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Microsoft Extends XP To May 2009 For OEMs
beuges writes "Microsoft has announced over the weekend that it would allow computer manufacturers to receive copies of XP until the end of May 2009, shortly before Windows 7 is expected to hit the market. This should allow users to skip Vista entirely and move straight to 7, which has been receiving cautiously favorable reviews of pre-release and leaked alphas."
unbelievable.
it would take a butt the size of mount everest for any company to take the plunge and trust anything from microsoft again, after the stunt they pulled with vista.
and what happens to the poor sods who DID trust microsoft and upgraded their entire office to vista, again ?
Read radical news here
The optimistic view would be that Vista is more like Windows ME, which would make Windows 7 more like XP. If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened, sort of like how we try to forget Windows ME.
I'm not old enough to remember all the promises of '95/'98, etc (More like I didn't care). But I'm already seeing the same XP/Vista/7 cycle start over..
Microsoft is setting themselves up for another round of the same old shit. Vista had favorable reviews from pre-releases and leaked alphas.... and then features started to drop to meet the continually moving release date.
Microsoft is going to have to sever all backwards compatibility at some point if they want a fresh start. Microsoft BOUGHT an Emulator/Virtualizer (Virtual PC), how hard would it be to make a seamless sandboxed XP install?
Not to sound to fanboyish, but Apple has done this TWICE in the last 10 years. First OS 9 -> OS X. Sandboxed everything in Classic. Not everything worked perfect, but it bridged the gap. Then again with the release on Intel If you already had your Apps in XCode all it took was 1 checkmark in a config. That's it. Complete new binary for a new architecture. And if that didn't work you still had Rosetta, which like classic, wasn't perfect but it works. On my laptop I seamlessly run PPC code on an Intel machine with less problems than most people have had with just trying to run Vista.
Not just GUI apps either. I can compile something like coreutils on a PPC machine and run it on an Intel machine, not ideal but it works.
Microsoft is supposedly the 800# gorilla in the corner but it can't figure out how to cut all ties to the past and move on.
More like Windows ME 2, do they really think people will buy it when they haven't sorted out the problems with vista.
Do you actually use Vista? Or is this typical ignorant slashdot drivel? I use Vista at home, I use Vista at work. I have had absolutely no issue with it. Let me qualify this by saying until a couple months ago I also used OS X 10.4 at home, and I also currently dual boot into Ubuntu. Vista has been far more stable than both of these, and the support is no contest.
Now let me ask again, do you actually *use* Vista? Or are you regurgitating tired old perceptions because of a fanboyish allegiance to a free operating system?
Similes are like metaphors
My gripes about it are typically more about unneeded UI changes which hurt usability. For example, what the hell was the justification for renaming "Add / Remove Programs" to "Programs and Features"? I've been a Windows user for over 15 years... there is no reason in hell I should spend 30 seconds scanning the Control Panel for a single icon.
This may sound like a petty rant, but I run across issues like this *all* the time! The mass storage driver is also flaky for my motherboard (I can't use any mass storage devices!) but that's more Asus's fault than MS.
All in all, Vista isn't terrible, and definitely usable but suffers from some very poor design decisions.
Here's the problem: Microsoft has used illegal tactics to maintain its monopoly gained from unethical practices.
Microsoft's monopoly is so entrenched, that the proto-typical "Sun Oil" case can't even compare.
In a real competitive environment, customers would have long ago abandoned Microsoft. The best analogy is WordStar vs WordPerfect. WordStar was first, but WordPerfect was better. Naturally WordStar lost and is now, no more.
Microsoft is so entrenched, and so anti-standards, that your data and business operations are held hostage. You can't escape the Widows lock-in without paying a lot of money and abandoning some of your core applications.
Furthermore, the monopoly level of Microsoft means that it is unrealistic for ISVs to develop for other platforms because Windows represents 80+% of the market and who can justify an the cost of development unless you can really identify a market. Virtually every notebook and P.C. sold at the consumer and "system" level has Windows installed.
In a real competitive environment, Windows ME, Microsoft BOB, Microsoft Dogs, or Vista would have killed any other company and we would be glad to see them go. But no, it is so bad that users CAN'T escape windows, so they are settling for an 8 year old operating system instead of modern alternatives.
If there was ever a time where clear proof existed that Microsoft needs to be broken up, this is it. Its insane.
Oh yeah, it's fine. As long as your usage pattern doesn't involve anything intricate like copying files...
Well, sometimes you need to make changes to the UI that would be more friendly to new users, even if it might confuse old users for a little bit. Yeah, the Programs and Features was a pain in the ass, but after the first couple of times, I don't even think about it (and I still use XP at work).
My gripes about it are typically more about unneeded UI changes which hurt usability.
But what about KDE? Dude, they scrapped a desktop that was popular, flexible, and working. KDE 3.5 was already better than even Vista's shell in some ways, as is gnomes. You can do a lot with the doc bars/task bars, and in KDE you could change even the clock type to one of 40 different types, and instead of just polishing that up, they went and junked it.
Unbelievable! Really, what was in KDE 3.5 that was so terrible that the whole thing needed to be junked, from an end user perspective. Plasma might wind up being cool, but its gonna need some time to gel up a bit. And, in the meantime, I'd like gnome to just do -something-.
And, along the way, I've actually got Vista growing on me. The only thing I really don't like about it is that the start bar doesn't have "run" on it the way XP does, but other than that, Vista is better.
As bad as Vista might be to some people, Microsoft won this round, again. This time, it was because while MS made mistakes with Vista, the KDE and Gnome teams made some big ones too.
This is my sig.
The optimistic view would be that Vista is more like Windows ME, which would make Windows 7 more like XP. If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened, sort of like how we try to forget Windows ME.
Win ME is not nearly half as disastrous as most people will tell you, provided that you configure it correctly. Most of the out-of-the-box default settings glitchy at best and system crashing at worst, though going menu by menu and rearranging everything manually will fix most of its glaring problems (notably the RAM management and ballooning system restore folder). I've had Win ME installed on a system at home since 2001 and it's been running as close as it will get to flawlessly. When I mention how it will leap through hoops of fire if I ask it nicely, however, people always seem to recoil in fear and reach for their bible and holy water...
The change from Vista to 7 is more like 2000 to XP. There is very little being changed under the hood. For example (assuming version numbers still mean anything at MS) the kernel is going from 6.0 to 6.1. 2000 was kernel 5.0 and XP was 5.1. XP 64 and 2003 are kernel version 5.2.
All that aside, I'm trying to be optimistic that 7 will be what Vista promised to be.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
If I wanted to go through my system and customize all the settings manually, I'd install Linux. In a Windows OS, given its target market, having to go through it "menu by menu" and reconfigure it is disastrous.
In fact, as I recall, when WinME was out I did have Linux installed, and the default settings were mostly good enough, with only some tweaking required for one or two components (I think the audio cards weren't supported properly then). Clearly, ME was (for most users) a disaster.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
If that's the case, maybe Windows 7 will actually be fairly stable and we can try to pretend Vista never happened
Except Vista already is stable. Maybe it's because I only use my PC for games and the Internet, but Vista (SP1) has been nearly flawless.
Windows 7 which there has only been a pre-beta release of. your signing off as copy of the last one.
Excuse me if I wait for a final or near final version before passing judgement.
I'll ignore it for the obvious hate post it is.
My experiences with Vista are similar to yours. But when I hear about Windows 7, those aren't the things they seem to be addressing. What I read is about it being cooler, having new features, etc. It doesn't sound like they are addressing the big issue: stability.
Fix the broken mixer, the performance and memory problems, the crashes in explorer, the video playback bugs, the unnecessary UAC messages, the driver installation issues... I haven't heard Microsoft even admit those problems exist, so I'm not sure they will fix them.
Why? Why should an increasing number of computer literate people have to cater to the needs of an increasingly small group of utterly non technical users. Why not make them catch up, instead of the rest of us slow down.
Good interface design is not synonymous with "The user is stupid, make the interface for stupid people."
I basically agree with your point, but simply renaming 20 year old cruft to something a little less nerdy is not an improvement, it's a very cheap and ultimately damaging hack.
What really ticks me off is the way options relating to one thing have been broken up and cluttered across a myriad of places. Think display settings and desktop themes. It's even worse than GNOME.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
The problem here was that the interface item itself was designed incorrectly in the first place. As a new user, if I go to control panel and know I want to do something with programs, my first inclination would be to look for Programs, or Uninstall Programs or Remove Programs. Why was it called Add/Remove Programs? For the life of me, in god knows how many years I've used Windows, I've never used that to add programs. Plus, Add/Remove Programs didn't indicate that you could also change/remove/add the features of Windows itself, hence, 'Programs and Features' makes more sense.
There's lots to hate about Vista, sure, but renaming Add/Remove Programs to Programs and Features isn't one of them. It'll take an old user all of 30 seconds to find it, and after a couple of times, you've retrained yourself easily. It's not about being friendly to utterly non technical users, it's about being friendly to new users. You know, there are new babies born, and kids grow up to use computers. What's wrong with making sure things make sense?
This isn't so wonderful if XP costs you an additional $150 (hello, Dell) over the Vista that you don't even want, but are forced to take as well. The previous $50 downgrade was just about palatable, but forcing you to virtually buy 2 OSs when you're only running one has got to be a Microsoft wetdream.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You might want to take another look at the meaning of this "ignore" word.
I don't see how going from "Add/Remove Programs" to "Programs and Features" is going to make it easier for new users to figure out how to add or remove a program.
These days, it's pretty much guaranteed that any PC you buy at retail will have Vista on it. Microsoft has done a pretty good job of addressing Vista performance concerns. I hear the newest service pack is pretty good.
However, how many IT people out there are dealing with a large number of older systems? For us, it really comes down to this -- we can potentially run Vista on a fair number of our systems. Others are right in the middle of the XP system requirements (P4, 512 MB RAM.) So which do we choose?
We're just small enough to not really have a formal hardware refresh cycle, so this is a major concern for us. Windows 7 will probably have the same problems regarding hardware resources. Do you put up with lousy performance on some of your machines, or stick with good performance overall?
As a new user, if I go to control panel and know I want to do something with programs,
Really? All the new users I've ever worked with think that the logical thing to do with a program you don't want any more is to delete it, same as you might delete a file.
You'd be amazed how many Windows users have deleted the icon from their desktop (and maybe even their start menu) and consider the application is therefore gone.
You'd be amazed at the number of Mac users who do the same thing. Of course, that's been how you uninstall Mac software since 1984, and NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP software for almost as long...
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