm not debating or debasing MSs reasons, just their methods in providing competition with the info needed in time to be ready in a less costly manner. Read through the DOJ anti-trust case, as well as the EU complaints against MS, and you will see there is a pattern of such.

I'm all for whatever changes MS makes to improve Windows (security, performance, etc)... but I am totally against their repeated use of such reasons as excuses to lock out competition by not providing them the info they need in a timely fashion.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[RobertM1968]

yet half of your post is dedicated to accusing Microsoft of extortion and anti-trust based purely on speculation with zero facts behind it.

DECADES of previous track record, including the findings lately in the DOJ case and in the EU case are hardly "purely speculation"

Yes, it doesnt affect ALL AV software... but it does affect their biggest competitors.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[SL Baur]

They don't. Developers who (try to) break ABIs get handed their heads on a platter by Linus. Internal kernel stuff is different, but userland Shall Not Be Broken is the prime directive and the kernel-userland interface standards followed aren't written by us.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[rudy_wayne]

Mod parent up! For those who don't follow the links, the important bit in this story is that Microsoft is blocking third-party security software. They're breaking basically all anti-virus software that isn't Windows Defender and all firewall software that isn't Windows Firewall. This is clearly monopoly abuse, and hopefully Microsoft will get smacked down for it. Not that I honestly expect that to happen, the current administration certainly won't and none of the current candidates would. But, hey, we can dream.

Utter bullshit. My AV program works just fine on Vista -- both the 32 and 64 bit versions. Microsoft did not deliberately break something just to screw AV vendors. That is total bullshit. What they did with Vista was make changes that prevented people from fucking with the kernel. If anyone other than Microsoft had done this it would have been considered a Good Thing(R).

The bottom line -- some companies were able to rewrite their programs so that they work on Vista and some weren't. Microsoft may be evil, but they aren't responsible for the incompetence of others.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[AJWM]

Shouldn't Linux not break their ABI with every new kernel release?

Linux doesn't. The Applications Binary Interface is remarkably stable in Linux, all things considered. The kernel internal interface is of course fair game, since it's all source code anyway (a few vendors' proprietary drivers notwithstanding). I've got 2.4.x application binaries that work just fine on 2.6.x.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[ta bu shi da yu]

Yes, but Microsoft would have been better to let the applications just crash, not block them. Since when has it been Microsoft's responsibility to ensure third party apps run nicely?

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[LinuxLuver]

Most existing Windows software isn't supported on Vista anyway.....Trying buying any language tutorials ....XP or 2K only.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[gnutoo]

Trend Micro works but Novell does not. Let that be a lesson to those who would cooperate with Microsoft, it never lasts. They may reward you today but they will punish you tomorrow.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Macthorpe]

including the findings lately in the DOJ case and in the EU case are hardly "purely speculation" Care to elaborate on these 'findings'?

Yes, it doesnt affect ALL AV software... but it does affect their biggest competitors. Really? It affects their biggest competitors? Like... Grisoft? Symantec? McAfee? No. None of those.

Biggest companies on the list of those affected are Trend and ZoneLabs. Microsoft have notified those affected companies that a kernel update may cause issues with their software, and those companies have updated. Not only that, but all this has happened before the kernel update is released.

This is a non-story and that's obvious to all except the blindest of fanatics.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[TheThiefMaster]

Traditional security-hole exploiting viruses are rare now.

Instead a virus scanner protects users from their own stupidity.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[kflat]

DOS ain't done til Lotus won't run.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[ozmanjusri]

It is in Microsofts and every users best interest for Windows to be made bullet proof

http://www.microsoft.com/OneCare/

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Myen]

Hmm? No, it's not Microsoft's responsibility to work around bugs in apps; it's a service they're doing for their customers (the people with their new OS who want to use old software). I view it as a best-effort thing.

Not having to do something doesn't mean you shouldn't, sometimes. Some times, of course, you just shouldn't :p

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[gearloos]

"I read an interesting article way back when about how Microsoft has had to bend over backwards, replicating old bugs " Oh, poor Microsoft. If they only were able to stay above financial water....pity

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[billcopc]

Novell stopped writing software a decade ago. Now they write malware. I applaud Microsoft for disabling that garbage.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[drsmithy]

I find that ironic, considering their industry is based solely around the insecurity of Windows.

False. The primary purpose of AV software is to deflect the bullet when the user tries to shoot himself in the foot.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[rsmith-mac]

SP1 actually has some changes in it to placate the AV vendors. Windows x64 introduced a feature called Kernel Patch Protection which as the name implies blocks (at least as much as humanly possible) attempts to patch or otherwise hook things in to the kernel. This has been something that Windows has been needing for some time since it stops certain malware/rootkit vectors along with lazy software authors dinking around with the kernel causing it to crash. But most of the AV vendors simply keep brining their code forward from earlier versions of Windows, where they used kernel hooking to set up their access method for real-time virus scanning. Ergo Windows x64 caused a huge problem when AV vendors couldn't use kernel hooking, and while there were real APIs that worked about as well, they were not in the least bit happy about the issue and hence all the bitching in recent months.

With SP1, Microsoft is scaling back the KPP functionality in Vista x64. Now Microsoft is going to let certain parties patch the kernel again, providing an API to do so. This will make the AV vendors happy, as they won't have to rewrite a bunch of code for x64. The loser of course is the rest of us, Microsoft basically had to scale back some of Vista x64's security so that AV vendors could make their own wares work better (and in a roundabout way make them more necessary).

The AV vendors don't really have a problem with SP1 breaking any existing software since they're getting kernel hooking back, which is a far bigger win for them.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[MickDownUnder]

Anti-virus software shouldn't be a requirement of an operating system. The operating system should come with adequet securtity to guard against and detect attempts at intrusion. 3rd party anti-virus solutions are just patches on a leaky boat. If Microsoft ever gets around to doing it's job properly the whole anti-virus business model will be defunct

Google is showing Microsoft how it's done on the web with their browsing and email solutions quickly becoming the defacto industry standard for spam email and malicious online attacks. Likewise Microsoft harness the peer to peer power it has at it's disposal, to detect and eliminate unauthorised intrusions on their platform.

If Windows ever becomes a truely safe and secure operating system it'll be Microsoft and not 3rd party anit-virus solutions that does it. Unless Microsoft really opens up it's OS, they are the only ones in a position to actually do a proper job of it.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[onefriedrice]

If Apple had the install base of Windows, they would never have risked that. When there are about .01% of the computing world using Apple OS, dropping the entire thing and creating a new one from scracth and keeping the old one as a VM is ok. you don't need to worry about too much backlash or loss of sales (as there aren't much to begin with).

When you're over 90% of the market, you simply cannot take your customers for granted and drop compatibilty. I think you misunderstand the point, which is that the "Classic" environment under Mac OS X worked really well while at the same time allowed Apple to actually improve the "real" operating system. So perhaps this approach would work even better for Microsoft since A) we know this approach does works, and B) we know Microsoft's current approach at keeping compatibility is a huge burden and apparently doesn't work so well. The fact that they have even more users should mean that it's even more important for them to do something that works, which a VM layer does, seeing as how Apple has proved that it works (multiple times).

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[vuffi_raa]

And how is it Microsoft's responsibility if application vendors are incapable of following the spec? that argument only works if you have a time machine as sp1 isn't released yet and the incompatibilities are on previously released and installed software- when the vendors wrote the software there was no spec for sp1

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Goldberg's Pants]

I'm done with Windows at XP. Vista has far to much baggage loaded with it. (The DRM crap. WGA etc...) If I have to go Linux only in the end, so be it. I'd rather do that. I'm still tied to Windows due to my gaming habits. (Sorry, but WINE doesn't remotely get the job done well enough.)

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[rtb61]

Of course that is not what really is happening. What happened is Vista SP1 actually incorporated code that would stop a range of competing products from running, 'Microsoft blocks these programs from starting'. So M$ knew there were problems that they incorporated into SP1, tested those programs to confirm failure and then added additional code to prevent the programs from running. Now that is the reality, not some story about bugs in other peoples programs.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[MPAB]

And most medical reference software is terribly outdated (in a technical way), working only on Windows 98 and some even won't install if the user doesn't let it install QT 2.0! They only update the contents.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[pimpimpim]

I think Apple had the right idea when they made OS X. Redo the whole OS, and then include the old OS in a compatibility VM.

The idea might be right, but creating an implementation where you use your media player as a fundamental layer of your graphical engine is not completely right I would say ;)

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Carewolf]

The primary purpose of AV software is to deflect the bullet when the user tries to shoot himself in the foot.

Wouldn't the bullet then hit the user in the head instead?

I think it would be an appropiate solution, but not a viable business model.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Mr. Shiny And New]

"Competing products", or else products that didn't work well in Vista either, only Microsoft didn't find out just how bad it was and is only now updating the blacklist? I mean, some products just do bad things to the OS, and they just won't work in Vista. If MS didn't test this product or didn't discover how badly the product breaks Vista, they might not have blacklisted the product when Vista was released. Claiming that the products don't work because of new code in SP1 is inaccurate, I think.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[HannethCom]

It's not that we aren't capable of following the specs. The problem is if you write to Microsoft specifications your program won't work, or some times they change the specs.

This has been one of the complaints in the anti-trust lawsuits against Microsoft is that they don't follow standards and when they provide documentation, usually large portions of it do not match their implementation.

There's one note in the DirectX 5 API that basically said, this is how you should do it, but because of a bug you can't. It will be fixed in the next version. Which that bug survived until at least DirectX 8 and now has been replaced by new functionality. Unless it's a bug that affects end users, Microsoft doesn't care about fixing it.

In Windows 2000 and Windows XP the multimedia timer was broken. This was Microsoft's recommended way of keeping audio and video playing at the right speeds. They said that it was a flaw in their design of the system and because it's in the Kernel we would have to wait for the next version of Windows to fix it, until then we were to find a work around.

I'm not even going to go into the horror that is the Winsock API.

Basically Microsoft tells us to work around their shoddy foundation. Then they start modifying support pillars to balsa wood and ripping out other ones, while in the rare case fixing one or two. Then we are blamed for their screw ups.

It doesn't help that they keep tacking on new APIs that do the same thing as the old ones. What they really need to do is sit down, actually design their systems and implement them correctly. The problem is that is not in their best interest. If they actually made something that worked and kept working, people would not have a reason to upgrade their Visual Studio. It's not in Microsoft's best interest to make something that is well designed and implemented because developers would have no reason to upgrade. Nor would users. We are seeing this with XP versus Vista.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[macdaddy357]

The problem with Linux is that there are roughly a vigintillion distros, and if try one, then go online asking for help, a bunch of unsociable dorks and dweebs in their mothers' basements tell you what an idiot you are, and that you have no business being within a mile of a computer. Linux is only for them. Sick of Windows? Get a Mac.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[LinuxLuver]

Yeah. I was silly enough to buy the Oxford English Dictionary CD (equivalent to 20+ hardcover books - EVERY word in the English language) a few years ago. It cost me $800. The software that accesses the data on the CD only works on Win9x and an upgrade is very expensive. There are definitely people out there who are good at what they do, but creating and supporting software around their core competency isn't what they are good at. I can understand that. A carpenter makes a chair, it lasts for decades. But someone makes a piece of software and it lasts maybe 5 years then has to be re-made? For people who work on long time scales, that is too frequent for them.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[myowntrueself]

When I was younger in a moment of anger at Microsoft I once exclaimed "I'm gonna write my own O/S one without any bugs at all!" to which my friend sagely replied, "So your not gonna let anyone write any software for it?" This is something to think about.

So what? You went on to develop the iPhone and took your friends comment to heart?

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[Meski]

So you want to carp and criticise[1] when MS do not close their security holes, and when they do, but it blocks the way AV manufacturers use Vista currently? Seems you want to have your cake and eat it. [1] Looks up at url. Ah yeah, I'm on /. - maybe I should shutup.

Re:AntiTrust concerns?

[h2_plus_O]

Where have I seen this before?

How is this news? MS hard/soft blocked incompatible/badly behaved apps in Vista too. The criteria are explicitly spelled out, this guidance is posted publicly.

Increased security.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Vista really need anti-virus software anyway?

Re:Increased security.

[Atti K.]

Does anybody need Vista anyway?

Re:Increased security.

[Mex]

No, but most vendors sell new machines with it. I know Dell supposedly sells PCs with Ubuntu and XP, but I'm in Mexico and they only offer Vista on new PCs.

I plan to try Vista but I'll most likely end up replacing it with XP, I have some custom software that I need and it doesn't run on Vista.

Re:Increased security.

[Kjella]

Any system with decentralized software sources would. If Linux finally got anything like klik/klik2, glick, zero install or whatever to be popular it'd need it too. Technically you might need the same today, but adding additional software repositories is so rare it's not a practical problem, and any malware in the standard repositories is easy to kill at the source.

Many closed source/payware applications won't go with the reposittory model, so I guess you could say it's the lack of payware that means Linux doesn't need distributed software sources that means Linux doesn't need anti-virus. Whether you think that's a good thing (OSS is all you need) or a bad thing (OSS or... nothing??? FFS, give me Photoshop), their absence is why you don't need anti-virus.

Re:Increased security.

[msuarezalvarez]

Virii is just misguided and pretentious desire to appear knowledgeable by the use of a word which does not exist nor, according to all extant documents, never has existed. Vira is just plain silly ;-)

Re:Increased security.

[Macthorpe]

Virii is actually derived from 'vir', the Latin for 'men'. So when you say 'virii', you're not saying 'many viruses', you're saying 'many men'. Vira is only a possibility if you were deriving from 'virum', which we're clearly not.

The plural of 'virus' in Latin was most likely to be 'virus' because it's already a mass noun.

The accepted English usage is 'viruses'.

Re:Increased security.

[Macthorpe]

Sorry, resident classicist corrected me: virii would be derived from 'virius', viri is derived from 'vir'.

Re:Increased security.

[magnum123]

Interesting, I gave up on Windows awhile back and went Ubuntu Linux. Single CD install, press ENTER six times to install - all the speed and free apps you can want, even runs on old hardware! Compiz-Fusion blows Vista away in my opinion for eye candy. I cannot see myself ever going MS again when I can do three times as much for so much less and in a fraction of the time.

Re:Increased security.

[macdaddy357]

Almost nobody needs it, but every poor sucker who buys a new PC gets stuck with it. The only people who need it are half-blind old people who can't see the small icons in XP.

Blocks or warns?

[nurb432]

If i warns me, thats cool, but if it totally blocks me from running what i purchased. They can take a flying leap.

Re:Blocks or warns?

[LocoSpitz]

Tell the company you bought your software from to take a leap; they agreed to the blocking. Or you could, you know, update your security software to the latest, compatible version through the links helpfully provided by Microsoft. Seems like common sense, keeping your security software up to date...

Re:Blocks or warns?

[dbIII]

People buy computers for the applications. If Vista gets in the way of AutoCAD or whatever they will use WinXP, 2000, 98 or whatever else will run it.

Re:Blocks or warns?

[IKnwThePiecesFt]

Then I guess it's a good thing for Vista that nearly no apps are listed aside from Antivirus which should be updated anyway!

Re:Blocks or warns?

[nurb432]

In this scenario the PC in question has no attachment to the 'net', and used only for specific applications that were purchased and installed from the original media from seemingly reputable sources like Adobe or Autodesk, or even Microsoft ( office for example.. ). Not all companies allow all PC's to access the outside world, for various reasons.

So with the above example, why should i care about 'security', and why should i be **forced** to upgrade because of it ? A simple warning would suffice.

( yes, i realize the story was specially about things like antivirus with SP1, but vista also killed 'real' apps along the way for the sake of 'security' so it all is tied together )

Re:Blocks or warns?

[nurb432]

Umm if the program worked before SP1, but afterwards either doesn't work or blue screens the PC, then yes it was SP1's fault.

Re:Zone Alarm?

[present_arms]

No, Its a firewall.

It's normal

[koro666]

People are quick to slam Microsoft again here. For those reading TFKBA, most of the apps are either:

1. Anti-virus programs. AV programs have a reputation of hooking on undocumented kernel stuff, so of course a major OS update is going to break them off.
2. Other programs which abuse undocumented functions or quirks/bugs in Windows, and these get changed/fixed in a subsequent release.

In conclusion, move along, nothing to see here.

Re:It's normal

[kemenaran]

Sure - plus there are far less compatibility issues with Vista SP1 than with XP SP2 (which was a real pita for a lot of users).

Re:It's normal

[VirusEqualsVeryYes]

There's even less to see here as all the security programs have updates.

Bitdefender AV - A supported version (2008 or a later version) is now available.
Jiangmin KV AV v10 - A supported version is now available.
Jiangmin KV AV v2008 - A supported version is now available.
Trend Micro Internet Security - A supported version (16.1 or a later version) is now available.
Zone Alarm Security Suite - A supported version (7.1.218.0 or a later version) is now available.
Rising Personal Firewall - A supported version (2008 version) is now available.

What is this "half an anti-virus solution" FUD crap in the summary?

Re:It's normal

[cheater512]

Would #1 be because there is no public hooks for antivirus programs to use?
There of course would be private ones for Microsoft's products.

Re:It's normal

[Scruffy Dan]

not to mention that the list is very short, most of the affected programs have updates or workarounds, AND SP1 is not even out to the public.

Re:It's normal

[ColdWetDog]

Are you braindead or something? Need to get out of the basement occasionally?

Ever seen a Google Search?

Just about 640,000 hits for "problems with XP SP2". Just for the record yung un, ** EVERY ** OS upgrade is going to have problems. Become one with this and you can make a good living dealing with it. Railing against the machine will just give you hemorrhoids.

Re:It's normal

[LocoSpitz]

Read the KB article before you start spreading crap in the comments. Every program listed as blocked was disabled with the approval of the vendor, and links are provided right in the article to updated, supported versions.

Re:It's normal

[The_Spud]

posting to undo mis mod
(nothing to see, move along)

Re:It's normal

[X0563511]

You mean it wasn't a problem for you and anyone you know. You do not speak for even a fraction of the people out there. Problems happened.

Re:It's normal

[Raphael Emportu]

These programs hook into undocumented because MS still doesn't follow European court ruling and opening up the documentation. But then again, they have no reason to support these programs. They go the way Apple did before and will end the same way. Maybe one day we see Yahoo buying MS :-)

Re:It's normal

[Your.Master]

There are public APIs and private APIs, and the difference between them is the difference between public methods and private methods of a class. You shouldn't perform workarounds to access the private methods precisely because private methods may change or disappear. What you asking for here is for Windows to maintain even more cruft than they maintain, when so many on slashdot clamour for Microsoft to drop a bunch of cruft if they want to improve their OS.

Re:It's normal

[dbIII]

Nothing to see here due to poor documentation of kernel stuff. People are also foprgetting that these applications exist to work around flaws in the platform in the first place. Microsoft is being slammed for more fundamental reasons than the poster above is talking about.

Log in to safe mode as Administrator, malware processes are not running but MS Windows stupid file permissions implementation locks me out from deleting it even as Administrator. Log out and fdisk from orbit - it's the only way to be sure.

Re:It's normal

[ozbird]

Microsoft: Hello [insert AV vendor here]. Would you like your users to have to upgrade to the latest version of your product for Vista SP1?
AV vendor: Yes please - we need the revenue.
Microsoft: Done - we'll add you to the "disabled with approval" list.
AV vendor: Thanks Microsoft! [evil laugh]

Re:It's normal

[Daniel Phillips]

People are quick to slam Microsoft again here. For those reading TFKBA, most of the apps are either:

      1. Anti-virus programs. AV programs have a reputation of hooking on undocumented kernel stuff, so of course a major OS update is going to break them off.
      2. Other programs which abuse undocumented functions or quirks/bugs in Windows, and these get changed/fixed in a subsequent release.

In conclusion, move along, nothing to see here. Seems unambiguously damning to me that Microsoft's antivirus internal developers were able to get the info they needed in time to be compatible with SP1 while independent software vendors were not. Perhaps if Microsoft were not selling a product that competes with those vendors it could be explained away more easily.

Re:It's normal

[ColdWetDog]

Sorry, mayhaps my humorizer wasn't working. Carry on.

Re:Zone Alarm?

[Insanity Defense]

Zone Alarm is a firewall and there are both free and commercial versions of it.

Article is FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

The list of blocked programs encompasses about five programs, four of which have new versions that are compatible with SP1. The entire list of programs with less compatibility is about a dozen programs, and I only counted three of which do not have updated versions that support SP1.

Yeah, so much for MS's new strategy

[fsckr]

And I quote:
Microsoft's New Leaf On Interoperability

Microsoft has made a major announcement about interoperating with others...

Re:Yeah, so much for MS's new strategy

[__aaqvdr516]

"For reliability reasons, Microsoft blocks these programs from starting after you install Windows Vista SP1," according to the article, which notes this step was taken with the consent of the affected vendors.

So they really are interoperating. They told them they needed to fix something and the vendors agreed.

Vista again?

[Eddy Luten]

Why are we still even talking about Vista? Is anybody really using Vista these days? Governments and Organizations have spoken out against Vista, Office 2007 and it lives in infamy everywhere else. Even Microsoft's Eric Traut has somewhat spoken out against Vista and Windows in general.

Everywhere I go people say I'll stick to XP for as long as I can, even in the Enterprise. These type of /. submissions are getting really old really fast since they all repeat the same message: stay the hell away from Vista.

Re:Vista again?

[garett_spencley]

Huh ?

Sorry but this is slashdot. Sticking it to Microsoft NEVER gets old.

Are you new around here or something ?

Re:Vista again?

[Ed Avis]

'for as long as I can'... this is the important bit. Microsoft can force you onto Vista whenever they want simply by dropping maintenance (including security fixes) for XP. Like it or not, all Windows users are going to be running either Vista or its successors a few years from now. So you'd better get used to it.

Re:Vista again?

[Atti K.]

For me, XP is gonna be the last Windows I ever use, at least for personal stuff. If my employer will switch to Vista, that's their problem. But my next computer will be a Mac, and if I were not that lazy, I would have switched to Linux my home desktop long time ago (those huge amounts of data on ntfs partitions are one of the reasons - and no, ntfs3g is not perfect). The one Windows-only app I really need is IE (stupid internet-banking site...) which can run perfectly inside a VM.

Re:Vista again?

[pembo13]

I am seeing that my school is switching to Vista on office machines, not sure if it is due to some support contract obligation, or it is actually voluntarily -- just happy am no longer in the computer support business.

Re:Vista again?

[webheaded]

You know, I'm honestly really tired of seeing this same lame ass rant over and over again in every single MS article. Kudos to you at least for keeping it relatively short. This happens EVERY SINGLE TIME Microsoft releases an new OS. They can't win, even if they DID write the best software known to man, and you know why? Legacy compatibility. You guys bitch when it doesn't work with your old shit and if it DOES work with your old shit, you bitch because the OS is bloated and runs like shit. There's a price for compatibility and if you think you have the easy and simple solution, you're probably wrong.

Every time one of these comes out there's someone ranting about the downfall of Microsoft and Windows and blah blah blah, and it never happens. They usually get Insightful mod points and everyone has a circle jerk over it. You've been doing it since Slashdot came into existence. It's ridiculous and it makes me laugh to see it keep happening over and over again and people don't even realize that they ARE doing it over and over again. Is Vista perfect? God no, not by any means. Is it a step down from XP? For the time being, perhaps. It has it's merits...I use it on a daily basis so I've got a pretty good leverage on the subject, unlike 90% of the people bitching who are using Linux at the moment and have spent all of 5 minutes on Vista. Shit changes from release to release...it happens. It sucks...it's annoying. It frustrates the hell out of me when they arbitrarily move things around just because they think it looks pretty. Was there a point in renaming "Add/Remove Programs" to "Program and Features" really? No...is the world going to come crashing down because of it? No probably not.

Also I keep seeing you guys whine about RAM usage...have none of you even read what the features of Vista are? It uses lots of RAM and caches your most frequently launched programs there...no matter what you are doing, you will always have high RAM usage...why are we even debating that? Furthermore, again, this happens every time they release an OS. It always requires better hardware. Trying to run it on an old piece of shit computer probably causes at least half of the problems we see. They can't forsee every conceivable hardware configuration...they just can't. It's impossible. I mean for christ's sake...Apple has problems too and they've got an EXTREMELY limited amount of hardware to accomodate for. What does that tell you? It tells you that it's REALLY hard to account for these things and if you think Linux does it so much better, I'd have to laugh at you. Linux still supports a laughable amount of hardware compared to Windows. Not necessarily Linux's fault, but it's still not there and people still have problems with it.

What I'm really trying to say here is that I really wish people would take a realistic and logical look at this kind of stuff. The rampant fanboyism disgusts me sometimes. If you like Linux, good for you. That's awesome. I like it too. I like Windows as well...for different reasons. They both have their merits...so does MacOSX (it's quite sexy I'll admit). Just because you like one thing though...does that mean you have to have fangasm and go apeshit about every competing product's flaws while completely ignoring the flaws of your favorite? Furthermore honestly...who even gives a shit? I'm sure most people here that aren't rabid fanboys are really getting sick of seeing the same shit like this over and over again, you know?

Re:Vista again?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's frustrating that a lot of people ignore what Vista gets right and simply say XP is always better. For example, in Vista, if a video driver crashes, the system reinitializes it like nothing happened. To my knowledge, XP didn't do that. I've been hit with that one a few times a week, since NVIDIA and ATI put out such crappy, perpetual-beta drivers that probably haven't been tested with my motherboard/GPU combination.

Or take the fact that Internet Explorer now runs as a different user. It's not the perfect solution to the problem of buggy browsers (there could still be a privilege escalation somewhere, or a bogus ActiveX control that wants to be escalated), but you have to admit, it does mitigate the problem in a way that Firefox on Linux certainly doesn't today. (And yes, Firefox does have security holes every now and then.)

Or the fact that you now have to click-through a menu to do an Administrator task. Yes, this conditions users into clicking "Accept" all the time without thinking about it (undeniably bad), but for users that are careful about it, it can be an improvement. (By the way, Mac OS X and several Linux distros have this feature too, although they prompt for your password. But nobody complains about this feature in these other systems, do they?)

But, since it takes a long time to copy a file, or since they've had small difficulties deploying the service pack, or since they've changed the UI so it's no longer what people are used to, all of a sudden it's a complete failure, and its merits get ignored. Yeah, the situation with Vista is far from perfect, but when has Windows ever been so? I'm personally curious on how Windows 7 can improve upon the situation.

Re:Vista again?

[tomhudson]

Like it or not, all Windows users are going to be running either Vista or its successors a few years from now. So you'd better get used to it.

Good to know that most people will be running osx or linux in a few years ...

Remember, both of those alternatives have two things that Window s7 doesn't have:

1. They're here now
2. They're proven, mature products

Vista is not there yet, and its doubtful it will ever be a mature product, with the way that even Microsoft is trying to position it now as just a stop-gap on the road to Windows 7. It really Is VastME.

Re:Vista again?

[Anonymous Coward]

I said the same about Win2k. I completed my switch to Debian early last year and I am perfectly happy.

Re:Vista again?

[dummondwhu]

When XP came out, I said, "I'm sticking to Win2K as long as a I can and never going to XP. Bah, the only thing that keeps me on Windows is games." Then I got a new PC with XP installed and realized it was pretty decent. Then I said, "I'm sticking with XP as long as I can and never going to Vista. Bah, the only thing that keeps me on Windows is games." Then, I got a PS3 and that was good enough to satisfy my mild gaming interests. Finally, I had no reason to stick with Windows. Then, I got a new laptop with Vista installed and realized, "Hey, this isn't as bad as the hype."

In my college days and for a while after, fiddling with hardware and building a working box with linux really interested me. Now, I'm tired of dealing with drivers and all the b.s. I just want an OS that lets me do what I need to do. I don't have unusual needs for hardware so I don't give a shit if Vista won't support this or that. I whipped up an order from Dell and it showed up and it works and that's that.

Vista isn't perfect and never will be. But neither is any OS from any vendor. And certainly, Vista needs some work in the short term. But, when some linux distro is robust enough to unseat Windows, it will. That's the way markets work. Until then, I just don't have the time to pretend anymore that Windows is soooooo inferior for the vast majority of users that just surf the web, read e-mail, play DVDs and other typical stuff.

Re:Vista again?

[rhizome]

There's a price for compatibility and if you think you have the easy and simple solution, you're probably wrong.

No, the price of compatibility is closed-source software. To recognize how little value both of these conditions have, consider that I can still compile current versions of tcpdump or fvwm or openoffice on RedHat 6, FreeBSD 5 and Solaris 8. While you ably demonstrate that a reasonable argument can be made for Windows improving over the years, your point boils down to the fact that Windows used to be worse than it is now. This is not a glowing endorsement and speaks little of the standards that they should be held up to. Microsoft's problems are due only to their own policies, and "compatibility" is only an indicator that they've built a fence that they have trouble climbing.

Re:Vista again?

[webheaded]

See it's people like you that should be modded up. It's nice to see someone break away from the rampant fanboyism and take a real look at this kinda stuff. None of them are perfect and jumping up and down and screaming about Windows doesn't make it suck, it just makes you a jackass. :p

Re:Vista again?

[Harmonious Botch]

Slashdot is NOT a very good indicator of industry trends. Not true. In 20 years, no Fortune 500 company will be using Vista.

Re:Vista again?

[webheaded]

You sound exactly like what I'm describing. They said exactly...EXACTLY the same things about XP. Go look back. Luna made everything "bloated" on XP. You can turn that off in Vista just the same as XP. If you're going to endorse a past OS my MS, at least get it right and go back to Windows 2000.

Re:Vista again?

[Compholio]

Now, I'm tired of dealing with drivers and all the b.s. I just want an OS that lets me do what I need to do. I don't have unusual needs for hardware so I don't give a shit if Vista won't support this or that. I whipped up an order from Dell and it showed up and it works and that's that.

I completely agree with you, playing with drivers is a pain in the ass - but that's true on both sides of the isle. This last time around I ordered from System76 and got a nice Ubuntu box with no driver issues, support for updates, and all beautifully pre-installed.

Re:Vista again?

[SHaFT7]

THANK YOU I own a retail computer service shop and handle both residential and business clients. You have summed up what I want to type every time I see a /. article on microsoft. if i had mod points right now, you'd be getting them.

Re:Vista again?

[Just Some Guy]

those huge amounts of data on ntfs partitions are one of the reasons - and no, ntfs3g is not perfect

What about moving it in chunks to either a fileserver or a USB drive, then back to Linux or Mac?

Re:Vista again?

[bigstrat2003]

Hi. I use Vista. I'm extremely happy with it. There are plenty of happy Vista users out there, even on /.. I am thoroughly convinced, by now, that the Vista-hate is more hype than substance... there's just nothing that damn bad that necessarily drives you away from it (for the average user), unless you're opposed to Windows in general and not just Vista.

Re:Vista again?

[tr00st]

Agreed, mostly... Part of me would like a "Disable backward compatibility" button in Vista, to see if it would boot up with less than a million gigs of RAM after that... Oh, that and a "Stop using my CPU when I'm not doing anything with you" button. Or is that the power button...

Re:Vista again?

[BeanThere]

Sorry but this is slashdot. Sticking it to Microsoft NEVER gets old.

I'm about as anti-MS as they come, but even I'll stop sticking it to Microsoft the day they start making good products and start using quality as their primary market differentiator instead of strategy, deception and lock-in. It is as simple as that and the bashing will stop.

To Eddy: Vista may be a joke but it's huge and is selling by the million because most people get it with their new computers and don't know better, and crap as it is, it's the platform of the future that will run the majority of computers sold for quite some time to come ... also, ISVs (of which many of us develop for) HAVE TO use it to make sure our apps run on Vista for our customers --- so yes, here in the real world, all these Vista messes ARE news on a tech site where many of us will have to deal with the fall-out in one way or another (whether it's on the corporate side or just helping grandma with her computer etc.).

Re:Vista again?

[dummondwhu]

Well actually, I *do* care about computers. I just don't want to have to mess around with a bunch of headaches to finally get to the point where I can do whatever I'm there to do in the first place.

Have you ever tried to build a MythTV box from scratch? That's the biggest pain in the balls I've ever experienced. Sure, I obviously didn't hand pick the correct hardware. But that's the point. I don't want to. Same thing for virtually every linux box I've ever built. Some went better than others. Things that have caused me headaches over the years include getting modems to work, getting video card drivers to work, getting lirc to work, and a host of other things. On the flip side, Windows boxes I've built went a lot more smoothly.

Of course, Windows isn't the answer to everything and it certainly has problems.

I write software for a living. Where I work, we don't use Vista. At work, I deal with XP, RH EL4, and Solaris 8/9. When I get home, I'm doing the simple shit. I don't care if Ubuntu gives me my e-mail in a snappier fashion, I only care that it's fast *enough*. I don't schedule my day down to the same granularity as you, I guess. I can spare a few milliseconds to wait for Thunderbird to give me my mail while it's being handicapped by Vista.

Sorry if I'm not geeky enough for this place, but if you'd step out of your mom's basement for a few minutes, you'd realize that the general public feels mostly like I do. Please spare me the "but but but but but we love computeeeeeeeeers!" routine.

Re:Vista again?

[marc.andrysco]

I find it rather funny that every time I see an article about Microsoft, I know that a large portion of the responses are going to be complaints and whining about how MS sucks, etc. Then, sooner than later, comes along a well written and often angry response, like the parent, that continues the whining and complaining by pointing out how everyone here on /. rips on MS. I see it as a nice trade-off since one can rather reliably get both sides of the issue, one way or another. I wouldn't consider this a weakness in /., but a strength. Of course this only works if assuming the reader themselves doesn't already have a predisposition towards MS or anti-MS, and, if they did, ranting isn't likely to convince them anyway.

Re:Vista again?

[kc2keo]

Well, I agree with you that XP will be the latest version of Windows I will use. I mainly use WinXP for gaming because wine and cedega are kind of silly to run the games I play. Although I am very happy they made as much progress as they have already. I am running a legal version of XP Pro that I got through my college.

As much as I do not like Vista I think it would be a very poor choice to not learn how to operate and fix Vista because corporations will probably make the switch to Vista if they don't switch to Linux. If you make money fixing machines your customers might be using Vista because thats what came with the machine. So it would be in my interest to learn Vista. It just makes good business sense... Knowing how to operate and fix Linux machines is also a valuable skill.

So... The more you know the better off you will be (Knowledge is power). Just look on current job postings and you'll see employers looking for people with Windows knowledge. Some will pay more for knowledge in Linux because it may be hard to find Linux experts. I plan on getting certificates in Linux and Windows. I only have an A+ 2006 right now. Working on my 4year CS degree right now.

I do not agree with M$ business practices and hope to live to see its demise (harharhar). Thats how I view Vista among other things.

--George

Re:Vista again?

[dbIII]

They can't win, even if they DID write the best software known to man, and you know why? Legacy compatibility

If they did that properly I wouldn't have to keep some Win98 machines :(

We bash this platform because we know a lot about it and have seen better - it is that simple.

RAM usage is also a major issue in 32 bit Vista due to the 2GB limit from incomplete support of the Pentium Pro and later processors - putting in more memory no longer solves problems.

Re:Vista again?

[mchawi]

Yeah, I can just see telling my mom "ok, now go to the command line and ....no...command line....no...click the terminal thi...no not ...oh I give up".

To put it another way, some IT people, people that like to tinker and developers have valid reasons to prefer open source software. To the typical user it is still just as closed source because they have no idea what 'source' is. This is why it isn't winning people over in mass numbers.

The second point people always make is that 'the hardware requirements'. The typical user LIKES shiny and new, so they find it exciting in some cases. Another large percentage of people will get a virus and then go buy a new computer because their current one is 'broken'.

Everyone keeps trying to foolproof Linux for grandma and grandpa to use, but we just keep producing better fools. It's one thing humanity universally excels at.

Re:Vista again?

[dbIII]

at least get it right and go back to Windows 2000

Some of us did. On low end systems you don't have much choice since XP is designed for systems with large amounts of memory.

Re:Vista again?

[rhizome]

Yeah, I can just see telling my mom "ok, now go to the command line and ....no...command line....no...click the terminal thi...no not ...oh I give up".

So many strawmen...

The point is not about Linux usability, it's about the problems Microsoft has created for itself. The fact that closed-source Windows software has compatibility issues depending on the version of the OS beneath it has everything to do with nobody being able to provide a version that doesn't fall into the compatibility trap. It's not cost-effective for Microsoft to create versions of Office 2007 that run on Windows 3.11, but if you take a look around that problem does not exist as much when people can mold their (and others') software to their individual purposes. Heck, there's probably a way to compile OpenOffice2 on FreeBSD 2.x, given enough time and energy, and neither Sun nor the FreeBSD collective will stand in their way. This is not the case with Microsoft Office.

Re:Vista again?

[Atti K.]

I did mention my laziness, didn't I? :)

Re:Vista again?

[AJWM]

That means absolutely nothing. Most if not all companies the size of Fortune 500 companies run a little bit of everything, from the most obscure hardware and OS you've ever heard of to whatever Microsoft is pushing. Just because "a large number of them are making their plans for post SP1" doesn't prove a thing -- they're probably also making their plans for the next version of Tandem Non-stop, figuring out when to retire their old VAXes, and planning their RedHat AS 4 to RedHat AS 5 upgrades.

Re:Vista again?

[Atti K.]

Well what I experienced were: files/directories with non-ascii characters in their names do not show up, vmware doesn't seem to work with the vm stored on ntfs3g partitions, funny permissions in windows on files/dirs created with ntfs3g... There are solutions of course http://www.ntfs-3g.org/support.html , but it takes a little tweaking around.
Don't get me wrong, ntfs3g is a nice piece of software, taking into account that AFAIK, MS doesn't make the NTFS specifications public.
Anyway the the best way to go is to get rid of your ntfs partitions if you make the switch to Linux ;)

Re:Vista again?

[BeanThere]

Anyway the the best way to go is to get rid of your ntfs partitions if you make the switch to Linux ;)

Having recently migrated a server to Debian, I second that - I was faced with the same choice for an existing NTFS drive (keep as NTFS or convert), and eventually decided to go with properly backing up the contents, reformatting as ext3, and unbacking up. I also noticed little problems here and there with the ntfs-3g support, like directories that didn't show up (I didn't investigate why in depth, but think it may have had to with permissions), possible odd Windows interactions (e.g. Windows complaining about a removable NTFS drive not having been unmounted properly). It's also a bit more of a hassle to mount/unmount (and install the software in the first place), but the second clincher for me (next to 'missing' directories) was that the CPU usage seemed very much higher than any native ext3 accessing - it would actually bottleneck on CPU during copies.

Re:Vista again?

[BeanThere]

Then I got a new PC with XP installed and realized it was pretty decent

Out of interest, do you know if that was XP SP1 or SP2 already? The first version of XP was an absolute bomb (not as bad as Vista, but apart from the usual driver and sometimes software problems, from a security perspective I'm of the opinion pre-SP XP must honestly have been the world's biggest security disaster. Ever. It practically launched the botnet era, and was also hit by several waves of horribly crippling widespread viruses, as I recall.)

Re:Vista again?

[ultranova]

You guys bitch when it doesn't work with your old shit and if it DOES work with your old shit, you bitch because the OS is bloated and runs like shit. There's a price for compatibility and if you think you have the easy and simple solution, you're probably wrong.

Not true. Wine emulates every version of Windows from 2.0 to XP, and doesn't incur any horrible performance overhead for any of them, or at least I haven't noticed so. The only performance problems I've noticed are in file I/O access, and bitdepth conversion for old DirectDraw games which use paletted modes.

While Wine is certainly far from perfect, it does prove that support for legacy systems on a modern one doesn't mean either horrendous overhead nor cruft. So no, whatever reason Vista has for being bloated and running like shit, backwards compatibility is not it.

And I don't bitch about Vista. I'm happy that I made the right choice and switched to Linux rather than upgrading to XP. Microsoft keeps on proving the validity of that decision time after time :).

Re:Vista again?

[dummondwhu]

It was a new XPS from Dell that I got in probably October '05, so I'm guessing it was SP2, but I can't specifically recall. I'm guessing Dell started using SP2 well before that. So, obviously I missed all of the SP1 disaster.

I should point out that I'm not trying to sit here and say that there haven't been Windows disasters or that it's a vastly superior product or anything. But from a consumer perspective, it's easy to get, easy to use, and does what I need.

Someone else in the thread commented that obviously MS has a better grasp of the free market than I do, because they're in bed with Dell. Newsflash: when a better alternative comes along that Dell can market AND will make them more $$$, then MS will be out the door. Right now, MS plays hardball because it has teeth in the market. Monitor and correct antitrust issues, get a superior product on the market, and change hearts and minds, and MS *will* die. But don't expect it to happen over night.

Re:Vista again?

[nbucking]

Well I have a certain understanding that the department of defense of the USA is planning a jump to Vista. In fact we have a stand desktop configuration (SDC) being tested that has Vista. I think they are just waiting for bases to catch up with newer machines to run Vista.

Re:Vista again?

[Pr0xY]

First of all, let me say I agree with you. Backwards compatibility while a noble goal, it is difficult to accomplish while making real worth while changes to a large system. However, I have a proposed solution... why not have an *optionally installed software compatibility layer, which would work similarly to wine? It could hypothetically have the same compatibility as Windows XP (so long as it's all user space, drivers are a whole other ball of wax). And not necessarily be needed. You could even have a special directory for legacy stuff and use something like syminks to keep things accessible to the user. Something like, "C:\CompatXP\" which all legacy apps would be "chrooted" to would work nicely, your regular file system could be present as a separate driver letter or something. Finally, if anyone is in a position to do this correctly, it's the people who wrote the APIs to begin with!

Heck, they could do this for each generation of windows too. Like "C:\Compat2K\", etc. In fact, I could see this as a very nice upgrade path as well. There are tons of opportunities here to keep the legacy optional and very functional. I just don't see why no-one at MS seems to have thought of this.

proxy

Re:Vista again?

[IchBinEinPenguin]

Now, I'm tired of dealing with drivers and all the b.s. I just want an OS that lets me do what I need to do.

Which, ironically, is the reason I use Linux :-)
The PC's I tend to use aren't new enough to run Vista, but are too new to install XP without lots of driver pain (SATA, Gigabit NICs ...).
I also find that Linux does a much better job of staying out of my way and letting me "do what I need to do".
Obviously YMMV.

Re:Vista again?

[Gothmolly]

Knoppmyth will fix your problems. So, there is in fact, software that just works.

Re:Vista again?

[hot soldering iron]

Tired of the rants? Don't read them. Legacy compatibility? That's what Qemu is for. Changes in the UI? Change the Window Manager. Oops, sorry. I forgot that you can't tailor Vista like XP or Linux, you're just stuck. It took years for the bugs to get ironed out of XP, just so MS could NOT use a debugged system. They could have just sold an upgrade pack, but the encrypted internal data streams (what sucks down the resources) wouldn't have been implemented. The hardware manufacturers wouldn't have any "reason" for people to buy new systems if their old ones would still work.

Will MS die? Maybe someday, but not soon. They have too much money, too much power, too much influence. DOJ never enforced their judgments against them for back office deals, legal harassing, or monopolistic practices. If the ref is crooked, guess who wins the game? Linux will never take over the desktop until IBM and SUN jointly form a company to compete with MS for mindshare, and let the attack dogs loose (marketers, lawyers, and shady deal makers, oh my!) The only time MS will compete in an open market, on relevant issues of quality and support, is if their back is to the wall and their feet to the fire.

Please don't take this personally, but you sound like a snot nosed 20-something CS major that's never had a real job, or whose ability to support their family has relied on a crappy piece of software. I take it back, go ahead and take it personally. I have to use a laptop with Vista for work. I would rather dip my hands in shit. It has a dual core CPU, 2 GB ram, and 130GB HD, and it is running at 25% CPU capacity just running Vista, while Ubuntu uses 3%. This is an obscene abuse of my machines resources, that could be used for compiling code or performing background tasks.

I've over 30 years in computers & electronics, and a decade in aerospace and test equipment, so I do have a background in complex systems and reliability, and MS NEVER gets used for anything critical, not even the test stations. Just the PHB and sexitary's desktops. Vista use is expanding in the home market slowly, and even more slowly in the professional arena. The home users don't know better, and the pros have to support the home users.

One last thing: whining over RAM usage? Not everyone is a rich, pampered prick that can afford the latest gold plated crapper. Most of us have to make do with what we have, old, used equipment. If it still runs, it's not getting replaced. The accountants don't give a damn about how "hot" a new laptop would be. Fortunately, some people DO get fired for spec'ing MicroShaft.

Re:Vista again?

[TerminaMorte]

Have you ever tried to build a MythTV box from scratch? I have. It was very easy, actually just by looking up a few things in google (for example, what capture card would be best for linux. I went with a PVR-150 since it had a MPEG-2 hardware encoder so I could use cheaper hardware) Or you could use something like Mythubuntu which is already set up for you. It has a graphical setup screen, which I went through using my ATI RF remote on my TV. It is able to have multiple frontends (so my Linux Dell and my girlfriend's Mac can both watch TV and our videos on our computers), and supports NFS. It also has a built-in DVD ripper. Oh, it's free too. That's sort of nice. Including hardware and software, I spend less than $100 using a slow machine I had laying around (AMD 2.0Ghz 45W CPU)

You also picked one of Linux's few weak-points left (hardware wise): capture cards. Most hardware is supported out of the box by Linux nowadays (much more than Windows out of the box).

Re:Vista again?

[donnielrt]

It's funny to see these anti-vista comments. Everybody with a new computer/laptop that I have met uses Vista. Do they have a problem? Hell, no. Most of them complain about some change in the interface for a day or two, and then, soon enough, get used to it. After a week, they wouldn't want to switch back to XP. Will corporations change to Vista? I'm sure they will, eventually. Because of the ridiculously large amount of anti-vista hype that is being blasted out, I'm sure that quite a few organizations will initially stay away from Vista. I remember the same thing when XP came out - I had seen organizations sticking to '98 for YEARS after that...I suspect Vista will take a similar time-frame, maybe less.

I use Vista at home, and XP at work. Which do I prefer? Honestly, I haven't decided. Neither is 'worse'. There are so many things that are cool and fancy about Vista, but the most important thing is - it just works. Except for a few complaints here and there, I'm pretty happy with Vista. I can't think of a single reason to 'upgrade' to XP. On the other hand, XP doesn't seem outdated and clunky either, yet. I see this as a win-win for MS.

About Linux, I'm sure Linux has its advantages. However, I am a geek, but when I come home, I just want to read mail, listen to music, surf the web, and do things that the 'common man' does. I am sooo tempted to try out Ubuntu or some other flavor of Linux - I have only tried two different versions of Redhat, and that was like 7-8 years ago. But each time, the thing that stops me is the question, "Why?". Except for the high of trying something new, I can't think of a reason to install Ubuntu, go into the trouble of creating new partitions, and possibly having to hunt down drivers, etc. How will installing Linux help me? Most of the apps that I use on a daily basis might be available on Linux, but many will not. Emulation seems silly when you've got the real thing lying around. Performance? Except for boot-up times (around 30 secs, cold boot), I can't complain about Vista's performance. Stability? Vista is solid as a rock. Security? I consider myself a smart enough user to deal with security issues. I've got an antivirus, use Vista's firewall, and anti-spyware apps. If it ever happens, I can deal with a virus infestation. Being able to tweak the OS/kernel? Being able to view the source? These were things that intrigued me once, but now I realize, I am not really interested, except maybe as a hobby. Any new features I would need probably been done in an app in Windows somewhere. If not, I can just whip up an app in a few days.

So to round if off, from a Vista user's perspective, all these anti-Vista/MS rants, while amusing, seem only as relevant as a 'Go Vegetarian' ad to a non-vegetarian.

Re:Vista again?

[onefriedrice]

What are you doing here? Rational thinking? Common sense? That kind of thinking is not welcome here. This is Slashdot, you know, where nobody RTFA's and everybody rises up to slam teh evil Micro$oft in the daily Vista article.

Well anyway, welcome to Slashdot.

Re:Vista again?

[Tacvek]

Now, what was with that moderation? There was nothing trollish about my message. I have indeed had the listed problems, and do regularly have issues with XP. Never the less I continue to use XP, but am not planning on moving to vista in the near future based on those past experiences. I have reason to believe most of my XP issues are due to bugs in device drivers, although I have yet been able to determine the specific problematic drivers. On the other hand, I very rarely have had any need to manually kill explorer.exe under XP, and only occasionally need to forcibly reboot the system. It does happen, but not very often. I have found them happening far more often on Vista PCs. I have used at least 3 of them, all laptops, but of different specs and manufacturers. All of them had severe performance issues, and showed a remarkable tendency to lock-up. These machines admittedly had far less RAM than a vista machine really should have, but locking up not something I feel is a reasonable response to insufficient RAM. Slow performance with lots of swapping, sure, but locking-up completely is not a reasonable response. I do definitely appreciate some of the changes Microsoft has made for Vista, and think they are good ideas (although perhaps in some cases, less than ideal implementations), but these severe performance/lock-up issues does literally make Vista unusable to me.

Re:Vista again?

[Trogre]

Have you ever tried to build a MythTV box from scratch? That's the biggest pain in the balls I've ever experienced.

*blinks*

ur doin it wrong.

Re:Vista again?

[adolf]

My turn.

I only have one machine that gets used on a regular basis - a Dell laptop of a couple of years of age. I use it at home as my primary machine, and it's also the main desktop machine I use at work. I ordered it with XP Pro, and moved it over to Vista Business a few weeks after it was released.

Why? Because it does all of the simple stuff just fine, without me spending my time goofing around with it. On a normal day, I really don't run many programs but Firefox, Thunderbird, putty, and the occasional game. But sometimes I copy a video DVD, and that gets handled nicely by anydvd+dvd shrink. Sometimes I need to dupe a CD for someone, or transcode some video, which Nero does a fine job of. Every now and then, I have the need to edit a PDF file in Acrobat, or work with pictures in Photoshop, both of which just sort of work. And when I get a new bit of network-oriented hardware handed to me which only has a braindead Windows setup program, it just works, too. Windows handles the hardware pretty well, as well: Between RMClock's CPU undervolting and i8kfangui's fan speed controls, the laptop always runs cool and quiet, and the battery seems to last ages longer than when the machine has Ubuntu running on it.

And that's just it. Some of these simple things are hard to handle with Linux, but they're still things I want to be doing with a computer. And so, running Windows saves me time by making some of these things easier. I get to spend that time doing things that I find more enjoyable than configuring an application-rich Linux desktop, and compiling strange kernel modules and writing perl scripts to accomplish the same level of fan (read: noise) control.

But I'm not exactly afraid of Linux.

At home, I've also got a reasonably nice dual-head Ubuntu desktop machine. It mostly gets used as a second and third head on the Vista laptop (courtesy of Synergy), for things which are easier to do on a Bash command line, and for mucking with hardware using tools like dd_rescue. It also runs MediaTomb to feed media files into the PS3, which if I were feeling masochistic I could probably do with cygwin. I wouldn't want another Windows box as a secondary box, however - one instance of each OS is plenty.

At work, I keep a Gentoo desktop-ish box running, mostly as a test environment for the Gentoo mail server, but also for poking at the network in ways that Windows makes difficult. That mail-serving box is up to 592 days of uptime, and was last down due to a tornado in the neighborhood. (Need to reboot it soon to eliminate that fucking local root kernel exploit announced recently. There aren't any local shell users to speak of, but we all know how little difference that makes.)

And if that's not enough for what I'm after, I keep a copy of VMWare Player installed with a snapshot of Knoppix. I use this in case I'm in the field away from my Linux boxes and need to cook up a quick DHCP server, spoof a DNS address, build a temporary router, or whatever.

But by not having to fuck with desktop applications in Linux in any meaningful way, I have a lot more free time and brain power to, say, do interesting server-side work with the Gentoo boxen, or play with Asterisk, or whatever.

Desktop applications are positively boring to me, and I find little joy in compiling or downloading or even keeping track of things like KDE, so why should I bother?

I use the best tool for the job, and I don't particularly care if others find those same tools suitable for their jobs or not. Do you think that I should conduct myself differently?

[Oddly enough, as I wrote this, X just went to lunch on the plain-jane Ubuntu desktop machine, running a screen saver. Though the box itself keeps working fine, I'm looking at two frozen pictures of xspirograph which ctrl-alt-backspace will not eliminate. It did this yesterday, too. Oh, no, wait - it finally caught up after about three minutes of sitting there unresponsive. X just kicked itself over like I had instructed three minutes prior.

I am so fucking looking forward to troubleshooting whatever it is that causes this to happen. I really, really am. Really.]

Re:Vista again?

[adolf]

Which is really a huge, gaping fucking hole in the Linux desktop security model.

Just because I wanted to do $random_administrative_task 2 minutes ago, and entered my password into the prompt provided, does NOT mean that I STILL want some random rogue program clever enough[1] to run gksudo to be able to gain root without prompting.

[1]: Yeah, right. As if it's really that clever of an attack. Wait patiently for the user to run gksudo, which shouldn't take more than a few days, look for the process to escalate, and then run gksudo again == p0wn'd.

[2]: This unreferenced footnote is meant to convey that the author is, in fact, shouting. Loudly. Emphasis strongly intentional.

Re:Vista again?

[Jay L]

When XP came out, I said, "I'm sticking to Win2K as long as a I can and never going to XP...

Sounds like you've taken a fair, appropriately skeptical approach to new technology. What worries me more about Vista is, well, me.

Because when Win2K came out, and we were still using NT4 desktops at work, I got special dispensation to use Windows 2000, because it was so clearly better and more stable (it was the first OS to combine the Win9x features and interface with the NT kernel). And when Windows XP came out to finish that transition, I was eager to start running it as my home desktop from the very first beta, because again, it ended up being more stable on my desktop than Win2K, especially with some long-needed USB fixes it contained.

And then Vista came out, and I... didn't do a thing. Except, a year later, say: "It's been out for a year? Really? ... ::crickets:: Hey, that new Mac Pro looks nice."

I'm a classic early adopter, and I'm not even interested enough to read about the thing. And it certainly doesn't sound like there's a younger generation ready to replace me and swarm around Vista; they're all using Macs. Enterprise has turned its back on Vista (and even Office 2007, which I love for its concepts, despite its 1.0-style flaws).

So who's supposed to use Vista? Just people who buy new computers? Sounds like Windows ME all over again.

Re:"Oh look, a mote in Microsoft's eye"

[pla]

Nobody likes the new comment ordering system, not one person

I do, I'll admit it.

I hated it at first, but the slidey-thing to pick your comment threshold really makes it quite a lot easier to filter out the crap, whether a thread has 30 or 300 comments.

Now, finding the "reply" button sometimes seems like an impossibility (I don't know why, but sometimes the slidebar seems to vanish, taking away the ability to start a reply), but a reload usually fixes that.

Microsoft is being extraordinarily abusive.

[Futurepower(R)]

Microsoft is being extraordinarily abusive towards its customers, in my opinion.

Customers are being pushed toward buying Windows Vista, even though it is clearly not a finished product, and maybe even not a desirable product.

If a company needs to buy 1,000 new computers, it is placed in a terrible position. Will it buy Windows XP, a product that Bill Gates, software's Dr. Death, has declared is Mainstream Support Retired on 4/14/2009? If it does, it will be forced to pay extra when Microsoft desides to stop supporting Windows XP. And every Microsoft customer needs official support because of the huge, huge number of vulnerabilities that are found in Microsoft products.

Operating systems don't naturally have so many vulnerabilities. Users of Mac computers don't even bother to run anti-spyware and anti-virus software because they don't have problems. Large numbers of vulnerabilities are a built-in shortcoming of Microsoft products; apparently Microsoft doesn't let its programmers finish their work. Huge numbers of vulnerabilities force an unnatural connection with the supplier; the user is dependent on the supplier for patches; that creates opportunities for control. Vulnerabilities make more money for Microsoft because people are forced to "upgrade".

When Windows XP was first released, it was very, very buggy. Windows XP became relatively usable without hassles 3 years after its introduction, with the release of SP2. Service Pack 2 for XP fixed more than 330 problems, if I remember correctly, and some of those were not documented.

We have seen numerous reasons to believe that Windows Vista will also be full of hassles at least until Vista SP2.

Microsoft's customers were forced to upgrade to Windows XP because Windows 98 had an unstable file system, an unstable registry, and lots of problems with "DLL Hell" and the "Blue Screen of Death". Customers had to endure 3 bad years with Windows XP pre-SP2. Since the release of SP2, there have been only 3 relatively good years with Windows XP, and now Microsoft is arranging pressure to have bad years again.

That's ugly in my opinion, and I'm only one of many who think that way. This is all being done by billionaires who want nothing more than more money; that's sick.

Remember, Microsoft managers are sinking the company over the long term to get short-term profit.

With operating systems, there is lock-in. Linux is not an easy option because re-writing software and re-training is too expensive in most cases. But once a reasonable alternative is available, Microsoft will have difficulty finding customers, it seems to me.

It's fine if Microsoft introduces a new product. But there should not be pressure to buy the new product until it is stable. The "new" OS product should not be designed to require users to buy new hardware, as it seems is true with Windows Vista. Remember that Microsoft serves the system builders, who want everyone to need more hardware; the final customer can be dis-regarded and dis-repected because of OS lock-in.

One of the biggest and most respected IT magazines is rejecting Windows Vista: Save Windows XP. Quote: "More than 75,000 people have signed InfoWorld's "Save XP" petition in the three weeks since it was launched - many with passionate, often emotional pleas to not be forced to make a change."

Re:Microsoft is being extraordinarily abusive.

[tm2b]

Microsoft is being extraordinarily abusive towards its customers, in my opinion.

And next on Slashdot: Sun expected to rise in east, and water is wet. GIFs at 11.

Re:Microsoft is being extraordinarily abusive.

[Koda]

I purchase all of the computers for my company. All of the Dell workstations and notebooks I've been buying lately have been licensed to include "Vista Business with XP Professional downgrade". They come pre-installed with XP Pro, include XP Pro recovery media, but also have a Certificate of Authenticity and license string for Vista Business.

I do this because we continue to utilize Windows XP for the foreseeable future (so far SP1 does not address the things that stopped us from deploying Vista), but I don't want have to pay through the nose to switch to Vista if and when that time comes.

Re:Microsoft is being extraordinarily abusive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it buy Windows XP, a product that Bill Gates, software's Dr. Death, has declared is Mainstream Support Retired on 4/14/2009? If it does, it will be forced to pay extra when Microsoft desides to stop supporting Windows XP. You've got to be kidding. Dr. Death? Which OS maker gives "mainstream" support for their previous version for longer than Microsoft? XP's successor (Vista) was released about 13 months ago. That's more than 2 years of continued mainstream support for XP after Vista was released and more than 7 years of mainstream support over XP's lifetime.

OS X 10.4 (Tiger), released in April 2005, will stop being supported when OS X 10.6 is released if Apple continues their support lifecycle "pattern" (Apple has no official support lifecycle policy). The current Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu desktop (released in June 2006) will stop being supported in June 2009 (the next LTS is coming this April).

And every Microsoft customer needs official support because of the huge, huge number of vulnerabilities that are found in Microsoft products. Your link also mentioned that Windows XP will receive "Extended Support" until April 2014, which includes paid support, free security updates, and updated Knowledge Base articles.

Operating systems don't naturally have so many vulnerabilities. Users of Mac computers don't even bother to run anti-spyware and anti-virus software because they don't have problems. Large numbers of vulnerabilities are a built-in shortcoming of Microsoft products; apparently Microsoft doesn't let its programmers finish their work. Huge numbers of vulnerabilities force an unnatural connection with the supplier; the user is dependent on the supplier for patches; that creates opportunities for control. Vulnerabilities make more money for Microsoft because people are forced to "upgrade". More inane gibberish. Operating systems don't naturally have Microsoft's installed base. The vast majority of XP's vulnerabilities take advantage of users always running in Administrator mode, which Microsoft was forced to allow because incompetent developers of popular applications (e.g. Intuit) never got their apps working in standard user modes (and never got certified for XP). For every crappy application that doesn't work with Vista SP1, there are several (in some cases dozens) of competing (and better) apps that work just fine.

Re:Microsoft is being extraordinarily abusive.

[Sadsfae]

You've got to be kidding. Dr. Death? Which OS maker gives "mainstream" support for their previous version for longer than Microsoft? XP's successor (Vista) was released about 13 months ago. That's more than 2 years of continued mainstream support for XP after Vista was released and more than 7 years of mainstream support over XP's lifetime. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides support for up to 7 years after its release.

http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/

Wine for Windows

[Xtifr]

After I had a couple of old Win95-era games that refused to install on my brother's Win2k system (I haven't had Windows for nearly a decade, so I was thinking of giving them to him), I've been wondering if it might not be possible to get Wine to run on Windows. Sounds like this might be an idea that will only become more and more reasonable as time goes on. So...how about it, Wine team? Can we possibly get Wine for Windows? It could run on top of Cygwin/X. :)

Re:Wine for Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

wine does have a windows install look on there download page

Re:Wine for Windows

[Kickasso]

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=6241&package_id=112520

Re:Wine for Windows

[Xtifr]

Anonymous Coward wrote:

wine does have a windows install look on there download page Holy smoke! I was only semi-joking, but that's cool! :)

Re:Wine for Windows

[slimjim8094]

all funny aside, this is a real idea, and AFAIK in progress as a real thing. the idea is essentially to replace ntvdm

Re:Wine for Windows

[IchBinEinPenguin]

and SAMBA!

ReactOS

[Akaihiryuu]

The project I'm really keeping an eye on right now is ReactOS. http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html It's still alpha right now, but they're expecting to hit beta later this year. The initial beta release is supposed to be around 70% Windows compatible (realistically most things will work even then because the last 30% is stuff that isn't used that much). They're aiming for 100% compatibility of course...probably shortly before 1.0. Once that hits there will be a Windows alternative with absolutely 0 Microsoft code. It has the potential to make them irrelevant.

Re:"Oh look, a mote in Microsoft's eye"

[Anonymous Coward]

No more Vista-bashing stories until you fix your own problems with Slashcode, wankers.

Nobody likes the new comment ordering system, not one person, and you will change it back immediately. IANAL, but I think you're probably going to get sued over this. Into bankruptcy. The defaults are awful, but with some tweaking the new content system is great, imho.

Try this. On that annoying floating thing click the "xx More" button until it stops having a number. On the annoying floating thing drag the dark gray bar all the way down. Drag the white bar down until posts modded two and above are expanded with everything else abbreviated (your choice). Then click the "/" button on the annoying floating thing twice. The first time it jumps to the top and still floats, the second it sticks at the top of the story.

From then on it's actually nice.

Re:Bit of a catch-22, isn't there?

[timeOday]

So you're supposed to go online with your antivirus, which was disabled by Vista update, so that you can download a fix for your now not working antivirus so you can be protected from viruses ...

If you're downloading your antivirus software from the pirate bay or something, I guess you have a point... and much bigger problems to worry about. I doubt you'll get infected visiting the Norton antivirus site for an update, and if you do, some old version of their software surely wouldn't have helped anyways.

Side note, switch to Linux! 90% of what's wrong with Windows is virses and anti-virus software, I don't know which is worse. My Windows XP VMWare image is constantly bogging down because anti-virus software is chewing up the disk or CPU, getting confused when I disconnect from the network, or nagging me to allow firefox access to the network for the 1000th time.

"backwards compitability" IS the Windows franchis

[tomhudson]

You know, I'm honestly really tired of seeing this same lame ass rant over and over again in every single MS article. Kudos to you at least for keeping it relatively short. This happens EVERY SINGLE TIME Microsoft releases an new OS. They can't win, even if they DID write the best software known to man, and you know why? Legacy compatibility. You guys bitch when it doesn't work with your old shit and if it DOES work with your old shit, you bitch because the OS is bloated and runs like shit. There's a price for compatibility and if you think you have the easy and simple solution, you're probably wrong.

If Microsoft drops backwards compatibility, there's no reason for people to use Microsoft products. If you're going to have to switch all your software anyway, why not switch to linux or osx?

In other words, Microsoft has no choice - they have to continue to produce the same crappy software, because that is what their franchise is based on. Breaking backwards compatibility breaks the only reason people continue to use Windows - because their existing software works.

Most of the people who use Windows hate their computers. Ask how many of them would be happy to contribute to a fund to pay the legal fees of whoever takes out Redmond ... among Windows users, Gates is more hated than Hillary.

Re:Bit of a catch-22, isn't there?

[LLKrisJ]

So you're supposed to go online with your antivirus, which was disabled by Vista update, so that you can download a fix for your now not working antivirus so you can be protected from viruses ...

Isn't the whole idea of having a running antivirus so that you can go safely online and download sh*t? Isn't the whole idea of running antivirus software that you keep it up-to-date??? This type of software gets updates for a reason. If yours breaks because of SP1 then you are clearly not running the latest version so your computer will be unsafe to begin with... So it's your own damn fault. Don't come moaning.

I really don't understand. First they slag off MS for trying to hard to be backward compatible, thus making no real fundamental security improvements. Now when they make an effort to fundamentally change things they get slagged again for breaking some deprecated software which shouldn't be running anymore to begin with...

Re:Bit of a catch-22, isn't there?

[tomhudson]

My point was that various security products (including firewalls) are affected, and we all know how quick an unprotected windows box can get p0wned.

As for "switching to linux", I can't switch. I'm already there - been there off and on since slackware 3.x, My last Windows purchase was Windows 95.

Sadly optimistic was: Re:ReactOS

[damn_registrars]

Once that hits there will be a Windows alternative with absolutely 0 Microsoft code. It has the potential to make them irrelevant.
Even if ReactOS is capable of running 100% of windows software, it would be nearly impossible for them to reach the level of market saturation that microsoft enjoys. And it would be very difficult to describe a product with such high presence as being so easily made irrelevant.

With that said, I'll also say that I would be first to celebrate any such falling of windows. I run any OS I can in the place of windows, anywhere I can. But saying that ReactOS has the potential to make windows "irrelevant" is unfortunately a bit silly.

Re:"backwards compitability" IS the Windows franch

[webheaded]

Most of the people who use Windows hate their computers. Ask how many of them would be happy to contribute to a fund to pay the legal fees of whoever takes out Redmond ... among Windows users, Gates is more hated than Hillary.

Honestly, I really doubt this considering how many non-IT people there are that use Windows. Hell, I've been using computer since I was 7 and I know a fair bit...and I don't hate Windows or Bill Gates. :p I wouldn't say I LOVE them either though.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Huh?

[MeMeMeMe]

What's Vista?

Who cares?

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

If the OS runs better, i could careless if another company has to update their software to run on it.

Progress has its price.

Ran Kubuntu and XP--Now running Vista.

[TheIndifferentiate]

I spent $800 for a new computer at WalMart (Dell Inspiron 530 with 22" monitor, 2.2 Ghz dual-core Intel CPU, 2GB RAM, 500GB HD), and it came with Vista. I was going to replace it with Kubuntu which I have run for about a year and a half on my old PC after dropping XP. I thought I'd have a look at Vista before I did so. I liked it a lot and have decided to keep it. $800 is cheap for what I got (I could have gotten more probably by shopping around more), and Vista runs great on it. It consumes about a gig of RAM with Outlook and FeedDemon always running and Aero on (never tried turning it off), but so did Kubuntu on my old machine with Kontact and Akkregator going with plain old graphics going (various attempts at Compiz/Beryl provided flakey results). Anyways, I'm a professional programmer with an MS and MBA, and I know what I'm doing in both Unix environments and Windows (and environments that I can't run at home), and I know about lock-in and all the other pitfalls of proprietary software, and I don't give a crap about that. I'm using what's easiest. Vista has been a breeze so far, and I haven't had any problems at all with it. There are ways to get around the dreaded DRM overhead and other things that give people pause about using Vista, and the tired arguments of learning curve don't matter to me because its the same old thing in Linux land. You gotta know what your doing to effectively run either, and so far, I've found Vista to be less hassle to use now in comparison to Kubuntu at this point in its development. YMMV and all that, but if all it takes is one bad experience with an OS to knock it, then it should only take one good experience for me to post what I've found too.

Re:Ran Kubuntu and XP--Now running Vista.

[J_Doh!]

"I'm a professional programmer with an MS and MBA" good for you

Re:Ran Kubuntu and XP--Now running Vista.

[TheIndifferentiate]

Yeah, I got them originally to show off with on Slashdot, but found they have better uses. ;^) I was a working programmer prior to earning any degrees. I mention my background to demonstrate that I'm not a n00b. Actually, I'm not in the habit of ever defending Microsoft, so I guess I'm a n00b in that regard.

Comment: Windows XP was worse than I said.

[Futurepower(R)]

In a comment to another story titled Psychology of past trauma, SgtChaireBourne explains that the picture I painted of Windows XP in my parent comment is actually quite rosy; Windows XP was worse that I said.

Yes people use it.

[an.echte.trilingue]

According to my server logs, about 11% of the public uses Vista. Here is a screen of my XiTi report, complete with pie chart.

Re:"Oh look, a mote in Microsoft's eye"

[Briareos]

Now, finding the "reply" button sometimes seems like an impossibility (I don't
know why, but sometimes the slidebar seems to vanish, taking away the ability
to start a reply), but a reload usually fixes that. Uh, actually there's a "Reply" *link* at the very bottom of the comments page for an article... so if you're missing the control bar simply scroll all the way down...

np: All - Sag Alles Ab (Pop Ambient 2008)

Why not switch rather than be forced into pain?

[Futurepower(R)]

"Even if ReactOS is capable of running 100% of windows software, it would be nearly impossible for them to reach the level of market saturation that Microsoft enjoys."

I wonder about that. I think most companies have strict controls over what software can be installed, because employees have very narrow needs at work. So, if ReactOS is able to run those programs, why not switch rather than be forced to have the painful experience of buying and running Windows Vista?

It seems that ReactOS will not be ready soon, but when it is ready, it seems that a lot of companies would switch.

Re:Why not switch rather than be forced into pain?

[damn_registrars]

I wonder about that. I think most companies have strict controls over what software can be installed, because employees have very narrow needs at work. So, if ReactOS is able to run those programs, why not switch rather than be forced to have the painful experience of buying and running Windows Vista?
I think its also worth considering that most companies have very specific declarations of what they will support. And being as most desktop IT support staffers are trained to support windows, you'll have a hard time selling many businesses on training their existing staff on a new OS, even if it can meet its goal of 100% software compatibility.

And of course also worth remembering is how difficult it is to buy a PC without windows installed on it. Most businesses I've worked with prefer to buy PCs from large manufacturers so that they can buy into the large-manufacturers' support systems as well. And if those PCs already have windows on them, and were sold to be supported with windows running on them, why would the business want to invest time and/or money in setting up those same systems with something else?

So as much as I would love to see a tremendous fall from grace for windows, I don't think we'll see it anytime soon. The way that windows is entrenched in the market will require a failure much more catastrophic than just (the slashdot perspective of) vista.

Re:"backwards compitability" IS the Windows franch

[YaroMan86]

Despite arguments to the contrary, most Average Joe users are almost totally unaware of the alternatives and think that Windows is not just their operating system, but their entire computer.

To them, Linux is just some other strange tech speak due to the network effect of Windows and Microsoft's own aggressive practices in making sure Average Joe only really knows Windows. To Average Joe, Macs are strange PCs nobody but artists and hippies use. And Be OS got crushed by MS when it actually had a shot at being a decent OEM alternative. This was due to, you guessed it, more MS anti-competes. What many groups would almost call "racketeering" Be all Windows and it won't cost you.

Basically, non-IT types use Windows because they are absolutely clueless about the alternatives. To them, using a computer is sitting infrom of a screen clicking a mouse with a stupid expression on their face, oblivious to the likelihood their computer is already part of a bot net and God knows what else.

M$ will be less generous with Vista service packs

[Schnoodledorfer]

The main reason SP2 was such a pita was that it included security and other features that had originally been intended for the next OS. Because XP has those features now and other planned features for Vista were dropped, Vista lacks the killer features that would force users to upgrade.

I think M$'s management is going to less generous with their service packs from now on. That will probably drive more people to other OSs, though.

I agree that there isn't much to the story here and it isn't even all that current. The KB bulletin was posted earlier in the week and the AV companies have been working on fixes for a while. The rest of the press has noted it and gone on to other things.

Re:"Oh look, a mote in Microsoft's eye"

[BronsCon]

I'll risk the offtopic mod for this.

It's at the bottom, where it should be, so you read all the comments in the thread before posting one of your own, thereby reducing the likelihood of redundant comments.

Of course, there is still the possibility of posting a comment similar to one which was posted after your copy of the page loaded. Hey, it happens.

Also, seemingly redundant comments on separate branches of a thread are not redundant. They're in response to entirely different comments.

Comments which restate their grandparent in response to a parent who obviously didn't get the point are not redundant. They're trying to clear up the issue for others who may not have understood what their grandparent was stating.

set the wayback machine to 2001...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey kids, remember way back when Windows XP was released and ZoneAlarm had compatibility problems? That certainly doomed Windows XP.

Lets just all go read that thread instead of posting all the same things again:
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/08/04/1159203.shtml

userland Shall Not Be Broken

[leuk_he]

But correct posix is even more important. Some posix calls that were wrong are fixed now and then. They should not break things big time. In 99.9% of the cases that is.

And the linux kernel rarely breaks userland code, but for some reason disitbutions do because all kind of dependancies i do not even understand. That is why virtualisation will be big, you can run multiple versions at the same time.

This is of course not different from MS.

Re:Sadly optimistic was: Re:ReactOS

[El_Oscuro]

If it can run Battlezone, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Shockwave games on the internet, that it for me.

Re:"backwards compitability" IS the Windows franch

[tomhudson]

And those software "updates", if Windows ever completely breaks backward compatability, will have to take the form of completely new versions, rewritten from scratch; in such a case, people wil be examining their options.

Re:"backwards compitability" IS the Windows franch

[uhlume]

And Be OS got crushed by MS when it actually had a shot at being a decent OEM alternative. This was due to, you guessed it, more MS anti-competes.

I...don't really know how to break this to you, but — Microsoft didn't deliver that fatal stroke...

Re:"backwards compitability" IS the Windows franch

[msuarezalvarez]

So who is going to pay for the new versions? And who will train users? And who will resurrect companies that dissapeared and did not have the nice touch of opening the source of their defunct product so that they write the updates? And who will pay for the hardware upgrades? And...

Of course, all that in order to upgrade an OS, which is the last thing the average user wants to do, because it is close to the least important thing for him. Because... you guessed... it is the apps which are important to the user.

Undocumented

[dallaylaen]

Microsoft has a long history of encouraging undocumented feature usage, instead of providing a well-documented hooking mechanisms for everyone, and *that's* what they should be slammed for on slashdot.

Of course, the opposite approach (as in "let's break something in the next release, they have the source, after all") is not ideal either.

Perhaps there should be some quirk-dealing layer between the kernel (which has few well-documented entry points) and applications. This way, affected parties can hotfix compatibility problems on their own, even if updating is not an option.

Or have I just invented WINE?.. (and maybe LD_PRELOAD)

Internet Explorer

[Keeper Of Keys]

the app they tested with wasn't quite obeying the standards ... understatement of the decade

Microsoft releases software before it is finished.

[Futurepower(R)]

Quote from the parent comment: "XP's successor (Vista) was released about 13 months ago."

Vista may have been "released" 13 months ago, but that is missing the point. Microsoft "releases" software LONG before it is finished, in my opinion.

Windows XP was very troublesome for 3 years after it was released. All the evidence we have is that Windows Vista will be troublesome for that long also. One of the MAJOR issues here is that customers are being pressured away from Windows XP to Windows Vista before Vista is stable. For many, being pressured is not equivalent to being forced, but for many it is, especially at the end of June, when Microsoft stops selling Windows XP, except to preferred customers.

In my opinion, it is not correct to compare an upgrade of Linux with upgrades of Windows. Microsoft sells upgrades of Windows as entirely new products. To do that, it introduces incompatibilities with old software and hardware. Of course the biggest incompatibility is with hardware. Each upgrade of Windows tries to force the customer to buy completely new hardware. That way, Microsoft's true customers, the big system builders, get what they want, more sales.

In contrast, the latest version of any kind of Linux will run fine with minimal hardware.

Yes, Apple tries to use lock-in to make more money; Apple is also adversarial, but far less adversarial than Microsoft.

You said, and I quote: "The vast majority of XP's vulnerabilities take advantage of users always running in Administrator mode, which Microsoft was forced to allow because incompetent developers of popular applications (e.g. Intuit)..."

First, Microsoft did not supply the necessary support to get software vendors to design their software properly.

Second, running as a limited user has shortcomings due to the poor design of Windows. Fast user switching has serious limitations, for example.

Third, yes, versions of software can be expected to have vulnerabilities. However, one effect of Microsoft releasing software before it is finished is that there are a wide variety of vulnerabilities that would not be present in finished software.

Fourth, Microsoft is slow to fix vulnerabilities; note that 15% are still not patched. It is easy to guess that Microsoft is slow because vulnerabilities make money; people buy new computers rather than try to fix corrupted computers.

I agree that Intuit has shown incompetence, but Intuit is also extremely adversarial towards its customers, in my opinion, perhaps following Microsoft's lead.

Anyone who would like to read more about some of Microsoft's adversarial behavior can read Ed Foster's Gripelog: Microsoft.

Ed Foster has detailed Intuit's adversarial behavior, also.

Old New Thing

[Sits]

Yoy might be thinking of Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog. The shims that keep popular old programs with dubious behavior going are party why Windows is so popular. Here's an article about a decoy control panel window...

Serve rather than push the customers?

[Futurepower(R)]

"If they were running 98, they deserved what they got."

That is what abusive parents say: "Yes I abused you, but you deserved it."

Twenty days before the beginning of 2004, Information Security News carried a story about a study of Windows users. On January 16, 2004, Microsoft killed Windows 98. Quote from the story: "Inventory data of more than 372,000 PCs - from some 670 companies with between 10 and 49,000 employees - found that more than 80 percent of these companies were still using Windows 98 and/or Windows 95."

It is important for readers of Slashdot comments to do their own research. Many of the comments, such as the parent comment, are wildly inaccurate.

Re:Bit of a catch-22, isn't there?

[LLKrisJ]

Nobody should ever pay for anything ever -- everything should be free Last time I checked, communism didn't work ;-)

Disables snakeoil

[symbolset]

Since Vista is the most secure Windows ever it doesn't need antivirus. Like BSD, Linux and OS-X antivirus is only required as part of mail services to protect vulnerable legacy clients from infested email. Since this is a server issue, this is in keeping with the Microsoft philosophy of disabling features on clients that belong on servers.

Re:Disables snakeoil

[pandrijeczko]

I will happily accept that the security architecture of Vista may make it harder for viruses to run - but please don't get all smug about it not needing antivirus because the fact is that the whole architecture of Windows is deeply flawed when it comes to what permissions a service or program runs at.

Whilst it might be the case that less stuff on Windows now runs with highest level permissions, the fact is that if a virus runs at a user permission level then it can still affect that user's files and propogate across a network.

And I don't believe virus writers have yet fully discovered what holes they can exploit in Vista. In proportion to the whole computer-using world, hardly anyone is running Vista yet so they've not really given it much attention.

Re:Disables snakeoil

[SEMW]

Firstly, I'm pretty sure the GP was being sarcastic.

More importantly, though, your statement:

the fact is that if a virus runs at a user permission level then it can still affect that user's files Come on, think about that for a minute. Of course something that runs with a user's permissions can affect that user's files, that's what running with that user's permissions means! Having to elevate to above my user level in order to write to my own userspace would rather miss the point of having user permissions! The whole point is, if you run with a user's permissions, you can't affect *anyone else's* files (or system files),

Re:Microsoft releases software before it is finish

[TheAwfulTruth]

Interesting.

On the other hand...

I have never had a version of Linux installed on any machine or from any distro that was "finished" ever.

Have you? Where did you get it? Which version of Linux doesn't have dozens of updates for core components every month? Which non-micorosft browser that shows anything more than text hasn't (also) had several vulnerabilities a year in it?

How many other OSes support their customers as long as Microsoft does? (With etended XP support for another 5 years). Apple and most distros are 12-24 MONTHS period.

What you say may have some truth to it, but look at the mud puddle were standing in right here...

If /. FOSS etc don't stop throwing stones around their glass houses soon...

WRONG! Read TFA

[Xenographic]

Well, if you had read TFA, you might have seen this part:

With the 16.05 update, which is available now, Trend disabled a behavioral monitoring module in the software in order to avoid issues with blue screens, said Kim. The 16.1 update -- which restores the module and meets Microsoft's certification standards -- will be available in early March, said Kim. Both updates are being distributed through Trend's auto update service.

(emphasis added)

Yes, they all have updates. You should've bothered to read what the updates do, instead of assuming the updates all just fixed things. Now, had you quibbled that behavioral monitoring is worthless and that doesn't really make it "half an anti-virus program" you might have had a point, but you didn't do that.

Here's how it happened..

[Cathoderoytube]

So here's my theory. During the annual Microsoft company picnic an airplane carrying a load of bricks exploded in mid air right over the picnic. Hundreds of bricks rained down on the entire Microsoft staff bashing them all in the heads giving them all amnesia. The next day they all went back into work and began working on Vista, unfortunately all their knowledge of how to make a working OS had been lost during that fateful picnic.

Re:Bit of a catch-22, isn't there?

[I'm Don Giovanni]

"Average time between the installation of an XP system and the moment of system compromise is ~ 45 seconds. I forget the source, but it's been backed up by numerous other tests. Service Pack 2 supposedly increases the security, but not by much. I doubt Vista fares much better."

You'd be wrong.
A couple of years ago, a study were performed using XP, XP SP1, XP SP2, OSX (Panther, I think), and some version of Red Hat.
In the study, the computers were connected to the net and timed to see how long each would be compromised. XP and XP SP1 were compromised within seconds (like 12 or so, IIRC), but XP SP2, OSX, and Red Hat systems ran for two weeks without being compromised, at which point the test was ended. The study showed that XP SP2 was attacked orders of magnitude more than OSX and Red Hat, but the attacks failed.

Re:Bit of a catch-22, isn't there?

[im_thatoneguy]

I've had XP SP2 systems sit on a DMZ for weeks without a single nibble.

I've only gotten one virus in my life and that was attached to a file I opened that I thought was safe. (Damn you ICQ!)

This "45 seconds till apocolypse" bullshit is in my experience completely unfounded.

Lazy programmers, sloppy code

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys have been whining about windows security for years.

Now that ms is actually trying to do something about it, you're whining and giggling with glee even more.

Half the problem is that the software *relies* on the inherent insecurities of previous incarnations of the OS. Many of these problems are coming to light because programs that EXPECT to run with admin rights and do what the hell they please, can't.

What, Vista hasn't been around long enough for the software authors to make sure their software runs on it?

I, for one, won't be running any software that gives me a hard time installing or running it on Vista. And I won't be blaming MS.

Re:Lazy programmers, sloppy code

[Ilgaz]

You guys have been whining about windows security for years.

Now that ms is actually trying to do something about it, you're whining and giggling with glee even more.

Half the problem is that the software *relies* on the inherent insecurities of previous incarnations of the OS. Many of these problems are coming to light because programs that EXPECT to run with admin rights and do what the hell they please, can't.

What, Vista hasn't been around long enough for the software authors to make sure their software runs on it?

I, for one, won't be running any software that gives me a hard time installing or running it on Vista. And I won't be blaming MS. You don't know the funny thing... The software vendors mentioned ALREADY DID the changes, waiting for SP1. People are in automatic attack MS mood it seems.

Trend (Micro) gets the real money from Enterprise/Mail server type of things, including various Unix/Linux type stuff. They are already used to such restrictions I guess.

Re:Zone Alarm?

[molotut]

Hi everyone.

I am not an OS expert, just SAP consultant. I would like to know what is the best option for an OS. I already have XP on a desktop, Vista on a Laptop and W98 on a old computer. The only one without problems is my old computer, i whant to try Linux but, guys please, is this the best option ?

Regards

Molotut

Anger problem? You missed the point.

[Futurepower(R)]

Anger problem?

The issue is the heavy-handedness with which Microsoft deals with the problems. They say a new version of ZoneAlarm is available now, but I don't see it.

You said, "Better yet, the Knowledge Base article gives a link to a WORKING, UPDATED VERSION OF ZONE ALARM."

The link given in the KnowledgeBase article for ZoneAlarm is to a page that asks for $25 to deliver a Vista compatible update when it is available.

There are many sensible, more gentle ways Microsoft could have handled this rather than just giving a blue screen.

I haven't fully investigated the problems, but it certainly seems that Microsoft is being uncaring toward customers, and I have seen numerous examples of that.

Incorrect!

[Xenographic]

> The blocked software was blocked with vendor approval.

True.

> Microsoft's KB article includes links to download current, working versions of affected software.

False! Trend Micro's update just disables a buggy part of it. They'll actually fix it next month. Why don't YOU read what the updates do? It even mentions that the update just disables part of the AV engine in TFA. But you only read the KB article, huh?

Re:Incorrect!

[LocoSpitz]

I said a link is provided to a current, working version. A link is indeed provided to a current, working version. Where's the falsehood?

Re:Bit of a catch-22, isn't there?

[LLKrisJ]

How can my previous comment be considered Troll? And days after it was initially considered Informative...

It contains argumentation and is an honest response to the post it is a reply to.

I really don't understand this system of moderation.