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Microsoft Internal Emails Show Dismay With Vista
bfwebster writes "Microsoft is currently facing a class-action suit over its designation of allegedly under-powered hardware as being 'Vista Capable.' The discovery process of that lawsuit has now compelled Microsoft to produce some internal emails discussing those issues. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has published extracts of some of those emails, along with a link to a a PDF file containing a more extensive email exchange. The emails reflect a lot of frustration among senior Microsoft personnel about Vista's performance problems and hardware incompatibilities. They also appear to indicate that Microsoft lowered the hardware requirements for 'Vista Capable' in order to include certain lower-end Intel chipsets, apparently as a favor to Intel: 'In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded.' Read the whole PDF; it is informative, interesting, and at times (unintentionally) funny."
There's an interesting article on nimp. Looks like the MS Devs dropped the ball big time.
To sBallmer:
Steve, Why is it taking forever to send emails?
From sBallmer:
To bGates:
Bill, 640 minutes for roundtrip for email should be enough for everyone.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This could get quite ugly.
"I'm just grateful I kept XP on this machine."
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
_0_
\''\
'=o='
.|!|
.| |
mircosoft internal emails show disdain for goatse
LOL with
Wow M$ made a decision based upon profit? I am shocked!
.. this shows that Microsoft are not misguided/stupid enough to genuinely believe Vista is a Good Operating System.. Let's hope they learn from these mistakes before Windows 7 comes out.
Start to posting about something else than Vista and Microsoft.....
This pathological obsession with Windows and Microsoft isnt doing anything for the majority of your visitors.
"I going to f---ing kill the 915 chipset!"
Some of my readers ask me what a "Serial Port" is. The answer is: I don't know. Is it some kind of wine you have with breakfast? - This made me lol.
Penis penis penis lol. (_)(_)lllllllllllllllllllD -- that's my penis lol. not to scale, I couldn't hold it against the monitor long enough lol.
(Footnote: I would have got first post if it wasn't for this piece of shit proxy XD.)
Intro Managing IT Low 500 level class. First Day of class. They show us a chart. Showing the statics of the more money quoted for an IT Project the higher chance of it failing. Vista tried to hard to make the Ultimate OS of all times and ended up with one that looks fancy but people rather use the old version. They tried to put a lot of money to make the Best OS Ever and ended up making a relitivly bad OS. Vs. Apple who did incremental changes over time. Then Unfreezing Changing the Code for new features then freezing agian to assure that things don't get to out of hand. If Microsoft after XP did a smaller approach of making incremental changes in the OS right now we may have a fast and efficient Vista, that could give OS X a run for its money.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Marketing gone wild...
First of all I think the 'Vista Capable' suit is ridiculous. Microsoft deserves to win that one, because I am well aware of what was on the shelf on the low to mid range during that time frame. And those machines should of been fine, I had Vista RTM up and running on my P3 1Ghz w/ GeForce 6600. And it ran with Aero, and was certainly 'capable' in classic.
However I can understand Microsoft's dismay at it's performance, for relatively little gain you are incurring tremendous performance hit's across the board. File transfer and gaming come to mind most quickly however. But during it's development cycle I got the impression they really had no idea what they wanted out of Vista, dropping key features over the years. And seemingly concentrating to hard on a 'shiny' UI, that although slick in some respects still feels like a mangled XP GUI, with simply a reworked folder system. And a much lauded search to run feature that should of simply been in XP SP3 to hold users over while something, smaller, better, faster, stronger was being developed.
But in the interests of full disclosure, I have Vista running in a VM... A couple more trips to newegg.com and I might finally install it, DirectX 10 is still exciting to me.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
I want XP to be re released, it was actually a decent program. I could run every game I own and the new ones off it with out any trouble at all. This will hopefully push it's return.
OK, I'm officially a Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist(tm).
I read the title as "Disney", not "Dismay".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
.. when, as one of our customers found out, The Sims: Castaway tells you the Intel graphics card in your laptop isn't a Direct 3D capable one. Despite Castaway's own box specs and websites listing it as compatible. The customer in question ended up swapping it for a bog standard ATI graphics card based laptop that ran it fine - for the same price.
I have found that Windows server 2008 runs very well on a ~ 3 year old Dell 610 notebook, even when the system is locked into maximum battery life (and minimum performance) mode. It has a ~ 2GHz processor and 2 GBytes of RAM.
Playing graphics games costs CPU and GPU processing power. From my point of view, the reason to upgrade to Vista is its significantly higher security than XP, let alone the earlier OS's. Search is also very nice and quite useful.
Give MS a break! This sort of thing happens when the general public just can't wait to have the "newest" technology, operating system, what have you.... so thereby causing companies like Microsoft, and others, to "push" out thier newest prodcts in an attempt to try and please the general public.... now, now.... I have to say shame on Microsoft for marketing thier newest OS to computer producers as "Vista ready", or "Windows Visa capable". On the other hand, let this be a lesson to the general public that waiting for something can be a "good" thing and, not nessessarily nice to have the newest of anything,(Vista or whatever the case), as quickly as it can be had, which can cause many companies to be sloppy in thier final products rushed to the retail world. Let's all try waiting fo a change an encourage quality..... not quantity!
Here's a very informative discussion/blog that I've been following on the lawsuit. Much interesting information here:
yhttp://yro.topix.com/tech/judge-rules-vista-capable-lawsuit-can-proceedarticle.pl?s/
The problem is that the OS is so badly designed and un-optimized that you can't run it on that kind of hardware. There isn't any good reason why Vista should have been slower than XP really, and fancy FX should have been turned on only on premium hardware. Many other OSes can do it after all. Leopard is doing just fine on a core 2 duo with GMA 950 GFX after all...
Microsoft dropped the ball on this one. It is not a Bob, or ME situation, with a strong alternative sitting in the wings. This time, they bet the farm, and now have a lot of crow to eat.
What saddens me is that I want to like Vista, but I can't. My sister loves it, but to get to run it she has now 8x the PC that I do (Athlon64 x2 vs my ancient Socket-A Sempron), and I still crunch her into the ground for performance in many cases. Microsoft has managed to become the victim of it's own success, I believe. They worked on the premise that hardware would progress faster than it did, but people have hit the point of "good enough." More and more I don't see people upgrading their PC's. I used to pick up used machines easily that were just 2-3 years old. Now, this Sempron 2800 is the last one I got this way, and I've had it for years. People just aren't upgrading. Bodes poorly for Vista.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Heh, I got a chuckle out of that one.
I'm running Vista Ultimate with Aero & dual monitors on an old 875 motherboard, 2.4Ghz Northwood, 1GB ram, Radeon 9600 AGP. No problems whatsoever and performance is fine for work apps (don't play games). I'm thinking of getting a couple of radeon 2400 cards (one AGP one PCI) so I can run three or four monitors.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
I wonder if AMD can use this in a lawsuit of their own due to anti-competitive practices (On the other hand, it would be burning a bridge with the largest OS manufacturer, but since Intel appears to be getting preferential treatment, there may be something much more sinister below the surface). Not only that, but shouldn't Microsoft's shareholders be kinda ticked? By allowing this to happen, Microsoft opened the door to this lawsuit (something that will not help their investors), while helping out another companies investors, which it would appear was not in Microsoft's investors best interest.
I just read their internal emails and it appears that they changed the drivers required for Vista such that due to new DRM A/V requirements in Vista, most existing drivers were made inoperable and, in many cases, would never be fixed. They then colluded with Intel to say that machines based on the 915 chipset were sufficient to run the OS so that Intel would have good quarterly results.
To summarize, they just don't care about the customer. At no point do the emails indicate them making any decisions based on what's best for their customers. It makes it pretty obvious why Vista has been such a failure so far. They can't even get the service pack right.
I'm not big on the idea of predicting corporate downfalls but you really have to wonder whether a company that makes such incredibly bad decisions is long for this world.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Where these chips "incapable" of running Vista or did it just run donkey slow?
Former, bad. Latter normal service.
LOL @ Mike Nash's complaint that his $2100 Sony was an email-only machine because it had the Intel 915 chipset that can't run glass or movie maker. Mike Nash is the Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I don't mind Vista, I have been using it for a while at home since I do a lot of gaming. My machine is completely capable though. The hardware vendors did a very shitty job of preparing their drivers for Windows Vista and some to this day are plagued by horrible drivers. For the same reasons I would imagine that they have horrible driver support on Linux.
Fault lies with Microsoft in this case because they bowed to the pressures of the OEMs, namely Intel. That was a horrible move on their part and will lend a lot of credence to the recent class action lawsuit. I still place a lot of blame on the hardware vendors and their terrible drivers.
When people are able to run Lord of the rings online in medium graphics level setting with a mid range graphics card, 1 Gb ram and Xp whereas getting almost the same performance with people on vista and high end gear, you can say that the latter os fails in performance.
and dont feed me the 'but those are games' bullshit. for, games and entertainment comprise almost half of the activity on computers, and even for business, only idiots would want to put vista on a client/standalone computer in the office, having the need to pour a few hundred bucks just for being able to run vista so that the computer is going to conduct the same work it did with xp.
on gaming front microsoft tried to push vista with the 'high performance' bullcrap to gamers with dx10. correcting - they FORCED it, and almost noone took it. now they have to oblige with nvidia's needs for putting dx10 capability for xp, because people are just evading not only vista, but high end graphics cards too, because they need dx10 to deliver the latest, but noone wants to take the vista sh@t just because of it.
sorry people. you in microsoft have utterly failed with vista, and you need to go back to drawing board, even, put on your thinking caps and reevaluate your approach to customer and their needs.
we are not the witless herd of the 90s anymore.
Read radical news here
That was always the gripe I had with integrated graphics chipsets. IGV take away the system memory and the OEM's "innocently" forget to do the subtraction when quoting the actual system memory in their marketing material.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Are you serious?? You bought the cheap system and you knew it would run like crap, but you wanted to save $100. GTFO! :P
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
In case of performance issues, look! Over there!
Isn't that Britney checking into rehab?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Microsoft's REAL error was actually retaining these email messages instead of following their "do-not-save-e-mail directive" and "30-Day E-Mail Destruction Rule", like they did to thwart previous lawsuits.
"Consuming Internet bandwidth since 1991."
Has anyone else noticed that Steve Ballmer barely ever uses punctuation?
Circumcision is child abuse.
My company just bought a dozen new machines. Before buying I checked with our vendor that provides one of our business software products and was told that since we use Samba on our servers, Vista can not work with Samba. So we bought XP and have had not a single issue.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Other similar cases: Ford, Fender. Both used to make great products, but as they got larger, someone got into the mix and absolutely screwed everything up. Now both companies face competitors that make twice the product at the same cost- or half of it. The reason why? They are smaller. Smaller companies have more to prove, along with fewer cooks in the kitchen, so the product is usually better.
Microsoft got cheap. Instead of paying reluctant vendors to write Vista drivers for older hardware (supposedly this happened for Win95), they ended up turning Vista into a bitter pill. Case in point, I have an HP Photosmart 7350 printer that I bought in 2002. This printer is great because it was one of the last printers to not have HP's customer-friendly "your printer cartridge is too old so I won't print" mechanism. For a few months after Vista's release, HP kept saying that the printer was incompatible with Vista. Suddenly, the printer is compatible with the "HP Deskjet 5550" driver included with Vista. Huh? Of course, HP says that some features are unavailable, but doesn't say which ones...
Even Vista fanbois have to agree that hardware incompatibility/driver issues are the biggest problem with Vista. Microsoft's Vista Upgrade adviser, while offering great disclosure, doesn't help promote Vista. So that leaves people like me stuck between having perfectly useful hardware with no fully-functioning Vista driver (or no driver at all), and moving to Vista... So I'm sticking with XP.
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Please hire me to advise you on your products before releasing.
If you give me political amnesty from others within the company, I an give you an honest view of the quality of a product.
Based on these email, it seem that upper management is unaware that some of their employees have had their jobs threatened from people in middle management for getting to 'loud'. Nothing direct, but a lot of implied threats.
I need 120K a year, 100,000 shares, and to work remotely most of the time. I will need to be extracted from the daily 'in the office' routine in order to maintain objectivity.
I work in the strictest confidence, and I assure you know email will be leaked from my office.
Regards,
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I see Windows Update mentioned a lot in the PDF.
Has it ever had a third party driver on it? I've never seen one. I always assumed it was like Windows Media Player which always says "looking for a codec" then "codec not found" - even if it's the most common codec ever which is missing.
Microsoft could fix an awful lot of problems by making Windows Update actually do something useful. I don't know why they don't do it...
No sig today...
While you may be correct that the best reason to upgrade to Vista is the improved security, that was clearly not how the product was primarily advertised to the general public. People were shown ads with amazing Aero eye-candy, and told that Vista was the way to get it. When purchasing a computer that says "Vista capable," it's a reasonable assumption for a non-technical user (to which those ads were targeted) that buying a "Vista capable" computer will deliver the most prominently advertised feature of Vista. I'm not saying it's a bulletproof case, because the small print was there, but it's rather self-contradictory to advertise Windows Vista as being easier than ever for novice users, but also expecting same novice users to understand the system requirements of a GUI that is an optional component of an OS.
"Consuming Internet bandwidth since 1991."
reading is critical:
what I typed:
"and I assure you know email will be leaked from my office."
and what I meant to type:
"and I assure you, no email will be leaked from my office."
two good sentence, to different meanings, one typo*.
Wouldn't it make more sense to spell typo 'typi'?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hardly the stuff of a great leader like Ballmer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk
No sig today...
"People who rely on using all the features of their hardware will not see availability [of drivers] for some time, if ever, depending on the mfg. The built-in drivers never have all the features but do work. For example, I could print with my Brother printer and use it as a stand-alone fax. But network setup, scanning, print to fax must come from Brother".
Yes - buying Vista is a really good idea if you want to keep any existing hardware.
Jim Alchin says: "I have no idea what a 'modern cpu' means".
LOLOL maybe microsoft is hiring in the near future?
> I have an old XP box (Dell GX620, ~ 3 GHz processor with 1 GByte of RAM)
That's powerful compared to the 'Vista Capable' hardware discussed here. You may notice that they're making due with half (or even a quarter) as much RAM as you are, for starters.
It attempted to download and run something on the computer I'm using. There's an "extra anonymous modifier" om the post so it's a registered slashdot user.
I have nobody in my "foes" list but if this guy had not posted anonymously, he'd have been the first. Is there any way to unmask these asshats? Maybe the program he was trying to plant was benign, but I really doubt it. At any rate, that is the last link I click from an A/C post.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
"So far I am surprised at the low call volume in PSS [Product Support Services]. I think we have a lot of new PCs which helps and the hobbyist people who bought FPP/UPG [Full Packaged Product or upgrade] just know what to do and aren't calling, but I know they are struggling."
A lot of hobbyists just aren't moving to Vista as it doesn't allow them to tinker as much. A lot of OS components are signed and you can't plug in your own. Stuff like substituting your own front-end GUI is a lot more complicated and since stuff is more tightly integrated you can't substitute your own apps where you would want them sometimes. A lot of OS GUI extras will never have an end-user authoring specs or software and don't even allow casual users to plug in their own content by specifying another file. This is an end-user OS and nothing else, there is nothing for hobbyists to do with it.
I refuse to believe this. I will *not* read these documents. They are probably forged by these European users anyway. Everybody knows that Microsoft goes all the way to support it's users and Bill Gates is a nice man who supports a lot of charities. How can you even suggest that they would join the forces of evil to steal our money. It's true my Vista is a bit slower on the HP with 512Mb memory, but I bought it that way and it is supposed to be like that. If not then it is certainly not MS fault but HP. And if the SP1 is dropping a lot of functionality in a range of programs then that is only to protect us users from evil software that profits from the great source code MS produces. I hate you all for making fun of MS[tm].
from
From: Steven Sinofsky
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2007 12:08 PM
To: Steve Ballmer
Cc: Bill Veghte, Jon DeVaan
Subject: RE: Vista
"Massive change in the underpinnings for video and audio really led to a poor experience at RTM"
HA HA! M$ sold out to the MPAA & RIAA and got burned. Too bad the failure of this product was not directly linked to the decision to sell out customers.
One line said it all:
... Apple did not lose their way."
:)
"We really botched this."
You tie that together with his memo from 2004:
"I am not sure how the company lost sight of what matters to our customers (both business and home) the most, but in my view we lost our way. I think our teams lost sight of what bug-free means, what resilience means, what full scenarios mean, what security means, what performance means, how important current applications are, and really understanding what the most important problems [our] customers face are. I see lots of random features and some great vision, but that doesn't translate into great products.
I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.
Anybody know if he's since switched to using a Mac?
Score 0: Disagree with our religion.
Shh.
Steven Sinofsky, page 3... LOL
Stop! Dremel time!
It is up to the consumer to only upgrade when necessary. This allows a company time to regroup and rethink their product to produce the best possible. This concept not only applies to the OS, but to movies, cell phones, cars, and almost anything that can be purchased. Haste makes waste. Change is a good thing, but Chaos is wasteful and produces insufficient products. Sometimes the latest & greatest deserves to be examined before purchased. Maybe, perhaps, someday Vista will outgrow the awkward stage. Maybe it will mature. Maybe not. Maybe the world of OS will shift and move on. For now, I chose to stay where I am at with my system. It works. Why not? What does Vista offer me? This is not a new attitude for me. I totally skipped the WinMe fiasco. I made it just fine. This too shall pass!
Is it usual for CEOs to have the grammar of twelve-year-olds? Reading through the PDF, most of the Microsoft employees have respectable spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. And then I read Steve Ballmer's e-mails. Here's a verbatim excerpt:
"You are right that people did not trust us have you checkd windows update I assume you found no drivers there either?? thanks"
Most of what he writes is of similar quality.
did anyone notice that we now have steve ballmer's email
steve.ballmer@microsoft.com
i suggest we email him and tell him how much we love our linux boxes that have drivers.
How much OS do you need to run a browser?
The OS is pretty much a moot point for most people now. Most everyone I know uses a PC to run a browser
and email. Sure they may use office or whatever occasionally but the browser and perhaps a email client
can just about get you anything you need.
Got Code?
No it wouldn't. Just checked. Update manager still points to ubuntu.com
Anyone stupid enough to buy a Vista-Capable machine to actually run Vista deserves a lemon. It was product misrepresentation on the part of Microsoft as well as the hardware vendors, but then again, a lot of businesses do this borderline issue and is perfect candidate for a class-action lawsuit. I fully support a class-action lawsuit, eventhough I don't intend to run Vista on my Vista-capable-certified laptop. The upgrade-checker program reports that a few devices won't work properly if I actually install Vista on the system. It was cheaper to buy a laptop with Windows-XP and run Linux on it, than to buy an equivalent laptop with Linux preinstalled or with no OS. If only somebody publishes an "Idiot's guide to manufacturing laptops in China", that might create a lot of linux/laptop businesses.
Cleary. There. Are. Some. Exceptions. To. This. Rule.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I'm not sure if "they" meant MS employees writing drivers, or hardware vendors writing drivers. Either way, it seems MS has a credibility problem.
Also, the unsaid meaning of some of the emails is: recognizing that they failed to set a high enough priority to having the device drivers ready when Vista shipped.
It's not surprising that MS corporate brass had these discussions. You'd expect them to. What is surprising is that they failed at something so fundamental to the business of selling OSes.
Wow, Vista runs well on a 3ghz box with 1 gig of RAM? Call the media.
To all the Microsoft apologists out there--this is your Waterloo. Here we have a concrete example of how Microsoft decided to do one of their corporate buddies a huge favor--letting them meet their f'n quarterly numbers. So, Microsoft chose to help one of their rich pals over every single one of their users. That should tell you who they value. And the common perception that Vista is a piece of crap? Confirmed internally! This is just despicable.
What I've always found funny about Vista is that it had poor compatibility with existing Windows applications, and abysmal hardware support. You know, the two things that (rightly) prevent people from using another OS instead of Windows...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I thought everyone knew about nimp. Nimp links are the Internet equivalent of asking the new guy to bring you a form ID10T or a left handed monkey wrench.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Gez, there's nothing worse than having your company emails posted for the whole world to see. It always seems like Microsoft internal communications are the first to be released.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
TSIA. HTH. HAND.
Kid-proof tablet..
i honestly don't know why you guys are complaining so much, vista(now anyway) runs great for me. No problems so far. When it first came out, yes it sucked.
Techie
What surprised me the most about reading through the PDFs is that Microsoft caved to Intel. First off, I'm surprised that Microsoft caves to anyone, let alone a chip manufacturer. More interesting is the way they back pedaled on their promises to OEM about what kinds of hardware it would take to achieve the "Vista Ready" logo.
HP and other OEMs spent a lot of money putting in newer, more expensive WDDM-compatible video cards because they were required for the "Vista Ready" logo. Microsoft promised with a 100% guarantee to HP, that they would not regret making these investments because there was no way Microsoft was going to allow crappy Intel chipsets to get the "Vista Ready" logo. After enough pressure from Intel (and far after HP and other OEMs made pricey investments) Microsoft apparently caved and reduced the requirements for their logo. 915 and 945-based chipsets are apparently suffering from horrible performance and customers are pissed. Now all the OEMs are feeling cheated as well because they met Microsoft's initial demands, only to watch cheaper and slower chipsets make the same grade while offering terrible performance.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Circumcision reduces the threat of HIV, and is required of Jews by their religion. Keep your god damned laws off my kids and their bodies!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
There is something right in a world where Steve Ballmer is reduced to doing tech support for Vista...
:-)
have you checked windows update, I assume you found no drivers there either??
Now if only everybody could CC their support requests to mailto:steve.ballmer@microsoft.com, I'm sure they will all be attended to quickly
Way cool!
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Microsoft executives collusing with Intel executive in securities fraud. What a surprise!
I really hope that the SEC looks into this in more detail.
I got stuck with a Vista upgrade when several too many games told me that my aging Windows 2000 installation was not supported and refused to install. That's all I want Windows for anymore, really. I've got Linux and OSX for real work, right? So I went for the Home Basic, reasoning that for simply running games, that was all I wanted, and I didn't want to fill MS's coffers more than necessary. I also reasoned that I didn't want Aero, and would be trimming the services to the bare minimum.
Mission accomplished, right? Except the hard drives thrash a great deal more than they used to. So far, I've had to upgrade my sound card, but that's not so bad. The real deal is that the security model spams you so much that you regard its pop-ups as noise. Also, the software incompatibilities tend to undermine the sole reason that I keep Windows around at all.
I much prefer my experience with OSX or Linux or *BSD. Game makers ought to get serious about porting their titles, because I believe at this point that that's the main reason home users are still putting up with this crap. I won't pretend that there aren't obstacles to this, but for the love of god, let's dump this old broken system.
Here is a summary for those that don't want to read the PDF:
Early 2006: Microsoft got cozy with HP to make sure that HP invested in a better graphical experience for Vista. Intel had to make its quarterly earnings and convinced Microsoft to call their chipset "capable" even though it couldn't meat the graphic standards. Microsoft had explicitly told HP that they wouldn't do this, but they, led by some dude named Will Poole, decided to bone HP to make Intel (specifically some SVP chick named Renee-most likely Renee James) happy. Then MS discussed how they are going to try to play it off to intel with some fancy obfuscating letter. They got this guy at MS named Jim Allchin to sign off on it, which he reluctantly did, but chastised them for pulling this crap. Some dude named Mike Ybarra pointed out to Jim that they are boning HP and their customers just to get cuddly wuddly with Intel and Jim seemed to agree, but figured the wheels were in motion and could not be stopped. Mike specifically said, "We are caving to Intel... We are really burning HP... We are allowing Intel to drive our consumer experience..."
Fast forward a year later and some board member John Shirley sends some borderline literate guy named Steve Balmer an email about how his shit won't work with Vista and that some of the stuff may never get Vista drivers. They surmise that vendors didn't trust them to deliver Vista (gee, wonder why) so they didn't make drivers. Balmer sends an email to some guy named Steven Sinofsky asking about the driver situation. Sinofsky agrees that vendors didn't expect them to ship and also says that changes to Vista made it so XP drivers wouldn't work, he questions how smart it was to call the Intel chipset "capable" when it wasn't, and says that they need to be clearer with the industry. Then some exec named Mike Nash points out how his company boned him because he bought a $2100 "Vista capable" laptop that is only good as an email machine.
In the end, some exec John Kalman says that lowering their standard for Intel screwed them and they won't make such a stupid mistake with Windows 7.
In short, Will Poole is a weasel who is just trying to make some Intel chick happy. Mike Ybarra is too thoughtful and has too much foresight to work at MS. Jim Allchin needs to go with his gut and remind Will Poole which side of the desk he sits on. Steve Ballmer is missing some keys on his keyboard. Steven Sinofsky and Kohn Kalman have 20/20 hindsight. HP deserves to kick somebody's ass at MS. They should probably kick Intel's ass too, but MS is too busy licking it.
Myself, I don't think Intel is evil at all, just a little bit naive about the seriousness with which Europe takes the "level playing field".
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This is so far out of whack, it's time for whack-a-troll.
(1) You point out that "novice users" (and that would be the vast majority of computer users), are not going to run Photoshop. Yet you mention that 512MB ain't enough to run it. Why did you even mention it then?
(2) You say "or you like to play mp3s while working", implying that this would overload a 512MB XP machine. I have mplayer.exe running with a movie paused -- 17MB of RAM used. 17MB more is going to break the XP camel's back?
(3) "or a number of other situation". You mean like running AutoCAD, a continuous system benchmark, and playing WoW...while downloading pr0n? Man, I see novices doing that all the time.
(4) "but I will be [sic] that they *will* have a large number of applications open at once". Well, in my experience novices tend to have a grand total of one program open at once, and if you try to leave a second one open they will close it, sometimes even when you have carefully minimized it. Many developers are this way as well -- wanting to squeeze an extra 50msec out of that recompile. Oh, and that one program is almost for sure 99% most likely you-can-bet maximized.
Real world situation #1: upgrading the dreaded mother-in-law computer to XP involving a machine with 64MB of RAM. Yup, one-eighth of what you are whining about. EVERYTHING I re-installed worked. MS O2k, CompuServe 2000, graphics editors, alternate browser, etc. Yes, everything ran slowly. Yes, it was slow to boot up (but not as slow as 512MB Vista machines). And when told how cheap RAM was, the m-i-l rushed out and bought 256MB.
Real world situation #2: my wife upgrading her computer while I was away. It went from 98 to XP Pro, with 320MB of RAM. The thing ran hundreds of games and everything else. Nobody ever thought it was slow. I used it myself for some things for a time. It was only replaced a year ago, and died of dust overload, if anything.
Somewhere a chair-thrower is rubbing his hands together and saying "Vista is right on target!"
I come here for the love
We bought an $800 Mac Mini a year or two ago. The dual core intel version. It came with 512MB of ram. My wife would complain that the dual core was worthless because the thing wasn't any faster than my single core PC. And in fact seem slower. It would take forever for Safari to load for example.
We finally got around to bothering with it a month or so ago and asked an Apple rep from Apple.com what kind of memory the thing used. It was standard SODIMM stuff so we looked it up on NewEgg and found the exact memory that the rep mentioned for about $25 for 1GB.
The Mini is designed to not be easily upgradable by a user so I figured since it was only $25 for the memory I'd splurg and let the Apple Store take care of it. I figured $20 - $40 tops for the installation. I call them up and ask if they'll install a 3rd party memory module. Nope. So I ask how much for 1GB. They told me $150 dollars and the "installation is free." I told them that was ridiculous and hung up.
So we went ahead and risked opening up the thing to install the memory ourselves. There was a guide on-line we found. It wasn't too much trouble.
So this isn't an MS problem. It's a "cheap bastards" problem. They'd rather cut costs on the hardware to save a few bucks. At least with MS, you're working with a system that can be easily upgraded cheaply. I'd be annoyed with lack of memory from Dell but at least they don't make their system a pain to upgrade or mark up their prices astronomically.
We'll never buy a Mac again. The system is fine, we'll forgive them for not including enough memory for OS X by default but charging $150 for a $25 part is inexcusable.
Work Safe Porn
Goes to show how failed Microsoft's hiring system is when they have internal rats who leaked the emails.
Gee, the performance of the 915 chipset with compiz and xgl has been pretty good for me. Maybe the problem is less about Intel's HW prefs and more about MS' code?
Read The Fucking PDF
Here be signatures
Are our beloved overlords running XP or Vista? That is the deciding factor of where my loyalties lie...
My other sig is a knife wound.
It's the Challenger story all over again. As I understand it from those emails, is clear: Vista was developed for the graphical experience to be not just essential, but the major selling point. Microsoft established this early on (as in Summer 2004). Another key plank was that Vista was going to be a major rewrite of how things are done, requiring entirely new hardware. So Microsoft developed a program to aid consumers in navigating this sea change in hardware.
At the last minute (~1 year before the official release), Intel comes up and says: "look, old chap, we've got this cheap chipset that we need to move units on to make our quarterlies", and the guy whose job it is to deal with Intel happens to outrank everyone else, and not be in the loop concerning the nitty-gritty details of what he's selling. So he changes the specifications of what constitutes "Vista-capable" to satisfy Intel. As a knock-on, every manufacturer out there gets to slap "Vista-capable" on similarly lame (aka "runs XP, sorta") hardware.
Yeah, that's a lawsuit that will be settled pretty quickly. I feel sorry for the folks who had to deal with this crap. It ain't what they asked for.
Oh yeah, Vista sucks.
Windows update has literally thousands of 3rd party drivers. You can search for them directly without having to use the Windows Update application: http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/Home.aspx
Note that IE6+ is required to search the driver catalog. Try searching for ATI, Nvidia, or simply just "video"!
It was the lack of memory that was slowing it down. We know because that's all we changed and it runs great now. Opening a new safari window used to take several seconds. Now it's nearly instant.
Mobile harddrives are not that much slower than desktop drives.
"You'll probably still be saying it when it's the only machine still working when all the PCs you've bought since are failing in a couple of years time."
I build all my PCs from parts and they last as long as want them. I don't buy a new MB/CPU/Memory unless there's compatibility issues involved with getting a faster processor. I don't buy a new computer because the MB/CPU or memory failed.
When the 1.66GHz processor in the Mini doesn't cut it anymore we have no options. You have to buy a whole new Mac. You can't just spend $200 on a new MB/CPU and possibly some memory.
And like I said, since Apple tried to rip us off on memory I don't trust them anymore. I'd hate to buy a Mac and have to buy their parts. We got lucky this time.
Work Safe Porn
I have an ASUS P4P800 Deluxe (945 Chipset) with a 256 MB Radeon 9600 and 3GB of ram that I use as a 3D modeling station. It runs like an indycar under XP but when I tried upgrading to Vista it slowed to an unresponsive crawl, particularly when I tried playing sound (iTunes) or running flash. ASUS was no help. "We aren't making Vista drivers for that board" they said.
Vista does NOT play nice with the embedded sound / graphics on old Intel boards. These emails clearly show that they knew this. Microsoft should fry. Free copies of Vista or cash value for anyone running "Vista Capable" would be a good start IMO.
I, for one, was one of the few that got hit with Vista problems. However, I'm no longer running vista. Acer tried to tell me that I couldn't get drivers for anything but, but I showed them wrong. Don't applaud me for sticking it to the man, and being a linux geek, with that new copy of Kubuntu. I didn't. I'm running XP... It works. It's stable, and I'm more familiar with it. But, what's the first thing I do with my new copy of XP? I install a pack to make it look like Vista... Why? The pretty... I LOVE the pretty of Vista, however, I'm not going to run a Virtal Machine to get my scanner to work! I'm not going to put up with no memmory left! I'm not going to put up with a two to ten second delay in opening a window! Microsoft, get your heads out of your ass... Try building an OS that people want. Try actually making a good product for once. Don't argue that it's fine. It obviously isn't, because if it were, you wouldn't have the "Vista Sucks" stereotype. Obviously, you messed up. Get your head in the game for 7, or it'll end up being your last commercially viable OS, mark my words... You have a lot to learn from Sega... Don't be too innovative... People don't buy it...
The MS Vista debacle is fantastic. These Vista (in)capable machines run Linux just fine.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Nobody seems to be pointing out that these emails are proof that the guys over at Microsoft actually do want to make Vista a nice experience for the user.
Microsoft is being bit by its own successful campaign of getting hardware manufactures to only support Windows with "Designed for Windows" hardware. These WinDevices (WinModems, WinPrinters, WinScanners, etc.) rely on Windows to do the bulk of their processing and if you change the way Windows interfaces with these devices (as is the case with Vista) you need to create brand new drivers from scratch. The problem is that hardware manufactures are not going to invest the time and money to make a discontinued piece of hardware work with Vista when they can sell you a shiny new one.
If Microsoft would have promoted "real" hardware that did not need specialized driver software which is intimately entangled in the internals of Windows, they would not be in this position. Take, for example, a standard Postscript printer: complicated low-level drivers are unnecessary in most operating systems and it just works (to steal a line from the Mac world).
Could you imagine a world where every multi-function device used standard USB communication to interface to the Postscript/PCL printer, SANE/TWAIN scanner, and the built-in fax modem was a standard serial device that used AT command sequences? If Microsoft promoted such standards, this device could not only "just work" with Vista, but also Mac OS (X or otherwise) Linux, OS/2, BeOS... basically everything. The conspiracy theory part of my brain says that MS just can't stand for that, which is why it did not "discourage" hardware manufactures from tying basic functionality to Windows.
But now that it needs to change the internals of Windows, Microsoft's hardware lock-in is coming home to roost.
(BTW, does anyone else think it is monumentally stupid that Vista does not support generic Postscript or PCL printers out of the box and must rely on HP or Adobe for such drivers?)
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
WINDOWS VISTA: The Great Wow Experience
Copyright (c) 2006, 2007, 2008 Microsoft, Inc. All rights reserved.
WINDOWS is a registered trademark of Microsoft, Inc.
Revision 6093 / Serial number FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
West of Desktop
You are standing in an open field west of a desktop, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
>open mailbox
Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.
>read leaflet
(Taken)
"WELCOME TO VISTA!
VISTA is an operating system of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing window decorations ever seen by mortals. No computer should be without one!"
>photoshop.exe
I don't know the word "photoshop".
>help
I don't know the word "help".
>reboot
I don't know the word "reboot".
>dir
I don't know the word "dir".
>C:\ I don't know the word "c:\".
>
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I'm using a PC with pretty much that specs, and you say old? Windows Vista should run faster than XP.
(I'm going to repeat myself from another post, but...)
They only place layers of s*** without cleaning and optimizing code.
They rely on the latest generation of CPUs to run all that junk and produce "satisfying" results.
One day, they will wake up and realize they 1) got to clean all that code or 2) start all over again (yeah right...). Either way, they lose!
We have a divergence in the interests of the users and the customers. The customers for PC's are largely HP, Dell, etc. Dell, HP, et al, want reasons to get users to buy new PC's, rather than just upgrade their existing SW. If people bought subscriptions to the SW, the business model would change. That said, I expect the movement to software as a service should have some interesting impacts, and not only on Microsoft.
as noted in the related thread, the hardware manufacturers are equally to blame: for trying to pass off their products as vista-capable, and thereby increase sales. MS made product A, Dell/HP made product B - and the sales pitch was that A and B worked well together.
(A company I'm associated with sued Microsoft, and I attended the trial. Plaintiff entered into evidence all kinds of interesting internal Microsoft emails they obtained through the discovery process. Anyone interested in seeing interesting internal Microsoft tidbits should consider finding one of the many court cases they are involved in, and attending)
I don't think so, for two reasons. First, the standards were subsequently lowered for everybody, including AMD, so enforcement was fair. (Although you could make the argument that they were all treated poorly, I suppose.) Second, I understand that AMD was not selling desktop or laptop chipsets in 2006, as they had not yet merged with ATI. AMD chipsets would therefore not have been affected by this change, although ATI chipsets may have been. But it is not clear whether they were negatively impacted. Some ATI chipsets with integrated video may have benefited from this change, in fact. You just may not hear about them because they aren't as widespread as the 915 was and still is.
From what I understand, this decision was largely forced upon Microsoft by several OEMs (e.g. like Dell, Sony, Lenovo, IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Acer), who had relatively large inventories of 915-based products which they wanted to sell, and were afraid that without the "Vista Capable" logo they wouldn't sell well. Some OEMs (apparently HP) had already updated their 2006 product line to the original published Vista requirements, and were therefore understandably upset when the standards were lowered to include their competitors' less capable (and less expensive) offerings as "Vista Capable" too. I can certainly understand why these OEMs would be upset.
The fact that some systems (especially laptops) would lack Aero support was clear long before Vista shipped. Around June or July 2006, or 6 full months prior to Vista's release, Microsoft went live with the official Vista logo programs, of which there were two: "Certified for Windows Vista" (premium), and "Works with Windows Vista" (basic). One of the chief differences between the two was Aero support. (It is no coincidence that Windows Vista Home Basic edition does not contain Aero support, while Home Prmium does. The two SKUs were intended to align with their respective logos.)
Therefore, OEMs knew by at least mid-2006 that not all hardware would be able to achieve the "premium", Aero-enabled logo category. In June/July 2006 Microsoft released a logo test kit for these new Vista logo programs, which included a test called the "Aero Acceptance Test" which was required for the "Certified" logo. It failed several manufacturers' integrated video solutions, including the Intel 915. But since Vista was not yet shipping (and therefore these logos, although "ready", were not yet shipping to customers), OEMs were free to continue selling these non-Aero chipsets to customers with the older "Vista Capable" logo. At this point, however, they knew full well that these systems could never achieve the "Certified" logo. But obviously they felt no obligation to warn potential purchasers of the future limitation.
Ideally in my opinion, Microsoft should have specified two different "Vista Capable" logos all along, anticipating the fact that not all hardware was created equal and were equally "Vista Capable". However easy this is to note in hindsight, it is obviously difficult to specify hardware standards. It takes a lot of work. Having two such programs ready a year in advance of a fluctuating OS release date is even more complicated, and deciding where to draw the line between the "basic" and "premium" versions in 2005, when you don't really even know what features will make it into the finished product, is well near impossible.
So while I sympathize somewhat with customers who purchased hardware in 2006 with the understanding that it would run Aero in 2007, frankly no one promised them anything, and their systems are capable of running 95% of Vista just fine. Purchasing hardware with future expectations of 100% feature support has always been a gamble. You don't know whether something is going to work 100% until it's actually available.
Wife: "My photo application is slow, we need to upgrade"
She also can set the timer on the VCR: "Hon, can you set the VCR clock?"
Quite a capable woman actually..
I kid, my wife could upgrade the computer if she wanted to, easy peasy. But she doesn't like to, so I get to do it.
Hmm..same thing with the Yard work..damn! she IS smart.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
for Microsoft to be secure, they need to change their platform.
It's architecture is horrible. This is a huge part of the problem, it's not easy to fix.
Here's the deal:
Good architectures mature, bad one's age.
IF it was a good architecture, it would just need to fix the exploit, and you would have in less problem. Probably in a module someplace. As time goes on, the OVERALL design and implementation gets better.
This is why most of the really secure OS have been around for a while.
Evolve to prevent new threats.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's pretty much the same, really...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQVWDoqbN48
that's like the simpsons comic book guy.
Shatner is more like:
Cleary ThereAre. SomeExcep,tions. ToThisRule.
hey, I'm just having nerd fun.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Unless of course you like to run Photoshop, "
I do. I use an older version running under Win98SE and with plugins that do the equivalent of today's photoshop, from what I've seen. Eat my 96 megs of RAM on a paltry 533 MHz P3.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Vista's biggest problem, from day 1, has been buggy, shitty drivers. NVIDIA's drivers were horrible at release. So were Intel's.
Go read these emails. They are expressing dismay at two major things:
The first problem puzzles me. Many of the emails seem to reflect my confusion about this - WHY weren't drivers ready when Vista had been feature-complete for over a year? Manufacturers seemed to get used to the idea that Microsoft wasn't going to ship, which after 5 years of delays, I guess isn't so unreasonable.
The second problem is typical MS. They do this with WinMo devices, many of which still ship with a TI OMAP 850 (200MHz ARM - it was slow when it was released 4 years ago) and 64MB of memory (~30-40MB of which is used as a filesystem cache to avoid killing the flash memory). That's why I now carry an iPhone.
But has WMP ever downloaded a non-MS codec?
No sig today...
My GP got modded troll twice, funny 5 times, overrated twice, Redundant once and underrated once. Wondering who got that kind of mod points to waste?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"The emails reflect a lot of frustration among senior Microsoft personnel about Vista's performance problems and hardware incompatibilities."
You should get a load of what the rank and file are saying. It's not pretty.
I didn't find this surprising (most developers /LOVE/ *NIX), until I read that you were in mgmt. Were you a developer who had the misfortune of being punished for writing good code by being dragged in to management? Or were you actually a manager... that would surprise me. I'm a software development major in college, among my peers it's almost a running joke that management just doesn't *get* *nix yet, but it'll grow on them over time if they give it a chance. I'd really be surprised to hear that technical managers (who aren't from a development or admin background) are running *nix, regardless of company. When I heard that the new CEO of Red Hat used to run Slackware, I /still/ nearly fell out of my chair!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Heh, I just read through the PDF of emails. Allchin is quite the corporate survivor. How many times does he say "I wasn't involved in that" or "I didn't know" or "The dog ate my homework?"
Take the latter first. Code running in kernel mode runs on CPU ring 0; User mode, ring 3. What's been causing problems with device drivers is that Vista's new driver framework puts a lot more restrictions on what can run in kernel mode (e.g. kernel mode printer drivers are now banned).
But this is not the same thing as user account privilege seperation, which is a higher level distinction -- for example, different users might only have write privileges to their own home folders, wheras administrators have write privileges to the entire hard drive. This has also cause some compatibility issues, but with programs rather than device drivers -- mostly programs that write to areas they shouldn't (e.g. the root of the C drive), and thus will complain if they aren't run elevated.
So, for example, even if a program is elevated to administrator [user account privileges], the actual code will still almost always be running in User mode [CPU rings].
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Oh, come on, modders -- "Troll"? For what, pointing out that more modern operating systems doing more things takes more system resources?
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
This one will trigger Last Measure....don't click !!!
Check out page 47 of the full pdf. Its a table showing the percentage of crashes reported by graphics card vendor and Nvidia is way out in front, with 25% compared to less than 10% for ATI.
Search first, ask questions later.
A coworker last May told me he had gotten Vista for his teenage son for
his "old" computer and it worked "great" (TM)! I was surprised based
on all the information I read on Vista said it sucked up 640MB of ram just
booting up and the OS for whatever reason was sluggish. So I
asked my coworker to help me understand how his son's old computer could
run Vista so well. Well as he explained it with about the same point
of view as you've got, his son's "old" computer has
1) 3GHz Pentium processor
2) 2 GB of Ram
3) some nvidia card with 512MB of GRAPHICS ram.
I was so stunned by his nonchalance at what he considered
to be "old" that I was afraid to tell him that one of
my top of the line Linux boxes (a dedicated Mythtv box)
only had a 1GHz Athlon, a 64MB video card (GeForce 6800(?)),
and 512MB of system ram. I was stunned his son's video card
had to have as much ram as my mythtv box's system ram in
order to get Aero to work.
Holy shit man, and you don't "see" why some folks call
Vista bloatware?!?!?! Listen dude, like the saying goes,
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt!
Why is this modded "Troll"? Is someone who advocates personal responsibility really such a painful thing for you guys to hear? Knowing what you are buying before you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a machine is simply good sense. It's the prudent thing to do. If you yourself are not knowledgable about computers, it's not difficult to ask someone who is, to do a Google search, or to pick up a publication like PC Magazine or Consumer Reports and see whether the item you had in mind is highly rated. Honestly I can't believe people think that blindly trusting labels, packaging, or other advertising is the best way to make a good purchase.
... well, I don't think this is a rational belief at all, but if you feel that way then how about posting a reply to explain your reasoning? Modding someone "troll" because you strongly disagree with them is the kind of cheap, childish shit that makes Slashdot a worse place.
If you disagree with the parent poster, implying that you really believe that looking out for your own best interests is a task that shouldn't involve you, a task that should only be up to the government or honest advertising
And no, I am not saying that Microsoft should blatently lie, or that government regulators should do nothing about it if they do (save the strawman arguments, please). I am saying that depending on politicians or corporations to look out for you is naive at best, blatently stupid at worst. What is "troll" about pointing out that there is no substitute for due diligence? Or, what's "troll" about pointing out that uninformed decisions tend to get bad results?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I notice you didn't even try to defend the other three points regarding embrace-extend-extinguish, refusal to interoperate, or reluctance to follow US or EU law (as convicted monopolists).
And while we're at it, let's try and go for at least a Fox style "fair and balanced" view of Microsoft: we can start with the patent threats against Linux, move on to Balmer calling Open Source a "cancer", and then dig into all of the stuff that's behind them now like "cutting off Netscape's air supply" and flat out stealing technology from Stac, Inc. back in the DOS days.
Tell you what: we Slashdot drones will clean up and play nice with Microsoft and the warchest in billions of USD worth of ill-gotten monopoly money it has to spread FUD er.. I mean "marketing" as soon as they stop attacking Open Source and Linux to perhaps do a little more of that "cutting off air supply" style behavior. Until then, I say we SlashTrolls simply FUD away for the pure enjoyment and Google cache filling satisfaction of it all in our miserable little lives.
P.S. I hear with all the chairs Balmer is throwing these days in Redmond, that it's starting to get old hat for him.
Rumor is, the local humane society is being cleaned out so he can have some puppies and kitten to use as
"chair targets". Now that could be all made up FUD, but we're talking Microsoft and Balmer here so... well, you never know...
There. I feel better already.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Robin Leonard, a Microsoft employee, wrote that Wal-Mart is "extremely disappointed in the fact that the standards were lowered and feel like customer confusion will ensue.
If Walmart is complaining about quality, then you've really dumped a steaming turd into the marketplace.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Some of the BSD's are quite small as well.
.iso for NetBSD/i386 (one of the most bloated archs) is 247MB.
The size of the Base Install
So you get a complete Windowing System and full networking in a 500 MB footprint. And much smaller if you don't need X11.
Granted, you don't get a fully cocked and loaded DRM mechanism aimed at locking you away from your own hardware....
Does the gov't really do any good protecting people from junk products? Vista is an abomination (and a monopoly), but the gov't does not care as long as they get their tax monies. After all, corporations and gov't are merely quid-pro-quo whorehouses sold to the highest bidder. When the gov't needs illegal wire-taps, Verizon and Sprint allow them secret rooms to listen in on calls. When Haliburton (and KBR) need more revenue, the gov't hands out no-bid contracts. When the gov't dislikes literature, Amazon and Wikipedia ban the book "America Deceived". We The People had our gov't sold out from beneath us.
Final link (before Google Books caves to pressure and drops the title):
America Deceived (book)
where did the leak come from on these e-mails- class action was just granted and these docs haven't been made public yet- this could actually skew the case since as far as I know there has been no full admission of discovery in this case yet and the doc that has been posted could now be ruled inadmissible
These e-mail's don't paint a picture of a company that's dismayed with their own product, what they're obviously sad about is that they feel they have a good product but that they've screwed themselves over by caving to Intel. They *knew* that Vista required a certain level of GPU / memory performance and they pushed for that for 18 months, and then threw it all away when they let Intel convince them to lower the standards for "Vista Capable". Which went from meaning "Runs Vista ok - similar to XP" to meaning "Runs Vista, but don't plan on doing anything else".
It's like saying Crysis is "capable" of running on 5 year old hardware... yeah, sure, at 640x480 and 15 fps... If everyone ran it like that they'd say it's the biggest pile of crap ever made - and that's what happened to the Vista boys. They let outside vendors / OEMs define the requirements rather than them and then people got pissed when it ran like crap.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Make that XP.
If you want to use client-supplied VPN clients to provide remote tech support.
I picked up a used Mac G4 (2x533, 768 ram) and, having never used a Mac, was able to just work. After a couple of days, I decided to try to throw it for a loop; I gathered every oddball USB (and firewire) item that I could find and plugged it into the thing. Not a single item failed to work without adding any drivers. I even used an external SB Audigy without a hitch -- all the Digital I/O even worked. BTW Creative does NOT have ANY Mac support (But I guess Mac does have Creative support).
To compare, I spent the first two days with Vista trying to make it get out of my way and let me work. Some things (NMAP) still aren't usable at all, and others (Cygwin) have severely reduced functionality.
Me and my brother both had pretty much the same spec PCs a few months ago, both just about enough to run supreme commander reasonably well. He has since upgraded to vista, making his Nvidia drivers not work with the game. There's been a fix since, but even now it manages a grand 1 to 3fps on the lowest imaginable spec, glad I'm still on XP. Wish they'd just cut their losses, scrap Vista and give us all an XP DX10 patch.