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Windows 7 Leaked To Pirates By Microsoft?
nandemoari writes "The beta version of Windows 7 has been widely distributed through torrents and other file sharing systems. But now some commentators claim Microsoft deliberately allowed the package to get into the hands of pirates. 'I'm not being critical here, as some Microsoft Watch commenters will surely claim. It's rather smart marketing. Microsoft fills a big news void with something bloggers and journalists will write about. The suspense of stealth downloads from torrents and races to post the best screenshots first make the Windows 7 leak buzz all the more exciting. For other people, there is delight in seeing Microsoft squirm because Seven leaked early. Not that I see much squirming going on.'"
Because the clever marketing people who 'leaked' the beta do not communicate with the licensing and piracy teams.
I think drivers were only one piece of the problem, and a fairly small piece at that. The generally viewed performance and requirements are what really caused Vista to tank in the eyes of consumers. Good as it may be for some, not everyone has a new computer or a desire to buy a new one. Couple that with bad performance on budget laptops and there's your whole case right there.
Also the fact that literally nothing was in the same place as it was in XP meaning there was a learning curve right out of the box in finding where the settings have been moved to. I know I got a bit more than frustrated when I tried to actually do anything in Vista. It wasn't because it was slow, (I didn't really notice it being "fast" either) but everything was renamed and/or moved around so much it made changing things a bit of a hunt and peck routine I haven't had since Win95.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I've never yet had to use Vista myself, but in my limited experience helping friends who do use it, the "budget laptops" issue looks to be a serious one. A friend of mine was given a budget laptop for work, but he couldn't get wireless networking to work and asked me for help.
The first thing I noticed was that it took something ridiculous like 10 minutes to start up, and was incredibly slow even when no applications were running. So I went to the "System" control panel, and discovered the laptop had only 384MB of RAM.
So...it's a new laptop, that ships with Vista, and it falls short of Vista's minimum RAM requirements? I never did figure that one out.
I finally told him that the first thing he needed to do before I could help him was to get a laptop that met or exceeded Vista's minimum system requirements. I didn't hear anything about it after that.
I am seriously amazed this is news. This has been happening almost as long as piracy has been around. I used to release for several groups, and helped run sites. We had several people who were friends with industry people (sometimes software producers (but this was rarer), mostly movies/music/tv). This is how we got PRE's ages before the movie/album/show was released. There were instances of people stealing the property, but this was unsustainable and so those people were only able to provide us with 1 or so releases. The people who continually delivered were often from the marketing/producers/execs from the big parent companies and similar. However, there were some people who worked in development, or at cd presses, however this was a much smaller subset of releasers, as this section always got the most scrutiny on security.
I am perpetually amazed by how little people actually know about the scene. It provides us with so much awesome, yet very few people understand it.
More of an addendum than anything else... XP released at a time when 32-128MB of RAM on a system was fairly standard. XP required 64MB as a minimum to install, and didn't really start running very well until you had at least 256MB, which happened at large in the consumer market about 6 months after XP hit the shelves.
Vista released when 512MB-1GB was fairly standard. It runs poorly on anything less than 2GB. It's the same problem that XP had when it first released... now that new computers are generally coming with 2GB at a minimum, and 6 or 8GB is available from most major manufacturers, Vista's performance has reached acceptable levels.
I think the problem is that Microsoft has been providing its developers with very powerful workstations to design software on. Maybe for the next major releases of Office and Windows, they should replace all the workstations with '486 DX/66 with 16MB of RAM.... Hopefully then they'll learn the meaning of lean code again.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
You're a little too paranoid.
I trust the pirates and torrents FAR more than the software companys.
One works to screw me over all the time. The other has never let me down.
Metamoderation seems to be broken. All I ever get is a bunch of unmoderated comments, with poorly-defined +- options. If the comments are not yet moderated it is hardly metamoderation.