Slashdot Mirror
Windows 7 in the Next Year?
Microsoft's efforts to get businesses to adopt Vista may come to a screeching halt now that Bill Gates has announced "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version", referring to Windows 7, the next expected version of the company's flagship desktop operating system.With a new version available soon, many organizations may decide to wait and see if they can avoid the pain of a Vista rollout altogether.
Yesterday article about binary incompatibility was just a troll and some fellow slashdotter already pointed to this:
http://blog.paulbetts.org/index.php/2008/04/04/dear-dev-corvin/
This is a short answer from MS employee. Can't be more clear, because entire article was complete bullshit.
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
The way microsoft changes everything as far as administration goes I'm surprised the admins haven't revolted yet. You have to relearn, and recertify every time a new release comes out. With Linux, different distros have different GUIs for admin tasks, but that's just GUI. You can do everything for admin from the command line, and nothing has really changed much in the last 15 years.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Vista took that long because they scrapped almost all of their work half-way through, a great example of extraordinarily poor project management. We've seen mention here at Slashdot of the enormous resources poured into just the shutdown screen. They were behind schedule, over budget, and missed their goals to an unacceptable extent, but they had to be able to recoup the investment, so it got pushed out the door.
Meanwhile, Steven Sinofsky was over running the Office 2007 program, which delivered essentially on-time and on-budget, hitting almost all of the goals. (I know a lot of people don't like the interface, but that's a separate point from the project management.) Sinofsky was promoted to oversee Windows development, and inherited the mess left behind by Jim Allchin. The earlier Slashdot article alluding to a complete overhaul of Windows may well be his doing, an attempt to get the focus back where it needs to be in order to not have a fiasco the next time around. We may even finally see the emergence of WFS finally.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
For printers and some other stuff I often try to avoid running the "installer from the CD", because that usually puts tons of useless crap into your computer.
I usually try to look for the Win2K/XP directory where the "real driver" is stored, and then point windows to it.
If XP gets the wrong driver and you want to rerecognize the stuff again, just go to control panel and delete the relevant "?" stuff in device manager (the question mark icon for the device indicates it's not properly installed etc).
Most times it's the manufacturers who mess things up.
That said, NEVER install hardware drivers from Windows Update.