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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."
Is anyone surprised by this? Many customers told them time after time that they didn't want vista, and that they would rather use XP. Now I'm not a fan of M$, but I can say that XP Pro SP3 is absolutly amazing and stable I really really don't feel the need to upgrade to vista when I've finally got XP tuned so well that I hardly have to do any maintenance on it.
if MS just dumped XP and FORCE-FED Vista on Business
Then we'd move to full volume licensing for all machines that require Windows, and use our downgrade rights for XP (unless Windows Seven is actually worth using).
I've been running Ubuntu at work partially as a test to see how easy it would be to move people over to it if necessary. Things are working pretty nicely so far, I'm thinking everyone but our engineering design department could do their jobs fine with free software. In fact our Fabrication department would probably be better off with free software than the OmniForm crap that they're using at the moment. Sure, Evolution's Exchange integration isn't perfect - the unread messages number for each folder isn't updating like it should - but apart from that it works great. If MS try to force any shit onto us I'd be happy to move all our general office workers over to Linux, and yes I'd provide full support for them - it's part of what I get paid for after all ;)
which is totally what she said
Windows 95/98/ME were just graphical shells running on DOS.
Will that myth never die? Just because you booted to DOS doesn't mean Win95 was a DOS app. Win95 was a 32-bit OS with a protected memory model. It was also the most amazing piece of backwards compatibility I've seen: it could run 16-bit drivers that expected a shared memory model.
Of course, this backwards compatibility made it Hell for those stuck supporting it, as it had all the unreliability of the old crap drivers, but it was certainly the right business decision for MS, and a heck of an engineering feat.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
All that aside, I'm trying to be optimistic that 7 will be what Vista promised to be.
Except it won't be. None of the features that were promised to be in Vista but were dropped to keep from sliding the release even further will be in Windows 7. As far as I can tell, there aren't really any new important features in Windows 7. It's a new OS in name only (and bit of spit polish and debugging) and unfortunately that might just be enough.
And that's on top of Vista having few new important features. They did of course manage to cram in all the protected path DRM crap. Guess we know their priorities.