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Microsoft Extends XP For Low-Cost Laptops
Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft says it will extend the sales of Windows XP Home to OEMs by several years, but it's not in response to the SaveXP petition. Microsoft is supposedly making the move in part to ensure that Linux doesn't dominate the market for certain types of 'ultra-low-cost' laptops. XP will be available for OEMs until June 30, 2010, or one year after the availability of the next client version of Windows, whichever date comes later. This greatly extends the earlier XP deadline of June 30 of this year (which was an extension itself), and means XP will potentially be installed on new computers nearly a decade after its original release. The author of the article suggests that the post-June 2008 release of Atom-based laptops encouraged Microsoft to extend XP, even though Intel says Atom can support Vista. Intel also claims that 'Moblin' Linux will be available on Atom-equipped mobile devices starting this summer."
"Can support Vista" and "Can support Vista for 5 minutes" are the same!
It seems that Microsoft made the decision to extend XP based on an attempt to prevent manufacturers switching, after previously ignoring pleas from the end-users to extend XP. The issue seems to be that they're more interested in selling software (such as Vista) even to people who don't want it than they are in selling software to people who do want it; Vista helps to drive the upgrade train, and XP doesn't, so until the low-cost laptops came off the ground continuing XP would presumably have been seen as a huge evil from Microsoft's point of view. It's the manufacturers that Microsoft are trying to please, not the manufacturer's customers (note that retail versions of XP will no longer be available), and only because they had a real alternative (Linux in this case); this strategy may end up backfiring in the long term, because if retailers are prevented from listening to their customers as long as they stay with Microsoft, they may eventually have enough incentive to change, so as not to lose revenue.
(1)DOCOMEFROM!2~.2'~#1WHILE:1<-"'?.1$.2'~'"':1/.1$.2'~#0"$#65535'"$"'"'&.1$.2'~'#0$#65535'"$#0'~#32767$#1"
As hardware progresses does this mean in a way that Windows XP could become the new Windows CE??
Shh.
Is keeping their product in front of the customer.
This is going to make a lot of people unhappy. Lots of OEMs are going to have a little chat with Microsoft about this whole death-of-XP thing I think.
If Vista runs well on a MID I will be shocked. If it ran well, the things would ship with Vista and we wouldn't be having this 8-year-old OS discussion at all since these devices weren't even announced until Vista had been out for a year.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Developers: We can use your help.
Is this a self admission that Vista didn't do what they thought it would? What happens when Windows 7 doesn't ship on time? Will they come out with XP SP5?/>
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Microsoft are doing the right thing(extending XP sales) for the wrong reason(competing with Linux in the cheap laptop market). XP may very well be the last Microsoft OS that many of us will use. It's reasonably tweekable, fast, stable, supports a shitload of wide-ranging applications, and it dosen't have DRmware integrated into it(Windows media player dosen't count :P ) -- remember that network utilization problem that Vista had while playing media files? That's like turning on the kitchen sink only to have the toilet flush! Lesser of two evils...and calm down, all you Microsoft-haters out there: WINE exists for a reason :)
wow. this is good news!
-I only code in BASIC.-
... to see a 7 years old OS making the news because it will be extended to 10 years! It's like saying Ford extending the life of their 1965 sedan into the 2010. I mean it works, but I wouldn't define it as an achievement of human progress. Just because the model T was built for twenty years doesn't mean that all other innovation and progress came to a grinding halt.People know how to use XP, and how to fix it when it's broken. Who needs an upgrade?
"It's all just meme meme around here"
"It's like saying Ford extending the life of their 1965 sedan into the 2010."
Not really.
Software isn't hardware, and just because the public is groomed to accept drastic OS changes doesn't mean that we need to replace systems that work sufficiently well for their intended purpose. Refinement instead of replacement can avoid all sorts of problems such as, well, Vista. Given the MSFT market share, they could have gradually improved XP and made even more money than they have by dumping capital into Vista.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
We are not talking about upgrades here, but new purchases. If you are using XP in your current PC than you are perfectly right. But if in a 2008 brand new PC computer I will get an old OS, than you are wrong, because I am not upgrading to anything. 2008 hardware needs a properly designed 2008 OS.
I'm honestly confused as to why Vista was designed to require substantially higher system requirements and consume more resources. It's obvious XP is still the platform of choice because there's crap-all that Vista does which justifies the extra requirements. Yes there are some nice features such as easy resizing of Windows partitions and superfetch, but that doesn't excuse the hangups I feel when pushing my system hard because it's got less to play with than it did with XP.
Did Microsoft really think people would just stop using older, but perfectly functional hardware and buy new gear? Were they totally nuts? They could have had so much more success if Vista was designed to scale well with various grades of hardware. But it doesn't without a lot of work, and you could just as easily save yourself the trouble by slapping on XP (or Linux). Let's hope for their sake Windows 7 will have a readjustment in their perspective.
Microsoft sees a need to maintain a presence in the low-cost hardware market.
Vista isn't going to do it and Windows Mobile is less than satisfying. XP is Microsofts only offering that can be squeezed onto machines that otherwise might have been exclusively Linux powered. I think this sucks for developers more than anything in that effectively Microsoft is asking them to support two platforms.
load "$",8,1
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
They are keeping an OS alive because it runs on less powerful computers. Nothing new. They developed Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs to do the same thing. But, in the case of WinFLP, it was to ensure that people that buy Software Assurance on a computer can continue to pay for that assurance even after their hardware reaches "Legacy" standing.
They didn't release it to the public because it wasn't as effective as a full desktop version of Windows (although if you've used it you'll see it's more user friendly than Starter Edition) and because not enough people were buying new computers that couldn't run what they saw as the current OS.
Now with a shift towards lower powered ultra mobiles, people are buying computers that aren't really suited to run what they see as the current OS.
They are already maintaining a way to run a supported version of Windows on PCs going back to P233 with 64MB RAM because they saw a market driven reason for it. Extending the availability of XP Home just means they are recognizing a similar market in consumer space now.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Patches needed afterwards? Guess you've never heard of slipstreaming.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Mainstream support for XP is set to expire on April 14, 2009 according to http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&x=16&y=12&C2=1173 Which is obviously before June 30, 2010. Does that mean they'll extend Mainstream support as well (I'd assume so). If so, it'd be the second time they've extended support (originally 5 years after release, or Dec 31, 2006).
AccountKiller
1) The hardware manufacturers make more money. Then then repay MS by not supporting other OSes.
2) The cost of the software remains low in relation to the cost of the total system. People won't notice a $200 OS buried in $1000 of hardware. But in $200 of hardware another $200 stands out.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I think it needs to be made clear the following: XP Home will be available for budget laptops, such as the EEE PC, OLPC, Cloudbook, and Intel's Classmate PC. XP Home and Pro for standard vendors is still being taken off the market as of June 30. This is only for budget laptops; Dell and the other OEM's won't be carrying XP after June 30. Some of the AP stories and writeups on other websites are making it sound like they've gone back on their statement, and XP will be available again. This is to prevent Linux from getting a foothold in the budget laptop game.
That's a long way of setting some background; what I'm trying to say is that when a company that's enjoyed success for years decides that their success is due to some special insight or knowledge - the market corrects them. IBM thought they were the leaders in PC technology and made a turn and marched off into the distance. They didn't realize that nobody followed them until much later.
For IBM, this was the thing that changed them from being the leaders in PCs to an also-ran PC company in just a few short years. In their pride, they dictated how the future of PCs should be and ignored their market. Too bad for them; they're completely out of the PC business now.
For Microsoft, Vista is their "Microchannel" moment. They lost sight of the need to satisfy their customer's needs and decided to make some fundamental changes (baked in DRM) on their own. Now they're enjoying the result of that decision; sales of Vista are far, far lower than they expected. And those sales figures don't include all the new machines that came with Vista that have since been upgraded to XP. I know that Vista will never touch any PC I own or control.
Since there's a few smart people at Microsoft they've extended XP's life a few more years. A decent choice; better to sell the obsolete OS than lose more customers to Linux. This won't fix the real problem, though - Microsoft needs to decide which customers they're actually serving. If it's the end user then the next version of Windows is critical; another DRM infested release will spell the end. If they're actually serving corporate interests then it doesn't matter; they've failed already and we're just watching the death throes.
While Microsoft plays their games, Linux continues to evolve and improve. This is a golden opportunity for Linux on the desktop...
They have to keep XP going for the low cost laptop market otherwise Linux will dominate that market, but if they keep XP they're not making any money from Vista.
Sounds like their chess pieces are going to get taken whatever move they make.
They are ditching a successful product like Xp (most successful among the big selling ms stuff at least) for failing vista, but also playing dirty to prevent linux from getting low cost market.
get a load of that.
in which business school they teach students to ditch successful products and to only use them to prevent competitors from getting a slice of some low cost market ?
leave that aside, what kind of logic can justify this ? if you have something successful, you stick by it and make a pillar out of it.
no sir. ms doesnt do that. because they are much involved in their years long legacy of playing dirty, screwing customers AND partners alike and that. in recent years, they have also shifted much attention to 'preventing competitors from being successful' rather than trying to be successful themselves.
excuse me, microsoft lovers in slashdot, im no fanboy of anything, but this picture isnt a neat picture and there is nothing about it to even try defending against any criticism.
Read radical news here
We've been using WinXP or Win2K on dual-boot machines (I have one of the few single-boot WinXP machines) due to problems with excessive CPU cycle usage by WinVista - and had to request WinXP "downgrades" for a number of new PCs with dual and quad core CPUs for our statistical genetic analyses we run.
If they only do this for "low-cost" PCs, then we'll have to completely move away from the Office suite and go to OpenOffice instead. Be a shame, but if they don't want us to use Windows, that's their problem.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I'm buying one (or two - must think of mom) Asus eee PCs. I've never felt so good about buying a computer in many years. I was very close to buying it online the past week but finally I decided I'll buy it locally in Helsinki.
The straw that broke the camel's back was the problems I had with formulas in Word for Mac on my brother-in-law's iBook. Nice machine but OO.o works much better for me - and since it runs on Linux, and I always wanted a LIGHT notebook... eee PC just won out as the logical option for my on-the-move needs. If I could run a Matlab equivalent on it (and I will definitely look into that) this little gem might replace one of my desktops as well.
By the way, this is my first experiment with Linux as a desktop OS. I have a router with CentOS at home, but as my WinXP-running desktops die out, I'll be replacing them with Linux. Sorry MS, no Vista for me.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
In my opinion the only thing Vista was properly designed to do is strip money from customers.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
They released either too soon, or too late.
If we assume that business customers are where MS's real profits come from, then Vista is a fuck-up of epic proportions. I don't know of ANY business that plans to "upgrade" to Vista. Why would they? A five-year-old PC will run XP and basic office-type appliations at full-speed (especially if those machines have 1GB of RAM or more). What does Vista offer as an improvement? Yeah, the security is better, but in a corporate setting, those machines are (hopefully) locked down via Group Policies and permissions anyway.
It's just impossible to justify in a corporate setting. Upgrade all the machines, to get performance rougly equal to what you already have. Oh, and lets not forget that quite a few peripherals don't and WON'T have Vista drivers.
Now, the next version of Windows will come on a hardware-upgrade cycle for a lot of companies, so it will probably sell better. But even then, I imagine that many companies are planning to stick with XP until it's just no longer possible to run it on new machines. And that could be a long time.
What made Linux good was not that it competed with Windows (quite successfully despite the press and the critics of both OS's). Windows techs did learn to start community websites to help each other, so Linux user mindsets have permeated the Windows side of things.
Be happy, Microsoft might be an evil entity or a tool of evil men, but at the very least, many of its users found Linux or BSD or even Darwin because of this. By the same token, competition has been good for the Linux geeks. If the arena full of evil tyrants wasn't there, they would've never received the same press they got now. Had it not been for gaming, some geeks might have never discovered they were geeks.
Microsoft was a stage in evolution, if one seeks to see it as such. They put lots of cheap computers into the homes of those who would've been too inept to make use of the various Unices. Be happy for it, is what I say. Competition has been great for Linux, and would you truly wish to have the OS that is the world's biggest target?
If those in the community decide to fight against Microsoft, they will become what they kill. Microsoft became what they killed (IBM in 87 anyone?). Don't strive to kill Microsoft's joy. Microsoft is sinking themselves. Just keep doing what we've all been doing. It works far more than aggressively fighting for ground. Remember Sun Tzu: "Any warrior can fight a battle and win, but a master wins the war before the battle is fought." Try it. Microsoft is doing admirably at shoving their own foot in their own mouth. All the rest of us have to do is just help the "lusers" in our lives learn to use something else, and make that transition less painful than it would've been for them when many of us got into Unix.
You don't have to be a "guru" or a "wizard" or "3l33t" to help someone less technically inclined. Who knows, they might be able to help elsewhere.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
On top of that it needs to be actually secure, table and reliable. It would also be nice that it be readily repairable and not self destruct at random intervals.
The only real difference between 2000 and 2008, it should have the latest drivers properly implemented.
So all I want is an OS that I will be able to use for the rest of my life, without being extorted for upgrades, without being forced to use applications I have no interest in, without being subjected to inconveniences due to ill conceived anti-piracy methods, without bugs the will never get repaired because you should buy the latest version that has those faults supposedly repaired, without having to pay more for detailed help files and, most importantly without wasting hardware performance on the OS that should be used for applications.
I gotta tell you that those 8 years have taught me one thing for sure and certain, M$ ain't the company to provide the required solution but the have certainly demonstrated time and again the problems caused when those 'withouts' are replaced by 'withs'.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
no great shock here.
Eee Pc opened the floodgates - the future looks to be low power, SSD, minimal RAM long battery "laptop" style devices that will never run Vista in a million years.
This is about containment of Linux - as this is the OS of choice for this new breed.
I bet MS is shitting bricks over this, I have an Eee and the Linux flavor on it is very nice indeed. I still have not put Ubuntu on it.
I keep hearing that 70% of PCs in a year or so will be laptops, if 50% of them are low power devices then that 1/4 to 1/3 of PC in a few years that will not run Vista - you can kinda see why they are doing it.
However, when customers are told that they can only have Vista on their desktop or XP on their laptop they will be annoyed. Even more when XP is being phased out but new SPs are available for the "laptop" version of XP. I can understand what MS is doing, but I think it can (and will) go wrong for them in many ways. Interesting times ahead.
Hmm. It might also be a recognition that the upgrade treadmill is no longer providing much in the way of new value for the end users, compared to the nineties and early this century.
Vista is often criticized for its lack of killer features to justify its increased greediness. I personally think the UI's improvements are handy, but if I could have them in XP, I'd be just as happy. And I certainly couldn't justify spending $1000 more on a document handling laptop just so I can run Vista vs XP. Linux resource requirements seem to be relatively stable compared to MS operating systems. Really, only media-intensive work (eg transcoding) and "blockbuster" games are even capable of significantly loading a modern machine. For many tasks, people are now preferring to take their Moore's Law profits in money rather than performance.
Another factor might be that the GHz wall and relative difficulty of parallel programming means that there's just no perceived performance benefit to typical tasks from the newest hardware, and the benefits can be cancelled out by suboptimal software design (see again Vista benchmark results). Due to this lack of progress, people are choosing (for the first time since the eighties?) that cheaper hardware running less inefficient software is a better use of their resources.
That happens when you don't ask them to change for 7 years. People get comfortable.
Actually, Linux's requirements seem to be coming down in some areas. KDE4, despite having way more eyecandy is actually supposed to required less resources than KDE3. Compiz runs fine on my Celeron 1.6 GHz with 512 MB of RAM and Intel GMA laptop. Why can't Vista, with even less eye candy run at respectable speeds? You could easily have most (all?) of the UI upgrades that Vista offers on XP. Some of them you may not really want, like the completely redesigned control panel (why do they have to do it every time?). But it could all easily be done. There isn't anything revolutionary that Vista does.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It might also be a recognition that the upgrade treadmill is no longer providing much in the way of new value for the end users, compared to the nineties and early this century.
Recognition? It's a downright admission to market failure. This is not something that can be said for free software though.
The last seven years have provided all sorts of great things for free software users that were stuffed into the same modest hardware requirements. Interfaces that were functional and stable have become beautiful without excessive bloat. There are all sorts of productivity increasing features. Printer support has gone from decent to phenomenal. Media playing and transcoding was very hard to come by seven years ago, now it's common and very good. Network integration in both KDE and Gnome is astonishing and this feature alone would make it impossible for me to consider running XP outside of Parallels or some other Virtual Box. Then there are all the specialty applications. The exponentially growing Debian tree has applications for just about any purpose you can think of and it reflects an even larger body of free code.
Free software is not standing still either. People have new itches and they are scratching them so things are not going to slow down anytime soon. Besides better interfaces and specialty applications there are basic communications and sharing needs that people have. I imagine greater speech recognition, better wireless communication in general, better automation of wireless file transfer and synchronization based on location and a host of other digital life uses. Better and cheaper displays will create all sorts of information surfaces and free computing will be the first to really fill the smart house. People have made a good start with X10 type stuff but the ease of porting to ever smaller and more powerful platforms finally will make these things common.
No calls now, I'm
Think about it, some of these low power devices are easily in the power/performance range of ARM and PowerPC chips and a couple already run them on the very low end. The Nokia N800 for example. There's no way Windows XP can run on these and Windows CE is not up to competing against a full OS like GNU/Linux. So what could Micrsoft do and why for instance don't these vendors like Asus bring out ARM and/or PowerPC versions of devices like Eeee PC? They both have MMU's now-adays and are clocking up to the GHz range and GNU/Linux and OSS port pretty easily to these platforms. Getting drivers might be alittle more of a push but isn't the ball for Linux drivers rolling along nicely already?
IMO, it would shut Microsoft out of this market and give the hardware vendors the profit margins they can build a business on. Bulking up the devices so Windows XP will fit on them and taking money from Microsoft to put Windows on them is not a sustainable business. Microsoft will pull the plug when they've limited choice to Windows and Windows only and then pull the plug on the payola for being a Microsoft supporter.
Microsoft is not a hardware vendors friend and they should know this and be doing something about keeping control of their own destiny. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Boot time does not count!
I used Vista for months before finally getting fed up and switching to Linux. The fact that Linux can do *more* eye candy than Vista and still run on more meagre hardware is one of hundreds of testaments to Linux's actual superiority to Windows. It infuriates me that the most we get out of Vista visual effects is a glass engine, a 3d switcher, and somewhat boring window open/close animations that requires ~ 2 GiB of RAM to do it with any measure of decent speed.
The obvious answer, of course, is that Windows is and always has been a bloated piece of shit. It becomes more apparent with each Windows release: Windows because more massive, memory intensive, and insecure, and only a minuscule amount of improved stability against a typical Linux distro, which is small, nimble, efficient, inherently secure, and extremely stable, and increases in this way on every upgrade curve.
Vista pretty much proves this. How massive is it? Did we just double the system requirements for Windows *again* like with XP? What about that whatyamacallit system: Lunix? Lanex? Linux? Whatever the hell it is. Doesn't that run on my computer with all them snazzy features Windows claims to have without being s bitch to run?
No wonder there's been a noticeable increase of Windows migration and Linux/Mac OS X adoption, even the not-so-much-technical users are starting to notice how crappy Windows is.
My own reasons for moving to the Unices was because I had more control. The tools were more available to tinker. In windows, short of working in assembler, I had little choice in messing around with things.
Linux has evolved a lot since the simple tools that it was once comprised off... but as many who tool around with Linux From scratch can tell you, it is still a relatively simple system, if only a sort of tank which is carrying a train's worth of bells and whistles.
Whereas Microsoft Windows is more like a small Trabant dragging along the same bells and whistles. Eventually the Trabant breaks down, regardless of the fact that it might be rugged as a simple vehicle. It is incapable of dragging the extra weight for very long.
Also don't forget that Microsoft went and fucked up the network stack in windows (Service Pack 2 for XP anyone?) to deny libpcap (or winpcap as it is known to windows users) for the various and sundry network analysis tools out there. Until the rework was available, most tools (starting with nmap) were severely hampered on Windows rigs.
Remember the ICMP port 139 "win nuke" ? Yeah, remember how the repeated "fixes" only actually fixed "some of the time" attacks? Every time MS fixed them, someone running the patch would complain that "it still works"? As in, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. I found that if I had a firewall that dropped the packets, it stayed alive, but anytime it actually "processed" the packets the system dropped.
I STILL don't understand how that stuff worked (and no, i'm not about to hex edit my way through an entire windows core dump to try to figure out what happened, not worth my time)... but thankfully ever since I dumped Windows98 as a browsing environment, I haven't had to figure it out.
Remember those so called "tear drop" privilege escalation attacks in Windows NT, 2000 and XP? Each time they said they were fixed, and yet each time they resurfaced on patched systems? Before I quit working on Windows for a living (my last IT "job") I was given a system to 'clean' that had a virus (the name of which I forget) which utilized a privilege escalation (tear drop, yeah, the one MS said it patched a dozen different times) in order to create an account which it somehow ran as a nested parent account to that of the user. As a result it was able to capture all input and output and forward them to gods only know where. Curiously, it also slagged the system, and thus seems that it wasn't exactly what one would call an "elegant surveillance hack", not anywhere like "Sub 7" used to be.
The only logic I can get, is that Microsoft was simply trying to keep its "licensed professionals" in business. I am willing to even stand by that remark, as I am (until it expires) a Microsoft Licensed Professional, thanks to a company I worked for that paid for all of us to be "certified".
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
It's total EEE panic. Asus is selling better than either Microsoft or Asus imagined. It's reaching into Microsoft's core market and teaching them that free software is just as easy to use as any other if it has vendor support. It's also teaching makers that there's a pot of gold waiting for them outside of Microsoft control.
It won't work because XP can't really compete against free software on the same hardware. Compare Works to Open Office, then imagine trying to make the whole Microsoft Office thing work in 8GB of flash memory. IE 7 or IE 8 or Firefox and Konqueror? Outlook Express or Kmail or the whole KDE PIM package? The choice is obvious and the difference is going to grow. The price of hardware that will run free software will continue to fall but the utility of the device won't.
That makes a continuously building profit potential for hardware makers that has nothing but avoidance to do with Microsoft. Microsoft won't be able to get licensing fees from those computers and will have to raise the price on others to keep their revenue flat, say nothing of growing. All of this leads to less control of users and vendors and that will be a very good thing.
No calls now, I'm
You're right, the figure is bad. The number I was thinking of was actually in Australian dollars, based on my experience of the laptop market when I bought my Vista PC, which was about 8-10 months ago now. So yeah, things have probably come down some since then, plus the AUD has climbed a lot against the USD. I remember when the Aussie was worth less than half a US dollar; now it's over 90%. Anyway, my bad for not being clearer.
:)
Still: the (AUD) $1000 price comparison was more intended to contrast a "full featured" Vista Premium capable notebook (why would you bother with Vista Basic?) against something like the Eee PC or bargain notebook which I suspect would not be blazing fast with Vista even today.
And yeah, I don't get the DRM hype either.
http://www.umpcportal.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1353 (Vista vs XP on UMPC's) Kinda related. :p The above link shows startup times on basically the same machine, one running Vista one running XP. (I'll give you a hint, the XP machine demolishes vista :p)
Now, I'm not sure if they're still doing that, but it definitely had an effect on a great deal of OEMs, especially whenever another OS had a shot at the big time. (You know your OS is good and successful if OEMs have a shot at bundling it.)
The problem is that the cost of Windows to the OEM is passed on to the user. Oftentimes up to a full third of a PC's cost is Windows. Is it any mystery tham OEM'd Linux machines are selling for so much cheaper? The OEM didn't necessarily have any real cost in placing Linux on the machines. The savings pass on to the user.
The phenomena also passes on to home builders. Building a Linux machine is cheaper than a Windows machine simply because there's not payout for the license to use the operating system where Linux is concerned. I've never seen Microsoft freely give away licenses to Windows. Is anyone surprised?
I just got my brother in law to install Mandriva. He's been wanting to try out Linux for quite a while now. He's not really much of a computer geek, so I tend not to talk to him much about Linux, but after reading some main stream magazines, he knew enough about Linux that he knew he wanted to give it a try. Linux really is starting to get a lot of attention. It may not be the best option in all cases, especially when you have business critical windows applications. However, for the home user, Linux is a whole lot less hassle, and requires a whole lot less resources to perform the exact same function.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Haven't you heard of "Windows XP Embedded" It's a componentized version of Win XP Pro and is based on the same binaries as XP Professional. It's is marketed towards developers for OEMs, ISVs and IHVs that want the full Win32 API support of Windows but without the overhead of Professional. It runs existing Windows applications and device drivers off-the-shelf on devices with at least 32MB Compact Flash, 32MB RAM and a P-200 microprocessor. "XPe" was released on November 28, 2001. As of February 2007, the newest release is Windows XP Embedded SP2 Feature Pack 2007.
XPe is not related to Windows CE. They target different devices and they each have their pros and cons which make them attractive to different OEMs for different types of devices. For instance, XPe will never get down to the small footprint that CE works in. However, CE does not have the Win32 APIs XPe has (although CE has an API that is similar to the Win32 API), nor can it run the tens of thousands of drivers and applications that already exist.
The devices targeted for XPe have included ATMs, arcade games, slot machines, cash registers, industrial robotics, thin clients, set-top boxes, network attached storage (NAS), time clocks, navigation devices, etc. Custom versions of the OS can be deployed onto anything but a full-fledged PC; even though XPe supports the same hardware that XP Professional supports (x86 architecture), licensing restrictions prevent it from being deployed on to standard PCs :-(
I was just thinking as I was reading this topic of how I would love to be able to load only the components I want. I'm a great fan of XP Pro and use it daily in my work. I hope I will never have to downgrade to Vista. These days I am developing software for Adobe Flex & Action Script 3. If I stay at this, I may just switch to Linux when full support for that comes out next year.
The above is directly quoted from Wikipedia.
I dunno about the XO but ASUS supported the EEEPC with XP from the start and is either offering or planning to offer EEEPCs with XP preinstalled.
MS probablly knows they can't kill linux in this space but they really really don't want linux to be the only preinstalled option for such machines.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
KDE4 uses more resources than KDE3, the bad benchmark was quickely corrected but this myth seams to have spread anyway, the resource increase is minimal it could run on 1.6GHz and 256MB. I can better 1.6GHZ with 512, it ran aceptably on 256 ( i just couldnt run firefox and compiz with all the bells and whistles without a slowdown, this is on kubuntu, not the lightest distro).
I got vista when i smashed up my laptop (without a screen itll make a good PVR tho), i played with it for about an hour before trashing it while installing kubuntu. I found it ran like my 256mb system on 512MB, everything would get done but stuff tended to freeze up for abit when doing anything intensive (ironically other than using firefox, which performed fine). I think that it has moved towards being like gnome, run everything though 1 program and it figures out what your trying to do, or in the place of one program 1 interface.
The 'eye candy' was well completly lacking, its about level with kde3, but cant touch KDE4 or compiz.
The control pannel, i found actually suggests usefull wizards now, which is nice for newbies, but the price it paid for this is even making the navigation even harder, the adress bar would take me to seamingly random places while all i wanted to do was find the defragmenter. I suppose they're going after the newbie users thier loosing to the mac crowd, much more than the geeks their loosing to linux.
My short experience was not as bad as expected, even my non-geek friend(s) were abit too harsh about, but it was unimpressive enough to tell my dad one of the "I cant switch to linux, I NEED office" crowd, to stick with xp indefinatly. Theres no point him relearning how to manage his system when theres nothing to be gained (same reason im not switching him to ubuntu).
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Those were significant improvements for a single company back in the 90s, but free software has completely blown them away. Most people also associate the porting of browsers and other programs to Windows with the general progress of the 90s. Since 2000, besides UI, free software hardware abstraction and device support has finally caught up to the non free world for practical purposes.
Free software portability and architecture support had already eclipsed Microsoft's ability by 2000 and totally dominates now. Slashdot started it's life on a 64 bit DEC Alpha while Microsoft was struggling with everything Intel had to offer. Today, you only have to look at BSD and Debian architecture support pages to see just how far you can port free software. There's hardly anything free software won't run on and that makes Microsoft's 32 bit accomplishments look petty.
Stability? My software is more reliable than my hardware. Now that I have a few good UPSs and drastically lower power requirements, my computers just about never go down unless I'm putting in a new part or kernel. Having used Microsoft from the DOS 3.2 days, I can say that Microsoft stability has remained about the same. It's better to just turn the old box off.
No calls now, I'm
You're looking at it sideways. Microsoft's overbearing presence will now create a completely new market of out-of-the-box-little-old PCs that are quite adequate to run XP. This is actually a major market opportunity for makers such as Lenovo who are already interested in low-end machines.
The way things are going, I'm hoping to leapfrog completely over Vista... If my employer makes it possible, I'll land in Linux Land and perhaps never have to use Microsoft products at all. (Dream on, Mr. Adequate.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
the primary problem I have with slipstreaming is this: once you install or repair install an 2k/xp box with a slipstream disc, ONLY that disc (or one with at least those updates) can work when the system asks for the disc again. (for adding/removing components, etc)
so, in my line of work, where i am repairing or fresh installing customer machines, i'd have to GIVE them a copy of the slipstream disc i use, which microsoft frowns upon, unless i want them to NOT be able to fix their machines themselves, which would just piss a lot of them off.
so i will wait for sp3, and when it comes out, rejoice, as it takes 2x as long to install updates as it does the OS it self, with or without autopatcher....
Meaning... 2013 or 2014? Just an (un)educated guess based off what their previous initial "planned release dates" translate into on the real world calendar.
...one day I would love to see what sort of calendar MS uses for when they first announce a planned release date...
It's funny how reality can often be so humorous.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Please, PLEASE don't lump Windows 2000 in with XP & Vista. It's still one of the best operating systems around as long as you use windiz instead of windows update (to keep the DRM & crippleware out). it plays all the games written for windows, and with VirtualPC, everything else. OpenOffice runs on it just fine. and it has a tiny hardware footprint.
It's not as secure as Debian, but Debian has never been a Prime Target of every virus writer in the world, either.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Now of course that includes a lot of other software, to make it all usable, but still... I wouldn't call it small. Nor with any lack of bloat (three web browsers, five window managers, two windowing systems, three kernels, two desktop environments, a dozen text editors, etc).
So, you're saying the gaming machine I bought in 2000 could run Vista? It was relatively top-of-the-line, though it was purchased on a student budget so it skimped in a few areas.
Let's see. Athlon Slot-A 700MHz. Voodoo3 graphics. 64MB RAM (later upgraded to 128MB). 17GB 5400rpm hard drive. 1.44 floppy! 24x CDROM reader. 250W Athlon-approved powersupply.
Minor upgrades my ass, you'd be replacing everything but the case.
Random and weird software I've written.
Um, the 'big three' (ubuntu, fedora, suse) ALL fit on one CD, as they all have liveCDs. And on that one CD (ubuntu at least, been a while since I messed with the othe rones) you get:
An OS, a window manager, a desktop environment, tons of games, an office suite, an image editor, a DVD writer, a ton of 3D effects, a ton of screensavers, etc.
To compare, on the vista DVD, you get:
An OS+window manager+desktop environment (and you can't choose which ones), some games, a few screensavers, 3-4 3D effects, and that's pretty much it. And when installed it takes up what, like 10 gigs?
And as far as the 6 CDs or 1 DVD Linux downloads, these include ALL packages, so if you don't have internet access you can still install all your stuff. But Most of them you don't even need. I just set up a LAMP server today (no gui). I used CDs 1 and 2. That's it. And about 90% was from CD1. So yeah, I would say Linux is pretty damn small indeed.
The case too, the logo you'd have to stick in it has a minimum case requirement.
Onda Technology Institute
Quite frankly I am tired of this rather immature and dumb founded Operating System War. I am sick of the Linux Distro vs Linux Distro Wars, The BSD Wars, and the all other Operating System vs Microsoft Wars.
I have used a variety of operating systems, and find it better to use them instead of bash them to build up experience that is required in the Information Systems Community for jobs and what not. I am the type of guy that just wants to sit down at a computer and have things work without much tweaking or configuring. Each operating system has their place in the IT world even if you are a consumer you are still resident in the IT World.
When people ask me "Which is the best Linux Distro?" I answer them by saying "Download various LiveCD's and try them, and find out which one best suits your needs instead of blabbering off touting Ubuntu this Gentoo that and what not".
I use windows for gaming and office type stuff, but I also use *nix for hosting and serving.
So please stop it with your immature and baseless rants.
Now granted, adding certain features definitely does put a bit of drag on your CPU, but one of the great things about 'nix is that most of such things are *optional*. That being said, by not using things I don't need, Linux has - even on much of my older/slower hardware - become faster over time, from the Desktop right down to the kernel level. That's not to say that I'm sacrificing a lot of functionality either... the GUI itself has definitely getting more featureful and advanced over time.
The re-release of XP is a sign that Linux really is starting to move in on MS's turf, and that it's becoming a real worry to MS in terms of becoming a viable alternative to regular users. I ran into a guy with an Eee in the subway just awhile ago. He's wasn't a coder. He wasn't a hacker. He was just a regular guy who wanted a cheap but useful laptop that he could surf the net and do regular day-to-day stuff on. Now that is what's going to scare Microsoft.
I know it would never happen, but if MS wanted to pretty much annihilate linux all it has to do is make a service pack 4 for XP to provide enhanced security and functionality and most importantly efficiency for XP and then release XP as open source (or more likely 'shared source'), accept user patches and work with the community just like an enterprise Linux distribution. With OpenXP, why would anyone need linux? (Note: I don't use windows. I'm a linux-only user, and the above is my sincere opinion. For the love of god, don't mod me troll because you think I'm an MS fanboy, an OSS zealot, or a /. troll. I'm being quite serious.)
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
Agree. Ubuntu on CD includes the whole OS, office suite, browser, email & calendaring, games, 3D effects and god knows what else. All of which work in a "Live CD" mode, in which you don't even need to install it on the computer.
The Live CD aspect saved me a few times when mucking about on a computer where the installed OS was unstable and/or virus-ridden.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I've been trying to explain this two people for quite some time. Dual Core Processors does not mean if you have a dualcore 2.4ghz system that processor works at 4.8ghz, thats what a dual processor system works at. Since its two cores on one die they share resources so a 2.4 is comparable to 1 processor working at 3.6ghz. So no, your 3ghz core duo is not 3000 x2 x2 its more like 3 x 1.5 x 1.5 (if its 64bit running 64bit software using hyper threading and SMP) and thats still not accurate.