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."

Comments

Re:Hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

>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.

Re:They have a point

[SirSmiley]

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

It's MS, not Apple

[Moraelin]

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.

Vista isn't *that* bad... if you tweak it.

[feyd-rautha]

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.

Re:makes you wonder

[JWSmythe]

    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. :)