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Microsoft's "Mojave Experiment" Teaser Site Goes Live
MojoKid writes "Earlier this week, Microsoft was reported to be arranging a kind of 'blind taste test' to get die-hard Windows XP users to try Vista. They were told that they were trying a new OS, called Mojave. The report went on to suggest that users liked the OS, though they were actually running Vista. Now it appears Microsoft has put up a
teaser site, with
plans to show the actual video footage next week. Though the footage should at least have some entertainment
value, it would be a bit of a reach to expect that the test methodologies were
real-world enough such that users had to deal with things like user account
control, driver updates, and broad application compatibility."
>They were probably running on top of the range hardware as well, a grahics card with 1GB of RAM, system with 4GB of RAM and a Quad core processor etc..
Except that they were not. The linked site says they were running on HP dv2000 with 2Gb RAM.
I recently installed vista ultimate 64 bit on my athlon 3800 dual core and upgraded to 4 gig of ram so i needed a 64 bit os to take full advantage...the 32 bit xp could only recognize 3.37 gig...im thinking of going back to xp and using the 3.37 gig because vista is definitely using more ram and the performance is actually worse. Bootup time is simply unacceptable, it is about three times longer than xp if not four. That is with a 32meg cache on a new 500 gig sata2 seagate barracuda v 11 drive. Running apps take on average 2-4 times longer to open
http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/
you might find that the computers were all standard HP DV2000 with 2GB ram, try clicking through next time.
I have this collection of tech and mainstream press opinion of Vista as well as the more comprehensive the Vista Failure Log which details industry rejection. PC Magazine, PC World, the Atlantic Monthly, the Independent, EWeek, ITWeek, Dvorak, CNet and Network World all agreed with 90% of IT managers in thinking that Vista should be avoided. ExtremeTech wrote Vista's obituary in 2008. This was followed by USA Today and Time, which called Microsoft an "empire in rapid decline". I collected all the links, just for you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well, guess what MS
I have an HP dv2000 right here, I'm writing this in it right now (on Linux, course)
(There are several versions of it, btw, mine is one of the more entry-level ones, but dual core, and upgraded to 1.5Gb of memory)
1.5Gb of memory, and Vista STILL SUX.
Unless for 'Mojave' they switched off all of their 'bright ideas' like super-fetch, etc
how long until
Actually, you have to distinguish between
1. what MS's PR/propaganda machine does to the outside world, and
2. what MS does internally.
I remember the story linked to on Slashdot, where basically to get any new product and technology done at MS, you had to go in front of Bill Gates, hear him say that it's the dumbest thing he ever heard, then tell him that he's wrong and you're sure of it. Pretty much everything that was done at MS past some point, was done by people who told Bill Gates to his face that he's wrong or made a mistake.
It's not Apple, where everything is supposedly done because of The Great Man Steve Jobs, and everything is because of The Great Man's vision, and He is never wrong. At MS everything was done _in_ _spite_ of Bill Gates's vision to the contrary. Or at least so went that little game internally.
Their invasion of the Internet, going with DirectX instead of OpenGL, etc, etc, etc, were done by people who went in front of Bill Gates and told him that he's wrong.
And there were enough cases where they switched directions in mid-flight, instead of ploughing ahead to the hilt. E.g., they weren't going to do any Internet support, they wanted to make their own proprietary network. Some ex-Borland guy went to Bill and told him that it's a mistake, and the rest is history.
Heck, from the very beginning there's the story of the new guy who went to Bill Gates to tell him that the flood-fill function in MS Basic is crap and needs to be rewritten. So he got asked to write a better one then. Turns out that that function was written by Bill himself.
Now the PR bullshit they spew on the outside world, is a whole different story. And the kind of PR stunt in TFA _is_ probably their work. Though even that one occasionally admits that an older product had bad parts. E.g., see the Clippy spiel when they finally got rid of that annoyance.
Or you'll notice that there are more dumb ideas than that, which got silently discontinued. E.g., MS Bob. Now that was a fuckup. I don't see them still pushing it instead of admitting that it didn't work.
Now mind you, I'm not saying that MS is anywhere near perfect or ideal in any form or shape or aspect. But they do realize that sometimes things don't work as formerly planned, and some are just mistakes. You don't get to be a mega-corporation that size by being keeping doing a mistake just to not admit it.
But again, admitting it to the outside world, now that's a whole other problem. Of course they're not going to say Vista is crap, as long as they don't have a replacement. But they _are_ already working on Windows 7 and on the SP1 for Vista, and I'd be surprised if they didn't include some of the lessons learned in the design of both.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
FWIW, built in webcams on most new notebooks work out of the box with no drivers (for which I'm thankful).
Andy
You can significantly reduce the amount of memory that Vista uses by tweaking the startup services. I stumbled across an excellent site that has a table of all the default Vista services and what they do, with a categorized breakdown of what you should and should not disable.
There is no better OS than Vista! Users of alternative operating systems are committing suicide at Redmond's City Gates!
(If you don't get the reference, check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf#During_the_Iraq_war - second paragraph)
These users never had to install software or drivers, never had to do any configuration, and were certainly never allowed to use any software that didn't work flawlessly with Vista (almost everything).
Vista's appeal is that it looks nice on a computer in a store. It's only when you actually start using it for day-to-day computing that it shows its true colors.
I had the displeasure of using the business edition of Vista for 6 months on a major OEM computer that came with it pre-installed. Even during the first week my "Windows stability index" graph hovered near 3 out of 10. From day one I couldn't install any printers, couldn't install or uninstall Windows components, and experienced hourly crashes in everything from Firefox to Photoshop from ordinary, everyday use. I disabled Aero and reverted to the Windows Classic theme after the novelty wore off (a few days after I started using the machine), but that didn't stop Aero's dwm.exe from continuing to devour memory and CPU time. Everything crashed, over and over and over again. Vista sets a new record for lowest average uptime, even for a Microsoft OS. It wasn't until I made the mistake of trying to install Microsoft Virtual PC on Microsoft Windows Vista that it deleted all the NTFS permissions on my entire system drive, breaking everything. I nuked the drive and installed XP, and have been happily using it for months.
Keep in mind that this is a machine from a major OEM that came preloaded with signed Vista drivers. I can only imagine what my experience would have been had I installed Vista on an older machine without the proper hardware and drivers.
While playing with Vista for a few days (as the users in this blind test did) can be an enjoyable experience, actually using it for day-to-day computing is an utter nightmare.
Here you go.
Read my blog.
This depends on your definition of "quite a lot of money". I just replace the 2 512's in my laptop with 2 2GBs for $64 and its working fine. Disable UAC, disable the flip task switcher and the side bar, deselct opacity in the color choose, or better, just choose the windows classic theme, and set the window styles and task bar to classic. Viola, looks like 2k, has all the up to date security patches. Works for me.
The /. crowd would like it a lot better if they could fix it themselves, instead of having to wait for vendors who just never do.
BTW: who is it who decides which peripherals get the Vista Certified label? I have a linksys WMP300N here with a nice big official Vista Certified label, and nowhere on the box does it say that the device will only work with 32bit versions of vista using drivers ported from XP.. That perception about drivers is actually there for a reason..
Perhaps if Microsoft thought about removing accreditation from vendors who write crappy drivers, that wouldn't be the case.
I've been a die hard Slack fan for years now. Like, I first got my hands on it with the first edition of "Linux Unleashed" in 1995-ish, probably with Slackware 2.x. :)
I don't have a benchmarked number available right now, but I can tell you what I've observed in previous tests.
On the same hardware (same physical machine, different os install), a 64bit Linux OS of the same distribution will run faster than it's 32bit counterpart, regardless of the 2GB factor.
I bought my first 64 bit machine when the prices came down low enough to afford one, and at the time I was making good money. :) I installed the 32bit Slackware and then several others because Slamd64 hadn't come out yet. If I recall correctly, I ended up running Gentoo for a little while on there. Since Slamd64 came out, I use Slackware on the 32bit machines, and Slamd64 on the 64bit machines exclusively.
After a while, we had a big power hungry project. I was pushing for a good 64 bit system. I had to do a long proof of why to the powers that be, both bosses and developers of why we wanted to use a 64 bit OS for a new project. It took quite a while to prove it, but every way we looked at it, except for price, the performance was there.
What we ended up with were a pair of quad Opteron 848's with 16Gb RAM (I believe). This was just after the 848's came out, and we had a hard time even getting our hands on them, and paid the premium for buying the latest and greatest thing out there.
Then came the interesting part. I assembled the machines, burnt them in at the office, and delivered them to the colo. The developers then got their hands on them. They had been beating up on their 32 bit machines for a few months, and were looking forward to the performance, but were worried that such a new product was the wrong thing to do. The developers were using MySQL for the database, and had the hand holding support contract. Anything you need, any time, someone will be in and helping.
The developers were flipping out because no matter what they did, they could only induce 2% CPU load on one processor, and no extra load on the other 3. Something was obviously wrong. I insisted there was nothing wrong with the OS. Maybe it was a database problem, or maybe they just weren't creating enough load.
It got escalated through the MySQL support structure, to one of their guys logging into the machine to have a look. His response was "That's the fastest machine I've ever been on. It's only using 2% of 1 CPU because that's all it needs. The database is still idle. I threw a huge load test at it to make it work any harder, and never maxed it out."
He then proceeded to ask me for permission to play some more. He wanted to build cross compilers. When he was done he told me "That should have taken a week. I started it last night, and it was done by morning." I presume he was building quite a few. :)
I'm not going to try to say that the 64 bit machine is the holy grail or anything, but when you have the option, take it. At very least, if you don't like the 64bit OS, you can always go to the 32bit. All it will cost you is long enough to do the install, unless of course you dual boot. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The fact it doesn't is indicative that it requires hardware features that weren't present in 2003-era video cards
All effects in Aero can be implemented using features present on cards several years old (vide Compiz). It just artificially requires DX10 compliance to boost sales of new GPUs and new systems, because you won't get all the bling when you install Vista on your old system. This was a wise move, because it boosts the OEM market where they are the strongest, but screws the users, because they are forced to upgrade.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
1. Compiz doesn't degrade gracefully, it either goes full hardware or doesn't work at all. Still, it works even on rather old hardware, including integrated Intel GPUs.
2. The features required by Aero were already present in old cards (vide point 1.), the decision to only support DX10 compliant cards and leave users of existing HW in the cold was predominantly a marketing one (to encourage purchases of new systems).
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.