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Windows 7's Media Hype Having the Opposite Effect As Vista's
Death Metal Maniac tips an Ars Technica piece suggesting that the media's coverage of Vista's flaws portrayed the operating system as worse than it was, and, if early reports on Windows 7 are any indication, positive hype will create the opposite reaction this time around. Quoting: "... the problem is exaggeration; ... bloggers and journalists alike use their personal experiences to prove their point in their writing. The blame doesn't solely lie with us, as Vista was by no means perfect, but we did manage to amplify the problems beyond reason. And if the beta is anything to go by, Windows 7 is going to fly. This is, by far, the best beta operating system the software giant has ever released. The media has locked on to this, and is using exaggeration already, before Windows 7 is even ready for prime time." Apparently a decent beta can succeed where $300 million and Jerry Seinfeld failed.
but we did manage to amplify the problems beyond reason.
No you didn't. And yes, I've had to use Vista.
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
Call me troll, but I've seen several sub-par products that sold well on hype alone. Windows 7 will do just fine, whether it's any good or not.
At least Microsoft's marketing department is doing its job right this time.
I know this is /. but Windows 7 is much better than Vista and looks to be a decent OS for those who wish to run Windows.
Vista SUCKS. Period. It is an annoying kink in the neck. It's not just hype, it SUCKS. They can try all the spin they want "oh the bloggers gave us a bad rap!" BS If you create an operating system and purposely make it to annoy the users, what do you think you'll get?
Do or do not. There is no try. --Yoda
Windows zealots will have to try very hard to convince me that I need Windows 7. As it stands now, I will not touch it even with a 10 foot pole. Windows XP works and works quite well for me. I plan to ditch it for KDE 4.2 when it comes out though.
IT people killed Vista, and I see no reason why they will be any happier with Win7. I have talked to dozens of industry people, from the guys who network mom & pop shops to guys who run databases for Fortune 100 companies, and NONE of them wanted anything to do with Vista. Their complaints were that it was entirely too dependent on internet connectivity, it was totaly different and therefore a major hassle to integrate with their existing network infrastructure and to maintain at the user level, and could not be locked down in a corporate environment properly. Win7 is a finger in the eye to these people -- it doesn't even have Classic mode any more. I've only spoken to a couple of them since Win7 was introduced but they aren't impressed.
And it is a truism from the days of Dos 2.0 that people do prefer to use at home what they use at work. When the tech friends they depend on to fix what they can't insist they run XP, they will insist on XP. Office and Word became popular not because they're all that good but because people brought them home and became comfortable with them there.
This has all come down to a giant Mexican standoff between Microsoft, which wants to determine how your computer looks and acts, and corporate IT types who want to determine those things. (As for you determining those things, that ship has sailed; the end of Classic mode tells that tale.) The IT guyes will not give up their control. Microsoft has obviously dug in their heels. It is not clear to me how this will end, but from what I have seen it will not end with widespread Win7 on the corporate desktop.
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But if a little hype is what it takes to wean people of XP, then so be it. XP is not ready for coming challenges: 64bit, more than 4GB of memory and IPv6, to name just three. XP's included driver base is also getting annoyingly out of date. It can hardly be installed on a modern system without first making a new install medium with nLite. I'm still going to turn off all the UI flashiness in Windows 7.
From what I've been hearing, Windows 7 is pretty much Vista with alot of the bloat turned off. Having done that myself in my Vista install, even with all the fancy graphics turned on, I've had a good experience. I hope everyone else gets the same in Windows 7 and gets to love the fancy 'start search' bar as much as I have.
What alternative is there? You can't stay on XP forever - eventually support will go away, patches will stop, fire and blood will rain from the skies, etc. Eventually, IT will have to move to a new OS, and the odds are that OS will be Win 7 or whatever chunk of crap MS is peddling that year. It's still more compelling for business users than any alternative.
You could move to the Mac, but then you need all new software and you need to completely retrain your staff. Same thing for Linux. So you can move to Win 7 - where you can at least expect some of your software to continue working. Developers can keep cranking out crap in VisualStudio (which is a shitty fucking IDE, whatever it's cadre of loyal adherents say about it), executives can continue using Outlook and schedule meetings with each other, your shitty ActiveX control laden intranet will work without changes (MS is never, ever, ever, gonna give that shit up if they can help it).
I guess the question is "is it too little too late?" M$ lost quiet alot of their userbase to Apple & Linux, will they get those users to switch back for Windows 7?? The sad thing is that this release is just M$ playing catch up with other platforms packed with things they should have done a long time ago, if you compare it with other platforms it doesn't actually offer anything revolutionary in the core of the OS. did it ever??
i dont know about you but i had to endure hell because of my close social circle's woes induced by vista. be it games be it work be it unthinkable other stuff. and sometimes STILL.
no exaggeration there. vista was that bad.
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After downloading and trying out Win 7, I might make a suggestion. Use VM software as it will make it easier to start fresh every time it decides something will never work again. For me, It locks up every time I try and run anything. What did I do, you may ask? I ran Solitaire one time. That was enought to throw the awesome Windows 7 off balance. I'm going back to my Mac. Wake me when Windows 2364 comes out, should be next year according to Msoft revisioning. I hear it is much improved.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
And if a large organization has to make a major unscheduled effort because Microsoft is ramping up the pressure -- you can still get XP but it's more expensive, available on fewer models, and deliberately more poorly supported -- then you have to ask whether to take the next step on that treadmill which is only going to turn again in a few years, or go in a different direction. I have heard the words "Apple" and "Linux" uttered by people who would never have taken either seriously a couple of years ago, and you can see how that's working out for Apple very clearly.
Microsoft's headlock on the desktop is slipping, and with it their lock on the OS. A lot of stuff that used to require Microsoft and Office can now be done just fine with Linux and OpenOffice. My own company would never have considered moving away from Microsoft even two years ago, but now they're asking for a couple of test boxes to be set up, and they also pester our local Apple fanboy a lot about his system.
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That's a dumb argument. I still slice bread with knife, a technology which has been around for thousands of years - I could move to spiffy new computer controlled laser system, but why? It's expensive, both to acquire and replace, it's more work to service, and it doesn't get me much.
So what if the technology is old? Why is the new technology any better? What is the new technology that Win7 introduces that makes it so much better than XP? You don't mention it in your post.
It has usually taken Microsoft two releases of an OS to get it right. Compare the following:
Windows 3.0 vs. Windows 3.1
Windows 95 vs. Windows 98*
Windows 98 vs Windows 98 SE (Second Edition)*
Windows NT 3.1 vs. Windows NT 4.0
W2K vs. Windows XP
Attempts to prolong a decent "second release" such as Windows ME as a successor to 98 SE have also usually been miserable failures.
Cheers,
Dave
* The original 98 was better than 95 but Microsoft really didn't get 98 right until SE.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Just goes to show if you wright usable software people will use it. and never believe what someone elise says about something when you can find out for your self.
Tho I cant comment on 7 to much as I could only stand a few hours in it before I remembered how much of an unmanageable mess windows is and released I had fallen out of practice with all my windows management skills since I finally abandoned the platform for good a few years ago. (expose how did I ever live without you)
That doesn't address all the other stuff - software that you can still reuse, stuff with an upgrade path to new version. It's still far cheaper to move to a newer windows than a completely different OS for most businesses.
Believe me, I'd love to see MS lose it's market position, but it's probably not gonna happen because people refuse to move to Win7.
When I looked at Vista, ease of deployment was a big turn off. We are mostly a Novell shop and I use imaging to push out software / os. Someone mucks up their system, two clicks, a reboot, and 30 minutes later they have a shiny new system. Sysprep allowed this with NO USER INTERACTION (Corp license key). Vista was not so nice about this and 7 will probably be the same way.
Conservative, mod down for violating
I discovered Mac OS X last year and I'm done with any Microsoft OS.
If Windows works for you, that's lovely. Enjoy using it.
But I'm done. No more blue screens, or missing .dll's, or virus infections, or spyware, or mysterious errors that appear and then disappear for no know reason. Meh.
If after all this, people willingly choose Windows, then they deserve what they'll get.
There is no sense trying to convince them otherwise.
Also there is no point because many more people (real people, not astroturfers) are embracing Linux every day, the trend cannot be stopped and MS knows this.
If in the meantime MS wants to keep milking consumers and maybe even tangentially improve their product, then fine.
Not matter what the 'buzz', we all know that when it comes to it, most people seek out their most trusted tech-people and ask "So, this new computer I'm buying, what should I put on it?" or "I'm tired of Vista/XP whatever, what should I do" the answer they'll get will be from someone they know will really have their best interests at heart and that person will invraiably say "Get Linux" or even "Buy a Mac" WAY before they advise them to install Windows (any version)
The elephant in the room is over there...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
After the shit sandwich that was Windows Vista anything can look like a winner. Microsoft could have repackaged Windows 2000 and the technobloggers would have gone nuts how stable and clean it was.
I have friends who will run out of breath arguing how Vista is perfect and has gotten a bad rap due to vast Apple/Media conspiracy to spread rumors and undermine the OS. It's nearly impossible to convince them otherwise. Every objection is met by sarcastic remarks like "LOL MIKKKRO$OFT AM I RITE?!" and the like. You're either an Apple kool-aid drinker or a Linux zealot if you don't submit to Microsoft's talking points on how amazing their latest Windows is.
Soon after Windows 7 Betas appeared and couple of high-status media degenerates started hyperventilating about how perfect the OS was, every Vista evangelist suddenly came out and openly distanced themselves from Vista.
I can bet you lots of money that all these Windows 7 superfans will turn on it as soon as Microsoft pre-announces Windows 8.
It would give a free upgrade for Vista users to windows 7, that would get people migrated over to windows 7 much more quickly and create demand for windows 7 apps which would create a compelling case for people to buy new pc's
I know there are people who claim that sudo is insecure. However, Windows 7 still has a problem in that ordinary users tend to need to be admins. So when you run a process in a terminal window, magic causes it not to run with admin status to reduce the potential for harm. There is a workaround to get a privlege elevation box before the terminal window is opened - the one that comes at the top of Google involves writing a javascript which calls an asp which puts up the privilege elevation box. It works, but when is Windows going to get a proper security system that isn't half baked with magic?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
And of course this can all backfire if you have all these high expectations and hype, then the OS does not live up to them like people expect it to.
Then, my friend got it.
With her ownership, I can proudly say....it sucks.
None of the programs we have work properly, and it took the two of us a good twenty-thirty minutes to figure out where Heretic had installed to. Search function was bizarre, the setup was even stranger. It took far longer to start up, despite being on a good laptop. Nothing was in the same place, and it popped up every time a program was run to ask if it was safe.
And then the 'Mohave' commercials came out, finally trying to cry that Vista was good. Instead, they made it sound as though retarded chimps loved it. "I can set a timer on computer usage so my kids aren't on it all day!" "I can make videos!" "It's so easy to view pictures!" "I just love it!"
What part of any of that couldn't be done already? XP did it, maybe not with pretty pretty lights, but it did it. And Apple users are heralded as music/video/picture fanatics. So, how was this positive hype for Vista? "Hey guys, look! When we tell people it's another product, they tell us they love it because it does everything a Windows 98 could pull off! See?"
So this wasn't just negative hype; this was 'it sucks'. When 7 comes out, casual users might like it, but most heavier users will begin seriously considering a switch. I'll probably keep my non internet computers on XP, but switch to Linux on my internet computer. I'd prefer to be confused with something cool then be confused with something frustratingly cheapened.
>Is it as quick as running XP? Well, no, but don't forget that XP is a seven-year-old operating system that required a Pentium II at release.
You see I don't get this comment. Since the operating system 7 years ago had to run on much slower hardware, well, don't expect that now?
WHY F***G NOT! What on earth does an operating system have to do so that it sucks up ever bit of my quad core machine?
Here is the irony. Superfetch... Superfetch makes my programs faster to load and run. Well, are they counting the time that superfetch takes away while I work?
Oh yes, I remember, it runs in the background. Yes, that's right background if you count not moving your mouse or keyboard. BUT you see I write trading systems, and have traders, and they actually don't move their mouse or keyboard. Guess what thinks, it is ok to startup run, and cycle through a terrabyte of data? Yes anything that should run in the background!
I would actually like a faster operating system! I have a hate list of Vista, and not a single thing has changed in Windows 7! Windows 7 is literally putting lipstick on a pig!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
and not just Vista SP3 or 4, with the shit stripped away like some 3rd party apps already do.
People are out celebrating in the streets as if Windows 7 is the greatest thing since sliced bread and all I have to ask is "O rly?" Unless it has a much better security model, and kills off the registry or something - what exactly is the big deal here?
Stripped down Vista SP3/4, wow. Who cares.
That said the issue is that MS has not learned from past mistakes. They released MS and 2000, the later which was no bad, but theyu charged for these even though these were beta for XP. Customers who were stuck with ME were just told to sod off.
Now MS Vista is released, in various incomplete versions, and forced onto innocent consumers just like ME. And, instead of putting out MS Windows 7 as SP3 or SP4, MS is likely to sell it as a new product, likely again in various non functional versions.
Yes, the issue is that Vista would not run on old boxes. It is also that Visa would not fully run on new boxes, at least not boxes pushed as Vista ready. From an IT perspective, all the cool stuff that would differentiate it from Mac OS X and *nix are gone, and all that is left is eye candy and features that are best suited for a toy machine.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
ANY post that is even mildly criticizing of vista is modded down. another marketing strategy by m$oft ? like, release in-house fanbois to fight for the product ? maybe that is why 7 is getting good reviews.
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I use Windows XP, Vista, and now am testing Windows 7!
Windows 7 is not nicer. Windows 7 has all of the same problems as Vista. I write trading systems and as such see what Vista, and Windows 7 do.
1) Screen flash, due to the fact that HP has written a bad driver whenever the printer is not started will cause a loop 0 dialog box to appear. Result is that the OS requires a screen flash indicating a different mode. I have minimum 2 screens, usually 3 and 4 are not uncommon. Do you know what screen flash does to 4 screens and how long it takes?
2) Gotta have upgrades. Vista when it receives (Windows 7 as well) critical upgrades requires you to reboot. Well is that not f***n dandy. You boot your machine get your trading setup, and then Vista says, "Hey I have to reboot because you received a super critical update." The worst is that you can only delay it by 3 hours. That is great when you are in the middle of the trade and Windows decides its time to reboot. Also great if you are running a 4 day Montecarlo to wake up in the morning to see a "safe" machine!
3) WTF does Vista or Windows 7 have to search my harddisk? I have a terrabyte of data, and there is always something searching the harddisk for something. Oh yes the fabled "background" task. Did you know when traders run trading strategies they do nothing except stare at the screen. And guess what Windows thinks, "hey I can run this background task..."
4) The directory structure is still a freaken mess. I wish they would adopt an OSX approach where files don't have to be scattered everywhere.
And the list goes on...
Microsoft as I see has a major issue. They have some parts doing good jobs, Office, SharePoint, Exchange, etc. And then there is the Windows division that keeps producing garbage!
I wish, and I really do wish, that Microsoft did not fight the 1999 split up order.
Right now Microsoft is eating up 30% of their profits in "R&D", yet their growth is only 8%. That's called a pig!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
What an incredibly novel idea for Microsoft. When all attempts at spin fail, and only when all attempts have failed, you can always just build a better product.
This discussion reminds me of some of the press and marketing hype before Windows 95 was released. Many PC industry authors praised Win95 as a "complete rewrite from the ground up", "a completely new 32-bit implementation of Windows", or "Windows with DOS completely removed".
In his excellent books "Unauthorized Windows 95" and "Unauthorized DOS", author Andrew Schulman went to great lengths to debunk the popular misconceptions about DOS7 and Win95. Many times things were hinted at by MS, fanned by the press to include their own desires for the OS, and then left to stand by MS. Pretty great marketing.
Marketing can make or break a product.
Gone are the days of people demanding quality, its all about what is new and shiny that they see on tv/news.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The users I support are going to have *huge* problems with the new taskbar. First, they have a problem with grouping tasks into one icon. They never did get the hang of that, so we ended up just unchecking that feature.
Second, the default is to have no text under the icon. They are going to have a hard time figuring out what is already running. They'll end up double clicking everything.
Third, the taskbar no longer appends each new application to the end of the running tasks. That will throw people off.
In addition, they are really going to confuse themselves with all of the new mouse gestures.
Other than that, windows 7, like Vista, and XP before it has the same basic interface as 9x. Taskbar at the bottom of the screen, Menu launcher in the lower left hand corner.
I have never seen a serious conversation here about ANY windows products... and still see falsehoods about Vista every day, Now if you want to know how great Linux/Mac are...
and dont talk about shit that you dont know zit about.
dx10 only brings improvements to minor lighting conditions - like the shorelines, reflection points where water contacts with the non fluid gaming environment, like ponds etc. that's all about that in terms of game experience wise. apart from that what it brings does not interest gamers at all, but people who work in graphics rendering. not to mention that its possible to create the same effects with dx9, as the famous dx10 hack of Crysis shows.
thats why dx10 hasnt been a selling point for vista, gamers just skipped it by.
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This is, by far, the best beta operating system the software giant has ever released.
Is that the best that can be said about it?
Lemmings are silly; dinosaurs are extinct.
and they hell shouldnt.
they are being paid to make sure that the it infrastructure that their company works on works AS the company wants it, and in the fashion company wants it.
not microsoft.
no company can accept an outside company dictating it, networking and security procedures within their own network. its actually unbelievable that we're even discussing this.
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The real reason Vista really failed is the same people who are hyping up 7, the media.
Vista changed the way drivers needed to be written for security reasons, and because hardware vendors suck at writing drivers for whatever they make, there were all sorts of problems with hardware compatibility, ESPECIALLY with older hardware. Add to that UI changes ranging from minor to extensive in both Vista and Office 07, overzealous UAC, and a million other little things (on top of the million other little things that didn't make it into vista (i thought it was funny that theirs actually a wikipedia page for "Features removed from Windows Vista")), and obviously, almost no ones first impressions were good. Tech writers ravaged it, the mainstream media picked up on their stories and killed most of the little momentum Vista had by simply parroting the tech writers.
However, since then drivers have gotten good, service pack 1 has come out, and Vista has matured. You'd have a hard time finding a second impression review of the OS that did nothing but bash the OS like the first impression ones did. In fact, lots of reviews coming out now are actually praising Vista for becoming better than its predecessor (granted only with modern day hardware).
Windows 7 is Windows Vista++. A refined UI, refined UAC, drivers are mature now, performance is approximately as good or better than vista (which is as good or better than XP on the right hardware), IE8 is shaping up to be an improvement, and the whole package seems to just work better. Most of the tech writers have already been won over by Vista, windows 7 appears to be better than that (and its just a beta!), so obviously they write favorable reviews. The mainstream media is picking up on their stories and hyping up the slowly growing mass of momentum Windows 7 has by simply parroting the tech writers.
TL;DR: vista was killed by bad first impressions that the mass media ran with. windows 7 will succeed because of good first impressions that the mass media is running with.
What you say is often true, but I know at least one professional who flatly told his bosses that if they made him use Vista, he would leave. Most of us probably wouldn't go quite that far but there is a point at which the people who have to make things work simply say "boss, we can't make this work." At that point the received wisdom that you don't get fired for buying Microsoft is no longer operative.
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The media's reliance on a narrative "script" will, I think, be the death of corporate media. Time and again they show that it doesn't matter what is really going on, that what matters is the "conventional wisdom" that has been constructed around events. Almost literally nothing that doesn't fit that narrative will appear in print in the United States. So apparently the conventional wisdom is that Vista is flawed, and Windows 7 is a home run. Just wait - you will see the same problems previously lambasted in Vista ignored in Windows 7. That's the way it works. Why they continue to make money is a mystery to me.
Windows 7 should go back to home and pro setup no 5+ vers like vista. Maybe also have a enterprise ver with extras apps / tools for that as well.
Also all packs should oem and retail should come with the 32bit and 64bit disks or let people down load the 64bit iso for free and let them use there key that they have.
Positive press is having a positive effect on the perception of a product? No shit?
There are quite a few differences when moving from XP to Vista compared to moving from Vista to Windows 7.
XP->Vista you had new drivers. Vista->W7 you don't.
XP->Vista applications had to be partially rewritten. Vista->W7 you don't.
Windows 7 is not really a new OS, it's Vista R2, or let's call Vista the "public beta" of Windows 7.
Vista "itself" isn't that bad as an OS. It was bad drivers, lack of driver support and application compatibility that got it the bad name.
Based on this and the fact that many IT organizations want to skip every other OS release from MS, Windows 7 might be a success.
I joined two users too late.
Apparently a decent beta can succeed where $300 million and Jerry Seinfeld failed.
Umm, no kidding. You mean if your product doesn't suck you won't have to spend lots of money lying to people why it might not suck? Who would have guessed that a quality product might actually be more successful than a half-assed one. Amazing!
Still not buying it unless it really has some value beyond XP's functionality that I can't live without. Wait, I can live without it anyway. Who am I kidding.
This is, by far, the best beta operating system the software giant has ever released.
easy to accomplish when you're not creating anything new, but merely patching up the previous release.
Win7 = Vista SP2.
Windows 7 is literally putting lipstick on a pig!
What is it with you and the pigs? You a farmer or something?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
This is, by far, the best beta operating system the software giant has ever released.
By what measure? Certainly not stability or usability. I found Windows NT 5.0 Beta 2 perfectly usable as my daily OS - and I liked it. It not only got me excited about Windows 2000, but also increased my confidence in the stability of the final release. On the strength of that beta my company didn't even wait for SP1 before rollout. In contrast, Windows 7 Beta 2 crashes constantly for me and others I know, just like the Vista release candidates did. I remember loading a Vista RC and thinking "God, this is a release candidate?!"
I'm not complaining about Windows 7 Beta being unstable - but to say it's the best beta MS has released is wholly inaccurate.
Isn't that something like "Best Mexican wine"?
This story is an obvious MS plant.
Is Windows 7 REALLY the secret sauce they were unable to ship in Vista?
No.
Do I care if it boots faster than Vista?
No.
MS is doing everything they can to change public opinion, including planting articles on SlashDot.
I don't think so.
A 90% decrease in network performance while listening to music and the continuous[continue][cancel] prompts without actually fixing the security model are not small problems. When users cannot intentionally install software or change superficial settings (resolution, wallpaper, etc) but spyware and viruses can freely install themselves programatically is an indication that Vista did not at all live up to Microsoft's promises. That users did not get what they paid for (better performance, improved security) and the user[continue][cancel] experience is[continue][cancel] continually [continue][cancel] interrupted [continue][cancel] to create [continue][cancel] perception of [continue][cancel] security is are major problems.
The [continue][cancel] UAC [continue][cancel] "feature" [continue][cancel] is analogous to [continue][cancel] Duhbya's [continue][cancel] homeland security theater. It's almost completely ineffective, forces us to take off our shoes and leave bottled water and nail clippers behind while not the real criminals. It's a great show and gives the masses the "feel" of security without really providing any.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Blog hype or lack of it may change the impression of the product, or maybe MSFT finally has brought out the product Vista should have been, but the real question is does it provide value for the money it costs?
Microsoft's strategy of keeping itself inserted in the market by pressuring OEM's isn't going to last. There are already cracks in that wall. Netbooks almost got away from them, still could unless Windows 7 flies on low end hardware and doesn't add $100 to the cost. Maybe a lower cost version for low end hardware
Any way you slice it MS is in a bind. Sure they'll keep muscling the market via OEM's and leveraging school and government officials, the dead weight of legions of MCSE's and .NET developers, people invested in Microsoft, many in positions to influence decision makers. There's a lot of institutional inertia there. But if they field a crippled version for lower cost netbooks, Linux will eat their lunch on features. If they charge full price that will essentially double the cost of low end hardware. In addition, hardware OEM's want to sell more powerful and more expensive new desktops. But the market for high end hardware is not growing that fast. There's gaming, video, CAD and a few other specialized areas where you need beefy horsepower. The average productivity workstation doesn't need dual cores. For a majority of home users being able to see pictures of their kids, dash off a quick letter once in a while and check email is all they need to do and they don't need a $300 OS or high end hardware to do that. I just don't see a bright future for Redmond in this.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Windows 7 should go back to home and pro setup no 5+ vers like vista.
Disagree. Windows as a desktop OS should go down to one version, and dump the retail/OEM distinction too - this is all complexity introduced for the sake of pure greed. Maybe even dump Media Center Edition; any variation for purpose can be handled during installation. Choose a fair price point, oh I don't know, maybe $129, and that's the price of Windows whether you're upgrading or building a new machine; whether you're building a corporate desktop or a home PC.
If Vista isn't a turkey then did Microsoft deem it necessary to produce Windows 7 ?
davecb5620@gmail.com
Haven't you heard it? You can buy pre-sliced bread. And this innovation is considered so good that it has been used as a standard for comparing other inventions
I have used Windows 7 and for the most part it *is* the same as Windows Vista. Now you can tone down UAC, but under the hood I am pretty sure that not much has changed. On the system that I tested it on, after a fresh install, the system was eating up about 739MB of RAM, same as with Vista. So once again, if you don't have a dual core machine with 2GB of RAM and a decent video card, windows 7 will feel just like Vista.
Sounds like this OS is right up my alley!
We like to keep a modicum of decency in these forums, what you do in the privacy of your own home is your own business.
Deleted
After working to hype it so much, they better make sure they come through with the goods otherwise it may just backfire on them. The richest corporation on the planet with TWO failed releases of their flagship product one after the other. Vista already hurt them, they NEED Win7 to be a hit; specially to improve perceptions. Mojave didn't work, maybe another fresh skin for Vista and another new name will do the trick this time, as long as they hold it back long enough for people to believe it's actually a new product. But not to worry, we all know how great Microsoft's final releases are, right?
I started typing a comment and had to go to the restroom and when I got back---"Windows recently installed a critical security update, requiring a restart."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7 should help you find something of value. Fact is there are hundreds of new features, and adding features in SPs is rarely done due to application compatibility issues. Oh yeah, and because it costs money to develop new features, so they have to make some money by selling a new OS.
We go over this all the time here. Yet some people never seem to read it. So, here they are again. In no particular order.
#1. Understand the difference between a "virus", a "worm" and a "trojan".
#2. Take a hint from Ubuntu and have NO open ports on the DEFAULT installation. That will pretty much wipe out worm attacks. Do NOT depend upon a firewall to do that. The firewall is a SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE that is often disabled because it interferes with legitimate apps that the user wants to run. I can put a default installation of Ubuntu directly on the 'Web and it will NOT be cracked.
#3. Provide a "known good" list of files (names, date/time, multiple checksums) for ALL of the OS files. This way, at least infections can be removed easier. It's easier to find a file that is NOT on the known good and remove it than it is to find a file that MAY be a newly obfuscated version of an old virus.
#4. Keep the OS directories CLEAN. That means that installing MS Office MUST NOT install ANY updated files in the OS directories.
#5. Move to INI files for apps instead of allowing them to edit the registry. If you really must keep the registry, keep it clean.
#6. Consolidate the various temp directories and DUMP them during the boot process.
Remember, viruses, worms and trojans are nothing more than code. They are not magical. Limit how code can be written to the system and you limit how they may spread. Enforce organization and you limit where they may be written.
Once the disinfection rate exceeds the infection rate, the viruses, worms and trojans will die.
It still has drive letters, it still has a registry, it still sucks to create a new process, it still has a case-insensitive file system, it still uses backslash.
Even if Windows worked perfectly, it would still be Windows and it would still suck.
Windows 7 is Microsoft attempt out of sheer despair to get something sellable out of Vista codebase. But still it falls in almost the same traps. Yes, I have used both. Sorry, but it is just trying each time harder to replicate OS X success formula, not trying to go their own, unique way. It indicates lack of vision in MS. In same time stuff like Control Panel is screwed beyond recognition.
I already joked to my Twitter friends that Microsoft is IT guys 'female fatale' - it fucks up your life anytime you encounter her, but still people are so devoted to her. Geeks, you need get love somewhere else :)
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The price point for a computer is now $299. Dell is actively promoting a $299 Linux netbook. The top ad in Google for "netbook" today leads to a Dell Linux machine. HP's low-end entry is currently at $329, but that's list price; look for discounts. HP is even selling a $299 mini-tower desktop to businesses. The entry-level Asus Eee PC can be purchased for under $250 now. Netbooks are going to be in bubble-packs in drugstores soon.
Microsoft has to deal with that. They have to fit into the "China price" structure. On a netbook, Microsoft can get maybe $10 for their software component. And that's Windows XP; Windows 7 will have to be cheaper to get onto netbooks.
After many long years, I have slipped Microsoft's clutches for good. Cedega took out the last reason I kept Windows around. As much work as Vista was to get working with games, I consider my Ubuntu desktop a much preferable solution. I'd rather send money to Cedega than MS.
Sorry, had to crow. It just feels so clean.
With Windows 2000 and XP, search worked, especially once you turned off the smiling dog and configured XP search to work like 2000 search (i.e. it does what you want it to, not what it thinks you want it to).
With Vista, they made search awful. Firstly they simplified it so that for anything that a developer would want to do you had to do a search you knew would fail and then in the resulting dialog (because there is no other way to get that dialog, well not that I've found) you got to interact with possibly one of the worst ever designed search dialogs going. No way a non-techie could use it. Almost as if the Visual Studio 7 search dialog team had been let lose on Vista!
Now we get to Windows 7, and the search experience is worse! You still have to do the stupid search that you know will fail, but when it does fail there is no sensible way to do a better search. There is an abomination called Custom Search that isn't, there is no way to search the whole filesystem, including hidden files and non-indexed locations (if there is, please tell me!). Its awful.
I can see I'm going to have to write my own search dialog for use with Windows 7. Yes, its that bad.
The explorer file navigation pane is still missing the "up" button that was present in all versions of Windows prior to Vista. Yes I know I can click on the appropriate point on the dynamic thingy above but in my usage the new "user friendly" way introduced with Vista is slower to use and requires more accuracy in mouse usage than simply clicking the up button a few times.
On the plus side, I haven't tripped over any god-awful "you can't do that" admin dialogs like in Vista (where the best thing you can do is turn that feature off).
I just don't understand how every time they try to make Windows friendlier to novices they make it harder to use for everyone. And in the process Ubuntu just looks better and better, not withstanding the fact it is getting better and better. Seems like MS are trying to damage themselves. Just hope the Ubuntu guys see these changes in Vista/Windows 7 and don't go there with their UI.
I love the eye candy, but its worth nothing if the useful features are broken. Who wants a sports car fitted with a 1 litre 2 stroke engine?
Stephen
I've pointed this out before, but I'll do it again because I think it's an excellent example of how mind-control works. (And how smart people who strive to be media savvy are by no means outside the box of rats. --That is, it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you fail to analyze everything, then even a clever person becomes little more than a simple regime of thought patterns which can be solved for and sold to.)
The Seinfeld campaign wasn't a failure at all. --The current positive media hype about Windows 7 is the the direct result of the Seinfeld campaign. Those 300 million dollars firmly planted two things. . .
1. Gates had gone walkabout, leaving the keys with the moron who came up with Vista. Microsoft isn't Microsoft without the boy genius. Oh, and he's back to work on Windows 7. (Whether this is true or not isn't important. It's the media impression, which is all that matters.)
2. Gates is an awkward, non-charismatic computer genius geek who failed hard-core on broadcast television and we all felt SORRY for him and really want him to succeed next time. (When was the last time anybody felt sorry for gates?)
The PR company which was hired to rescue Microsoft wasn't going to be some slouch company. It will be the kind of place which hires prodigies whose bread and butter is hacking brain code. They're laughing at you right now.
-FL
There's a lot of hate about it. A lot of it is focussed on the DRM.
What are the other problems?
I agree that XP SP2 (after years of beta, known as XP and XP SP1), is a pretty good OS (please no semantic arguments abut what an OS is). And I don't think Vista is shitty. The problem is 1) if you have XP already, as (almost anyone who runs Wintel already does) there is absolutely no reason to change unless something much better comes along (which of course Vista is not) and 2) When you do upgrade, it should make your life better, not worse. Vista "breaks" a lot of things people are used to in XP (you know, minor things like applications and drivers).
The fact is that Vista is not shitty if it's your first OS or are upgrading from Win 98. But for the average XP user, it is simply a case of MS desperately needing its pre-existing users to buy something new every few years. MS is no longer a growth company since they have assimilated 90-plus percent of the world. So it can't have people just sitting on their pre-installed products. They need you to buy buy buy new ones!
You don't need Vista. MS needs you to buy Vista.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
As of Vista there is no such thing as Media Center edition.
Third, provide known-good channels for obtaining new software. See: Linux package managers and repositories. Tie it in to Microsoft Update. Make it possible for third parties to run their own repositories. No need to host everything yourself, but it should at least be possible to periodically fetch, from a trusted source, a list of updated packages and signatures.
Unlike Linux packaging, which typically uses GPG, Microsoft prefers "Authenticode", a traditional PKI based on a set of central certificate authorities chosen by Microsoft. Does your proposal include requiring every developer to pay a CA $200 per year for an Authenticode certificate? Hobbyist software projects might not be able to afford this.
Getting rid of Acrobat is not remedial. Acrobat has sucked since.... Well, every time I've ever used it. Horrendous bloat, tiresome lag.... Acrobat by itself is a virus!
I use Portable Sumatra PDF. It's phenomenal!
http://portableapps.com/apps/office/sumatra_pdf_portable
If someone puts Acrobat on any of the machines in my lab, I reformat that computer immediately. The same is true for iTunes, Norton, or any other bloat/malware I come across. This is my biggest gripe in Windows actually: How shitty 90% of the software idiots in my lab install is.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
All the blogs have been just comparing Windows 7 to Vista/XP. I'm sorry, but both of those OS's aren't worth comparing. If we compare Windows 7 to another Windows system, we are comparing a turd with a turd. Polish a turd, and it's still a turd.
The only way Microsoft will absolutely sell me on Windows 7 is if they make some drastic changes to how windows handles security and applications. They should have ditched the Registry with NT, but now it's so much at the heart of how the system work that we will never get rid of it. Microsoft has too much "legacy" garbage that is preventing real innovation in the OS market. They have the deep pockets to really push the envelope of technology, but more and more they are struggling to keep up.
Don't get me wrong, I use Windows frequently for work. It's not that I completely hate it... it just seems pointless to spend money for a OS that is less polished than one I can download for free. As long as this holds true, I don't think Windows has a place in the market.
I sincerely hope Windows 7 is that OS we've been waiting for; but don't see anything in the beta that really stands out.
We'll see...
google.slashdot
Windows 7 should go back to home and pro setup no 5+ vers like vista. Maybe also have a enterprise ver with extras apps / tools for that as well.
Also all packs should oem and retail should come with the 32bit and 64bit disks or let people down load the 64bit iso for free and let them use there key that they have.
You know what... I don't care anymore. They can have 82 versions. That's fine. But what they need to do is make Anytime Upgrade include such esoteric definitions of "anytime" such as NOW.
Anytime Upgrade means "take me to a web site where I can order a DVD and key that will be shipped to me in 5 to 10 business days". No thanks. I've got stupid users just like everyone else, who occasionally are permitted to buy their own gear. They always get the cheapest crap, regardless of what they're told the minimum requirements are.
At least if AU actually worked, we could fix the users who bought inadequate gear immediately. "See? Your laptop doesn't connect to the server. Now, type your credit card number here and pay the difference between the cheap crap you bought against my advice and what I told you to buy. Okay, done? Great. Hey look... it connects to the server now. Thank you for your business."
"Oh no... he found the
The opinions here are what one would expect unfortunately.
I have been using Win7 - it is pleasently fast and I know someone who put it on a netbook, worked as well as XP.
It still looks kind of unpolished.
One of Vista's weak points was the AppCompat - the new security model broke too many apps and caused big companies a lot of pain, some to the point where they gave up. But for them Linux or Mac is simply not an option.
It remains to be seen if Win7 offers relief there. I suspect it does not offer much on that front, but even if it were just a little better it would be enough for many big companies to skip Vista.
Its fundamental to the way Microsoft do things. All their products have always been a triumph of marketing and corporate-lock-in over actual substance.
Windows GUIs have been getting successively dumbed-down and functionally worse over each new windows version, with ever more and more crap and bloatware getting in the way of workflow. IT will soon get to the point where there's so many toolbars, ribbons, status bars etc. on your screen there's actually no room for what you're working on. Actual usability of Vista is terrible compared to XP, the amount of times you have to tell it you actually do know what you are doing is ridiculous, even with that retarded user-security thing tuned off. Plus they keep hiding the basic computer functionality under more and more layers of abstraction and with system dialogs having ever more vague terms unless you've paid for the correct MS cert course.
Microsoft are locked into a stupid mindset of assuming the user is an inexperienced idiot, and that bloat==better.
I can't believe Windows 7 will truly buck the trend. I'm way more expecting that its just Vista with different art, more DRM, extra "are you sure" dialogs, and another 2 or 3 times the memory/cpu requirement than Vista.
Windows 7 still has problems. Several of them in fact. Having used it, I have been frustrated by multiple issues with the installer, requiring multiple rollbacks, and just in general ticking me off. I hope this gets ironed out, because having to roll back way earlier, or hoping and praying that installing something doesn't mess up the installer... just isn't going to work for me in an OS I actually use on a regular basis.
but you can't get it so that is off the table
Who told you that? Sure you can. You can't "not get a Vista license" but you can sure get XP preinstalled now and probably for a long time into the future. A lot of the new platforms released in the last six months still don't support Vista at all. So you get the "professionally installed pre-downgrade" with the theoretical permission to run Vista, if you can get it to go.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Last year I had two new laptops... Neither runs Windows. One is linux and other one is for the first time in my life, Mac OSX.
My kids love linux for surfing the net, email, flash games and YouTube. It runs OpenOffice, so we are covered on that front too. OSX just works, and works excellent.
I tried to run Vista on my 5-year old home PC, but XP runs better. Windows7 will be the same as Vista.
But what about 2-billion people in China and India? They can not afford buying new OS and PC just because W7 needs much faster hardware just to be running.
In the year of recession, my company and any other will not look after new PCs just because XP is old or W7 is new. They will try to squeeze as much as possible from old boxes, upgrade hardware only, and just as someone said, XP can run on PentiumII/III just fine.
Doing a good job is like spilling coffee on a dark suit, you feel warm all over, but nobody notices.
I, too am interested to see if the W7 beta is compatible with the latest rage in operating system add-ons: downadup.
It's going to be a groaner of a January and February for most of my IT friends. And many of you.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I finally get to use a skill I learned in 3rd grade.
Vista is to Bush as Obama is to 7?
You know, I'm quite certain that if I tried to run Ubuntu 8.10 or whatever the newest release of it is (I've been out of the loop for a bit) on the same machine that I was running Red Hat 5.1 on ten years ago, it would choke.
I'm not. There are not really any more background processes. Code efficiency has improved... the only thing that probably would be slower is the GUI, but that's only the window manager and can be changed out easily or scaled back with settings changes.
Fundamentally Windows gets slower because the core system gets slower in the background, meaning the system as a whole needs more CPU just to stay in place. This contrasts with both Mac and Linux systems where new releases generally do not cause overall system slowdowns, even though they may add some components that are more CPU intensive.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Removal of receiving and sending faxes from the home (crippled user) version?
Fax software should be the modem maker's problem, not Microsoft's. All the modem maker has to do is include a driver that makes fax numbers show up as 200 dpi inkjet printers. This is especially true now that the proliferation of cable, DSL, and satellite Internet access has caused OEMs to cut the POTS modem out of the standard PC build in order to cut costs.
They are called Premiun and Ultimate versions now.
rubycodez and Auntie Beeb seem to indicate that serrated knives HAVE been used for thousands of years!
Faced with a big project that my XP system (built in 2004) wouldn't handle, I bought a new HP machine that came with Vista, factory-installed. I cursed it vigorously for two weeks, and then returned it.
I'm self-employed: research and writing, digital photography, audio production, website design.
Seemed to me that the user interface in Vista manifested something like arrogant, paranoid corporate culture at Microsoft. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to work around the idiot-proofing built into Vista, reinventing things that had worked seamlessly in XP. Also spent a lot of time pondering the bloated CPU and Memory usage in the "processes" window, as Vista chugged oh-so-VERY-slowly through some big graphics files (using Adobe Photoshop CS3).
There is a lot of memory-hogging *&#@!%! running in the background in Vista. It crashed repeatedly. It changed itself around when it was supposed to be 'sleeping,' doing bizarre things like switching my dual monitors (and trapping the mouse cursor on the second monitor, so I couldn't even access the controls without turning off the second monitor and rebooting). The drivers for my NEW scanner and NEW monitor wouldn't work with Vista, nor would other software that I use frequently and like.
Vista spent LOTS of time sending data - what??? - to Microsoft.
I spent an inordinate amount of time uninstalling factory-installed resource-hogging JUNK.
Because of the limitations of my old computer, I had been using several other computers; when I tried to consolidate the several copies of my working files, it indexed everything, including the files I had deleted as I consolidated, so finding the actual files was tortuous.
Etc., etc., etc.
Some people probably want to look at resource-hogging pretty OS details, like those cutesy semi-transparent window frames. Some people might even like a computer that sends all sorts of info to Microsoft, and reconfigures itself while you sleep. Some people might like buying all-new software (and some new hardware) whenever they get a new computer.
Me, I would just like a smart, fast, SANE OS: one that works cleanly, efficiently, and with a 'good working relationship' in human-machine interface.
If Adobe and ProTools worked with Linux, I would abandon Windows.
Shamelessly and Anonymously cut and pasted in defence of Mexican wine.
First introduced to Mexico by missionaries in Baja California, Mexican wine had a rocky start. A Jesuit priest, Father Juan de Ugarte, took charge in 1701 of the Loreto mission, and it was he who planted the first grapevines on the northern baja peninsula, which is well within the large wine growing region shared by California wineries. Until recently, the only reputation that Mexican wines were able to establish around the world was that they were inconsistent at best. Over the past decade or so, big Mexican wine industries such as Pedro Domecq, Bodegas de Santo TomÃs and L.A. Cetto, concentrated their efforts into the production of fine Mexican wines with an emphasis on quality and consistency. More recently, small boutique Mexican wineries, such as Cavas Valmar, Monte Xanic, Bodegas San Antonio, and Chateau Camou, started making very fine Mexican wines in small batches, attaining a level of excellence never before seen in Mexican wine. It appears that the new standard in Mexican wine quality is working, as some of the finer Mexican wines are now being exported to the United States and Europe.
but the original article seems a rather twisted exercise in logic. ON THE SAME HARDWARE, I tested Vista and Win7. Vista proved a resource hog, ran slow, and caused a number of headaches due to incompatibilities. It's "security features" were intrusive, among other things. Win7 proves to run faster than WinXP, I ran into no compatibility problems, and the security seems to be a slight improvement on WinXP. No, it isn't all media hype that's responsible for Vista's flop, and Win7's impending success. The Win7 Beta is superior to Vista, plain and simple. The finished product is likely to be even better.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
instead of the year or some letter combination or a random word... geez they could have been consistent all these years, but no. After trying everything else, we're back to just the numbers. (Will there be a 7.1 too?)
Ive tested the beta of Windows 7 and im not impressed in any way or form. Its better than Vista but so are about any OS in existance if you just put Windows applications compability aside. Vista isnt a good benchmark as its the worst possible outcome of any development i have ever seen with so much resources behind it. Ill still take XP over Windows 7 until those DRM crap are removed and driver support gets a lot better. Using older hardware wirh Vista *cough* Windows 7 (webcams, mouses, printers etc) is still a lottery.
Windows 7 has shown a astroturfing campaign beyond even my wildest dreams. Paid bloggers and journalists write it up like its gods gift to computers while all it really is is a servicepack ontop of Vista. The underlying stuff still sucks, its just hidden as much as possible from the user. The fun begin when you start to use it hard and knock on it. Then you recognize its just Vista with some lipstick on it. The only real success is the unprecedent level of astroturfing Microsoft has managed to build up. Its pretty risky as it turns peoples expectations up for a product that cant deliver.
HTTP/1.1 400
Give me a single feature that I actually need that is not already there in XP.
I see no productivity increases. I only see new stuff not needed, e.g. can't think of a single need for a local VSS installed.
Sorry, I was thinking about Itanic while writing that.
Good for you. I'm glad you're happy.
It's no longer necessary to enumerate Vista's faults here. That's a well worn path you can find for yourself quite easily, and I'm sure you've heard it all before. But you like it, and that's fine for you. Great!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Windows 7's Media Hype Having the Opposite Effect OF Vista's
Literacy people, LITERACY.
This is like a favorable comparison between a Geo Metro and a Yugo, yes its better but still not a Buick.
I haven't read all the posts but your missing the point. Windows Vista (Longhorn Beta) required a massive upgrade to hardware to perform well. so everyone upgraded there machines this time Microsoft went everyone has upgraded there machine let's just work on the code and making it pretty.
Bam of course the new operating system is going to look better why they already have all the bug reports from vista so all they need to is make it pretty slap it on the arse and send it out the door whilst pocketing a huge profit because the tech guy who couldn't figure out vista can work with the pretty new one.
Humans are always resistant to change it's the nature of the beast some will adapt and improvise others will sue because there machine has ubuntu on it.
hopefully sometime soon Workcover will be abolished so the stupids have no insulation from natural selection.
But the market for high end hardware is not growing that fast. There's gaming, video, CAD and a few other specialized areas where you need beefy horsepower. The average productivity workstation doesn't need dual cores. For a majority of home users being able to see pictures of their kids, dash off a quick letter once in a while and check email is all they need to do and they don't need a $300 OS or high end hardware to do that. I just don't see a bright future for Redmond in this.
Yay. Another advocate of junk, and part of why quality has disappeared.
Then how do you expect to have quality come back?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Sorry, my mistake. As I've mentioned above, I misread your * as a ^. Obviously you didn't spot my mistake either, so you see how I could've easily made the same error. Since I also put (x^y) and you didn't notice, I'm not convinced you were paying much attention! I did ask you to explain but you've just kinda said the same thing again. Luckily someone else noticed what I'd misread.
I've tried this in Microsoft Windows 7, and the same thing happens but I'm not convinced this is a 'bug' as such.
As someone else has mentioned, and as detailed on Wikipedia, this appears to be by design of Microsoft, that the 'Standard' mode in calc.exe is the same as that of a cheap handheld calculator, i.e. working left to right. The fact this doesn't occur in scientific mode proves to me that this was to avoid confusion by some users.
I can't imagine Microsoft deliberately wrote two different ways to calculate an expression for the two modes by accident. Still, it's interesting to see Ubuntu's standard GUI calculator (sorry, unsure which calc app it is) works this out in the correct order of operations.
Personally, I found it more annoying that there's no square root in scientific mode in pre-7... but I guess if you're using scientific mode, you'd remember to just use x^0.5 instead!
I am a "computer guy" and friends always bring their computer problems to me. I get a few "what does this mean?" questions, but several friends have Vista problems ... Real problems .. Crash loops, Sound/Video drivers "disappearing". Win Me kind of stupid stuff. I bought a laptop with Vista, and figured I could hack my way through it. After a month of this, I Installed XP on top of it. Sure I could make it work, but it kept "fixing itself" and then I had to go fix it again. Vista STINKS. Period. I don't care if a bunch of users claim "Gee I have never had problems!" To many of my un-geeky friends started having problems after buying a new PC with Vista, friends that only had "silly question" problems before suddenly had genuine.. "Better let me look at it" kind of stuff with Vista. Vista has too much artificial stupidity built in, and I won't put up with it... Some of my friends have actually "downgraded" to XP on their own .. super scary stuff for them, but they did not want to ask me, and couldn't put up with it any more.
Items 6, 11, and 12 you all list as criticisms of Windows vs. *nix, and use this to defend Vista. Yet, I thought Vista was supposed to be a major rework of Windows, no? At least, that's certainly how it was hyped.
If Vista truly represented a major reworking of Windows, 6. the gawdawful shared DLL issue would have been factored right out the window, 11. would work properly, and 12. likewise wouldn't be an issue. For that matter, issue 12 looks a lot more like MS deciding imperiously that the end user, even a power user smart enough to understand how to launch a "system" shell, simply can't be trusted -- and this certainly doesn't endear me, as an end user, to them or their OS. After all, what else aren't they telling me?
Discovering that the major reworking was mostly really of the bling and not of the underlying guts, and that what few underlying changes were made were implemented to screw over the user and remove flexibility and usability, is a major disappointment. Sure, the average consumer doesn't seem to care, and this could well be a valid argument -- but here on Slashdot, few of us could possibly be described as "average consumers".
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I agree. Many office people don't need cutting edge effects. This is why XP was able to hold off Vista - it was good enough.
It will still be good enough for a modest time yet. The big thing I see that can unseat XP is something like Windows Lean that has all the juice of fancy support when it needs to, but the CD will install Lean on your spare older box because it just sits there and needs to run your remote notifiers in the server room or something.
MS mostly sent Cleanup to Aisle 4 to get 7 out the door gain, because at least one of their middle managers understands getting something to hold shelf space in the stores.
Win7 SP2 might run Lean.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Good.
A report from someone who used both, and says 7 is on the track to sanity.
Maybe it will be usable by SP1.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Look its pretty simple. Windows 7 is a little better than Vista. Thats all but they want people so say that "..its better.." I've been Microsoft free since OSX Tiger and Leopard. I am not regretting my decision at all to switch to Mac. Id go Linux but I didn't because it relies on "PC architecture" so Im doing the old thing When unix vendors made hardware.
I put Windows 7 on the last "PC machine" that I use for my kids. Big mistake. Libraries are complete and utter nonsense to me. And why did they do this to Windows Explorer? Its completely fraking messed up. So I removed Windows 7 and will pretty much put a fedora on my last "PC" There is no reason to be in the MS camp. Games? If your a Generation O er then I can understand the eye candy but Im done with Windows for good and and either A Mac zealot or a Linux'er if the hardware runs it.
Microsoft Marketing department has nowhere to go rather than up but Im confident that a majority of people are idiots. Let them all squander the family fortune on uninspired over hype crap aka Microsoft Shite.
BTW - remember that MS campaign about an OS with a new same but its the same OS? I think its hilarious that people and the press have just fallen prey to MS's revealed plan.
Windows 7
We finally made Vista a little better, but just like Windows98SE and windowsXPSP2, instead of getting it really right, we'll release a completely new version after this.
So update to Windows 7 now -- it's the last chance you'll have for a less crappy Windows Experience(tm) for a long, long time.
I predict a successful rollout.
That's not going to happen unless governments use anti-monopolist legislation to force Microsoft's hand. In the past Microsoft has used the threat of forcing OEMs to pay for the retail version of Windows to prevent them from selling dual-boot systems.
A good product has better results for a company than advertising...
Shocking!
1)Release Good OS (XP)
2)Release Worse OS (Vista)
3)Extend life cycle of Good OS until Good OS II (7) is released
4)Provide minimal support for Worse OS whilst users take up Good OS II in their droves due to Worse OS's crappiness and Good OS's retirement
5)PROFIT???
6)PROFIT!!!
Repeat every 20 years until dead
Strange, I never have any of those things on Windows. Not since the Windows 9x days - one might as well criticise OS X based on the joke that was classic MacOS.
I've never been a fan of Windows, but the alternatives we got left with, after all the decent OSs got abandoned, I find even more annoying.
In the past Microsoft has used the threat of forcing OEMs to pay for the retail version of Windows to prevent them from selling dual-boot systems.
I know. It also all but forces customers to do something illegal or, frankly, weird, like having to buy a cable or an FDD with the OS to validate the purchase, unless you want to pay twice the cost for the same piece of software. I had to buy a 5-user Windows CAL once so that I could qualify for a certain level of discount. Having to jump through hoops like this before you even install the software starts your relationship with Microsoft in the manner it is likely to continue as a user.
They only did that, because people were bitching at them for allowing users to do things without warning. Yet when Microsoft finally made Windows behave like Mac OS, then suddenly it's bad!
It's just like the graphical-effects they put on - touted as a main advantage of Mac OS (OS X, I mean, not the awful looking version before that), yet when Windows does it, it's branded as wasting resources!
When I upgrade my O/S and software, it doesn't cost anything.
What's wrong with Microsoft's model, that they have these inefficient expenses?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
The Mojave experiment confirmed that users can be tricked into thinking Vista is good if you tell them it's the shiny new next generation OS. Why do you think it's called Windows 7... the emphasis is "this is the *next* OS! It's different from Vista! Really!"
I think $^#$!*#{NO CARRIER
$ make available
I've had it on my work laptop since March 08.....I run office, photoshop, couple of custom apps. No issues, no blue screens. I put Win7 on a new hard drive, same laptop, it runs as fast or fast than Vista. It should only get better, as they tweak the code. Only thing that doesn't run (obviously) is spybot, sanboxie, & window blinds.
Yes, just look at the sales figures.
Hey! Look where the sales numbers come from!
"From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP licence," said Jane Bradburn, Market Development Manager, Commercial Notebooks for HP Australia. "However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today."
Um, yeah. Vista is selling great... If you count the fictional licenses that come with the XP installations that people really want.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I am not a MS alarmist but one has to wonder if this approach was a big risky bait and switch campaign. If you think about it, look at the differences between Vista and Windows 7. Vista is sort of like consumer junk but has a very similar interface to Windows 7. One has to question if maybe Microsoft intentionally took the route of diversion on the Windows 7 codebase when they knew that Vista wouldn't be up to par and that it had been over 5 years. Now we have people clinging to Windows XP and those who have to go with Vista for whatever reason. Microsoft then releases Windows 7 as some sort of savior. This has bought them time to perfect the new generation desktop OS as well as push to the public that this new OS is stable and runs on slower hardware (grabs the XP holdouts as well as business IT) as well as looks and feels like Vista (which grabs that Vista converts who are not happy). Windows 7 is also compatible with Vista drivers and bought them a buffer period to get the drivers done while not having any of the transition pains Vista had.
My assumption is that Vista was their whipping boy and hold out OS while they released a new working OS. It would be akin to Ubuntu releasing a LTS and it failing miserably while they work on the real LTS and says "my bad, this is actually better, looks the same but is better". Except the fallout for them is different from MS.
Some issues are aesthetic. Some, like the failure to support some ancient legacy hardware are forgivable in a forward looking company. Some, like infrequent crashing of Windows Explorer or memory leaks are acceptable under the "all software has bugs" philosophy.
And then there are some that you don't get a Mulligan for. There's no do-over allowed on these because they betray a lack of commitment to good coding practice, validation testing and best network practice that not only has been the industry standard for a decade, but that you committed to years ago and continue to promise since.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The only reason we're seeing so many "Windows 7 does [Nice Thing]" comments is Microsoft marketing.
Oz, you've seen me on here enough to know I'm no Microsoft shill. If you have any doubts you can review my comment history.
7 really does look a lot better to me. I'm not sure if it's "good enough," but I've tried it for a week and not found any showstoppers yet. Vista? It wasn't even installed before I found blocking issues.
This is not a rave review. It's cautious optimism. Go ahead and try it yourself. I hear it runs fine in a VM.
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At least their new message is not "our product doesn't suck as much as you've heard -- as witnessed by these people who saw somebody else use it".
On a related note, the mojave experiment website now almost requires Silverlight. Whodathunkit? Is there a good slashdot word for compound failure? Maybe fail++?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You got moderated well but you're overselling here. Too many selling features in one post is almost certain to attract detractors who will accuse you of bias. As a thumb rule three is good, more is bad.
Yes a lot of these things can be had on Linux/through 3rd party programs. But now they are included in the OS, which 99% of the time means less problems/slowness/crashes. And developers can count on them to be there.
And a lot of these features are offered by third party companies who hoped to stay in business through 2010. That's adding to the pile of offenses antitrust courts are going to look at.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
But only because I upgraded my mboard, and now my old XP says it is illegal. Funny it wasn't four years ago.
But I digress.
Anyhow Win7 seems great. So far. But what happens Aug 1? Will MS send me (or all of us) a bill for $695? "take it or leave it!" LOL!
Well, I still have my Ubuntu systems in the background...
.
- aqk
F U
The biggest failure of Windows 7...
The product has to be released before it can fail. Remember that you're bashing a beta.
And yeah, if it has even one port open to the Internet in its default configuration on ship day, it's hosed. The targeted exploits will begin on day zero, and by six months they'll be commonly known. And then a patch will be issued that won't be applied by everyone because automatic updates break too much stuff. And so we'll have another worm like Conficker. Again. Because why would we learn from history?
But if it otherwise works OK noone will care. [sigh]
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's only beta; give MSFT and its vendors time.
The question still remains - why would anyone need to upgrade even when Vista SP2/Win7 comes out? In this tech maturity and economic times, companies and individuals need a compelling reason to shell out the money and pain to upgrade an OS. I cannot think of any. Fancy GUI and pseudo-security improvements are not compelling reasons. I think MSFT faces the same problem Sony has with PS3 vs. PS2.
Buisnesses who want to keep getting security patches will have to upgrade from XP sooner or later.
While I agree with this part of your observation, I happen to disagree with your assessment: "upgrade to what?" We have choices now and "Vista or W7" isn't the whole list.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Since this is the third such question in direct descent from the original post, I get to ask if you're paying attention. Are you?
At CES last week vendors were displaying new platforms that are not Vista compatible, some of which will not even initially ship until after this deadline. One must presume either that you know something they don't, or they know something you don't. My money is on the latter.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You ever buy anything from Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Google, HP, or Cisco? Those are some the companies doing a lot of the Linux kernel development (https://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php). Someone is giving those companies money to pay the people that write kernel code.
So in the end you are paying for it. What's that? Your total spending on that sort of thing is insignificant? Well when Coca-Cola goes down to IBM and buys some servers, they are spending your money to buy those servers. And so it goes with virtually any product.
Linux costs money to build too, and someone has to pay for it.
Slurm Queen: "You'll be submerged in Royal Slurm, which in a matter of minutes will transform you into a Slurm Queen like myself!"
Glurmo Half: "But your Highness, she's a commoner. Her Slurm will taste foul."
Slurm Queen: "Yes. Which is why we'll market it as New Slurm. Then, when everyone hates it, we'll bring back Slurm Classic and make billions!"
Chronologically late.
It's just called Vista Home Premium. This isn't exact but...
XP Home -> Vista Home Basic
XP MCE -> Vista Home Premium
XP Pro -> Vista Business
Enterprise is Business with extra somewhat random features, Ultimate is Enterprise and Home Premium combined.
I would like to see successors to just Home Premium and Ultimate, personally.
Hi,
Somebody please explain why should I pay good money (not to mention spend time) to go from Windows XP to Windows 7?
Even though I actually work in IT (and am thus a tinkerer when it comes to computers), with XP and Linux my PCs do pretty much all that I need - the only reason I can see to "upgrade" would be due to a new DirectX version which is released for Windows 7 only and forces me to upgrade (the kind of shitty move that MS tried with Windows Vista) in order to keep playing games on my PC.
P)lease spare me the "cool new widgets" or "fancy new filesystem that was promised last time around but didn't got released" sort of reasons - to enjoy cool new technology in computers you're better of turning to Linux.
Vista created backlash largely from people who are not great computer users.
It comes down to 'us' and 'them':
we/us like to tinker with stuff that is new and cool, for example myself I tinker with a new linux distro or something every second day it seems. I like learning and I get bored when I've mastered something or completed a project and move on. You know the kind of person. Now, I installed Vista, had no problems, or at least any problems I had were overcome without thinking. I also had no problems negotiating the new interface without having previously studied up or read anything. I Good. Infact, for someone fairly new to computers, Vista would be excellent.
The problem is "them", the people that don't like comptuers, can't use them well, and have stuggled for years to make it do anything they need to do. You know the kind of people, they still have the Bliss XP background, after years of owning their computer. Or they call the Office IT deptartment twice a day. These people have a different first reaction to us when you go and do something like change, oh, just about everything in the interface of your OS.
Where we may see a challenge when presented with something new and difficult, they may experience unfamiliarity, anger, frustration, and they will decide their opinion of vista based on this. Back in my support days, after a XP roll out, we had calls from users claiming their pc had been hacked because the menus had changed and they were looking at green hills and blue sky.
So while Vista was actually good, but troubled, there is still a huge user base who were going to complain if anything was changed, regardless if it was better or not. Because we know these kind of people, any change, even if a huge improvement is bad, because they have already once struggled to learn to use The Computer or IntraWebs at all, let alone have to learn new things.
You need to bear in mind these people are often baby boomers, who grew up in a world where there wasn't the pace of change we see today. They had decades before disruptive IT tech tipped up.
Now I understand the us/them thing, what I don't understand is the implied viewpoint from the blogosphere on Vista? How do expert bloggers complain about the kinds of things that none experts have a valid gripe about?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I loaded Vista Ultimate onto a laptop that gave me a good usability index (per Microsoft), and when it was finished loading and properly configured, Vista is horridly slow compared to XP. There was a site a while back that published some speed tests and comparisons of Vista, and found it to be quite contrary to Microsoft's adverts. I proved it again with my own laptop. So ultimately, the hard drive was pulled and set aside--maybe for some later tests. But in all; I've found that from a usability standpoint, I won't use it because its too slow and sluggish. I wonder how much Windows 7 will be akin to Vista even though Microsoft says it was completely rewritten. Was it really?? I seriously doubt it.
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So there are yet another two articles on how great Windows7 will be, how amazing, how it will kill Linux... the exactly same articles we saw before Vista came out. And XP. And 2000 (although there were less anti-Linux articles back then).
And where do these articles come from? By people paid for this from Microsoft, of course. This happens to most magazines.
Is this even worth discussing?
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
I don't know how ancient (or cheap) your "standard" calculator is, but I haven't owned or used a calculator that would compute that to 10 since the mid-80's, and I think the guys who wrote calc.exe should just drop dead from shame. You learn "Punkt vor Strich" (German phrase to memorize operator priorities) in your first year at school.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Okay, this is the second time Microsoft has done this. Around the turn of the century they released the much botched Windows Millennium edition. Everyone bought it, hated it, and replaced it with XP when that came out. Now they do the same with Vista/7. At what point do people lose their confidence in this company? Almost every American who is a technology consumer has dealt with either a botched Windows OS or a broken XBox yet they still act as if Microsoft is the only tech company in the world. Perhaps I'm stating the obvious to everyone here, but it's not right to profit from a broken product and then profit even more from its non-broken replacement.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
...Word-of-mouth marketing works.
Yeah, a Red Hat SERVICE CONTRACT. But for some reason, your example falls apart...
Hmm... What is it?
Oh yeah... Fedora. That and your incorrect assumption that development would cease without the patronage.
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But even if that was typical, the point is that Vista is doing badly against XP, which last time I looked, was still a Microsoft OS. XP was just too good! This doesn't mean OS X is doing well, so "trying each time harder to replicate OS X success formula" is nonsense. I might as well claim "Look, people still want XP instead of Vista ... therefore Amiga is more successful than Vista".
Or - maybe they are doing that, and that's why Vista is failing? It's XP's success they need to replicate, not OS X's "success".
I can't agree with you more. I have Windows Vista Premium, which I thought would give me about the same set of features as XP Professional - in fact, one downgrade option is to go to XP Professional according to the license, but I went to Windows 7 beta instead (which is Ultimate).
The first problem I had was I wanted (partial software) RAID and a dual boot Windows/Linux system. To make a long story short, what I really needed was dynamic disks and Vista Premium cripples that feature (but a legal downgrade to XP Pro allows it!). I'm still working on this setup, but currently with Windows 7 (which is Ultimate and allows it).
The final straw for me was when two releases in a row of nVidia's GTX 260 x64 drivers caused rampant crashing. This isn't Microsoft's fault, it's nVidia's, but the headache above was only the tip of the iceberg for problems I had been having with Vista as of late, so I decided if I wanted to run a system that was as buggy as a beta, I might as well run a beta.
So far my impressions of Win 7 have been favorable. I had problems with the latest Broadcom ethernet not being able to connect to the internet and had to back it out, and if you alt-tab out of a game you can never get back to it, however, I've had no crashes in Fallout 3 or Unreal Tournament 3 with the latest nVidia drivers and the Vista drivers crashed repeatedly. I'm also getting better framerates. Most of the problems I've had are avoidable. It seems less intrusive. The usability also seems much better and the default theme is aero (default for Vista Home Premium System Builders disk was basic, requiring some work to get it to Aero).
I still have a few things to check, especially OpenGL performance (fullscreen and window, the latter I expect to be slower due to context switching, but hopefully not 70% slower like I was seeing on my laptop - it should be no more than 15-20%). I just got my dev environment set up on it last night, so I plan to start building and testing my project tonight.
Vista Home Premium does not support dynamic partitions, Media Center Edition did (I've been struggling with that, so it pops in my head first).
Because of this and other crippled or removed features, I don't see Premium as comparable to MCE. It's really XP Home + a few MCE features.
The sad thing is, Vista Home Premium downgrades to XP Pro, which I vastly prefer (due to the above and tons of driver issues - in fact Win 7 beta seems to have better drivers and it uses the same driver model and is a beta...).
You know, I like using a calculator that I know how the operators are ordered even when I don't follow it with the same calculation on my head.
Anyway, if it is displaying '5', when I press '*2' it should change to 10, despite any other key that I've pressed before, with the only exception of '()', that are there for a reason. Also, it should show me when it is in the parenthesis mode.
And, after you ask me, the scientific calculator I'm used to does exactly that, like standard ones. I've never met a calculator that does something different*, except by MS's calc.
* Some of them delay the result, those are called 'algebraic', others reoder the operator, so there is no ambiguity, those need to show a stack. But no one of them will display only the number '5' and when pressed '*2' will give you '7' as result.
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You're all really, really silly.
This doesn't mean OS X is doing well
I have seen it written in the press a number of times that Vista is the greatest gift Microsoft could have given Apple and Linux. Google it up yourself. Another year of this and they'll be cracking interesting market shares. Microsoft can't afford to many more successes like this one.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Ok, i'm running XP/2003 on my machines and I installed the win7 beta in a vmware session. It actually works pretty well compared to vista at about the same time development point. Thats to be expected though, win7 is pretty much just Vista SE from what I can tell. There aren't any big features over vista that scream gotta have, but as with every M$ release since 2000, there is at least one thing that annoys me. In this case its the removal of the classic mode. Call me an old Luddite, but frankly I'm pretty happy with the win95 start menu and theme with a title bar, menu bar and movable button bars that generally can be disabled to save screen space. Why remove a feature that a decent percentage of your users are using? They could add the little search box to the classic menu and it would be better than either one. Stupid, some junior programmer at M$ is probably driving the whole thing cause he can't figure out the code base.
Personally, I found it more annoying that there's no square root in scientific mode in pre-7... but I guess if you're using scientific mode, you'd remember to just use x^0.5 instead!
I hadn't noticed that before. Wierd...
However, using INV X^2 will get you the square root, and INV X^3 will get you the cube root.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yesterday, I was at +5 Insightful.
Today, somehow I've been modded "overrated" 4 times and "Troll" once. I wonder how many of them happened to be M$ employees?
If you can read this sig, congratulations, you have your glasses on!
No, really, it is!
The pig, I might add, is less than pleased.
It's also gay, and is planning to elope to California with Sarah Palin's Pit Bull, to get married.
~90% of computer users
After playing with Windows 7 a bit I can say one thing. It beats the pants off Vista.
Beta or no beta.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Most numbers like IDC's are using internet tracking numbers to a host of web sites. While on the one hand this only tracks machines connected to the internet, by and large that's compensated by ignoring all of the non-desktop, non-notebook machines like servers, POS systems, and other dedicated devices, as those typically don't spend much time browsing the web.
And tracking those percentages would definitely include netbooks, by their very nature.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
i got the leak on piratebay and well ... i'm stil not interested in windows ... media or anything, it makes a great (well, not all that great but playable) gamestation out of my hardware, but that's about it ... i say the future of windows lies in games for personal computers, WHO tf in his right mind would use windows for business purposes i ask of thee ... or thou, my deviant (or defiant) ... or maybe not so ...at all ...well ...eum ... yea
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)