Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Released

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has finally released the final build of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. 'There are a few significant additions that are included in SP2: Windows Search 4.0, Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack, the ability to record data on to Blu-Ray media natively in Vista, Windows Connect Now (WCN) is now in the Wi-Fi Configuration, and exFAT file system supports UTC timestamps. The service pack contains about 800 hotfixes.' A list of other notable changes is available on TechNet. SP2 isn't included in Automatic Update yet, but it will be 'during the coming months.'"

Comments

Secure... lol

[joelmax]

And now that it is released to the public, Vista SP2 is no longer the most secure OS out there... it was doing so well too... why did they have to release it, its all downhill from here..

Re:Secure... lol

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree.

Just installed Vista SP2. Let me tell you it is the most secure and stab

[NO CARRIER]

Re:Secure... lol

[Anonymous Coward]

That tells you how good SP2 is. Even when his computer DOES go down, the PC manages to save his message, append "[NO CARRIER]" to it, and post it as anonymous. Let's see Linux do that!

Re:Secure... lol

[Ethanol-fueled]

Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Released

Will everybody please stop calling it Vista SP2? It's called Windows 7 for fuck's sake!

Re:Secure... lol

[twidarkling]

No, it's Windows 6.5. If you had 4 working brain cells, you'd know the worthwhile features aren't available in Vista, except as crippled versions.

Re:Secure... lol

[kno3]

darn, used up all my mod points, for the love of all that is holy, mod this guy up!

Re:Secure... lol

[maugle]

Just installed Vista SP2. Let me tell you it is the most secure and stab

[NO CARRIER]

...and stabs you when it thinks you're about to make fun of it, then posts your message as a warning to others?

Re:Secure... lol

[djfake]

Everyone knows it's Windows 6, KB948465.

Re:Secure... lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken truly like someone who doesn't know much about Vista or Windows 7.

Re:Secure... lol

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Vista 6.2

Re:Secure... lol

[CarpetShark]

Actually, that's a Linux server detecting Vista and filling in the blanks.

Re:Secure... lol

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree.

Just installed Vista SP2. Let me tell you it is the most secure and stab

[NO CARRIER]

... and stabs you in the back.

Re:Secure... lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Released

Will everybody please stop calling it Vista SP2? It's called Windows 7 for fuck's sake!

No, it's Windows 2009

Re:Secure... lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Released

Will everybody please stop calling it Vista SP2? It's called Windows 7 for fuck's sake!

No, it's Windows 6.0.6002
(at least that's what the operating system reports after you install SP2)

Doesn't make a difference.

[AltGrendel]

No one's using Vista anyway.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Kohenkatz]

No one's using Vista anyway.

What are you talking about?? Plenty of people are using Vista. My Website's stats show (For the month of May until today): Windows XP 57.5 % Windows Vista 22.5 %

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Saint Fnordius]

No one's using Vista anyway.

No, but many are forced to tolerate it.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[DigitalPasture]

Do you believe everything you read or hear on the net and TV? I've been using Vista 64bit for about two years now. It's the best (released) OS I've seen out of MS so far. Very stable since SP1 was released. Initially, yes there were problems. Most of the issues I encountered were due to Nvidia drivers however, not problems caused by MS. I seem to remember having similar issues when XP was released many moons ago. I still maintain that the only real problem with Vista is the media and users that are too afraid to learn modern tech.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[flyingfsck]

You should not check your own web site so often... ;)

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[sortius_nod]

Looking at your site, I can see you develop sites for people who don't know any better (than to either get some real professionals or do it themselves). This kind of falls into line with 22.5% of your visitors being Vista users.

I doubt most people have owned a computer for more than a few months before visiting your site, and if they have they wouldn't understand the problems with vista.

Anecdotal evidence is never an apt reply to sarcasm or trolling, you'll just end up looking the fool.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Chatterton]

I beg to differ with your numbers:

Numbers of page view per platform on the last 12 month of a little european website:

                          Page Views
Platform                      Sum    %
(blank)               231,944,487   14
AIX                        63,675    0
AmigaOS                     1,399    0
BeOS                        1,145    0
CP/M                       26,258    0
DOS                        28,158    0
Dreamcast                     319    0
HP-UX                       1,405    0
IRIX                        2,535    0
Linux                  10,782,630    1
Macintosh              22,543,401    1
NetBSD                      1,930    0
OS/2                        6,449    0
OSF1                        1,000    0
OpenVMS                       383    0
SCO_SV                         38    0
Slurp                  61,242,836    4
Solaris                 7,625,811    0
SunOS                     197,176    0
Unix (unknown)             67,609    0
WebTV                       2,111    0
Windows                12,050,352    1
Windows 16-bit             11,607    0
Windows 2000          132,118,040    8
Windows 32-bit          6,226,532    0
Windows 95                723,941    0
Windows 98             32,166,513    2
Windows CE                107,696    0
Windows NT              5,474,837    0
Windows Sever 2003     19,986,701    1
Windows Vista          30,442,927    2
Windows XP          1,012,030,914   62
unknown                39,486,905    2
TOTAL               1,625,367,720  100

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[kno3]

This guy will be modded down, unfortunately. I totally agree, I have been using Vista 64bit for over a year now, it has crashed on me twice in that time. My XP machine is far less stable. Also, because of its 64bit capabilities and its far better use of multiple cores (I have a quad core), I have found a performance increase over XP. Its performance has also remained, even though I have added a large amount of apps to it, it does not seem to suffer from slowing down to a slow grind after a few months of use, like XP does. There are some stupid, irritating features to it, like the UAC, driver signing, aero theme...etc. Luckily all of these features can be turned off. The only 2 problems I have with it is the integration of DRM, and the lack of EAX support (although this is being solved by drivers).

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[L4t3r4lu5]

My Windows 7 RC installation is reported as IE 7 on Windows XP SP2, because half of the video streaming sites I use (legitimate, obviously) break with "AMAGAD UR OS IZ NOT ZUPPRORTREAD." messages, which are absolute rubbish as I am able to watch them in Firefox on Windows 7 as long as I alter the user agent string.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Kohenkatz]

Looking at your site

The site that my email address is at is currently a placeholder until I have time to work on my own site. The site where I pulled those statistics is a real business site for a Summer Camp. The reason I did not (and will not) post a link to that site is because it is on a weak server and I'd rather not get slashdotted.

I doubt most people have owned a computer for more than a few months before visiting your site, and if they have they wouldn't understand the problems with vista.

Where do you get that piece of information from? Personally, I have been working in Web and Software Development and in Systems Administration for fifteen years and I have no problems with Vista.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Kohenkatz]

My Win7 comes up (at least in AWStats) as

Windows (Unknown Version)

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[TheLink]

You might not have had problems, but so far a lot of people have had problems.

Maybe it's the initial stuff that was crap. But you know what, that makes it an even better reason to stay with what works. Stuff that has more of the bugs fixed.

I was using Win2K after WinXP SP2 came out. And Win2K was quite stable. The few blue screens in years was due to hardware going bad, or a bad NIC driver.

I'm now using WinXP SP3 on the desktop and ubuntu for my server. And both have been stable. I wouldn't use WinXP "the original release".

I tried vista on a test box at work and I got it to blue screen quite quickly - just logged in and out a few times, dunno what happened. I seem to have a knack of crashing or hanging stuff. When the first imacs came out (the colourful ones), I went to an apple shop and checked a demo unit out, and for some reason it hung on me. I don't think I did anything really unusual. Just clicked about using stuff. I also crashed a demo unit Atari ST. I've crashed someone's Forth webserver on my first test...

I think I'll skip Vista. Maybe Win7 or something else would be stable enough for me :).

Don't get me wrong I'm grateful for the guinea pigs and early adopters. It's just not a good idea for everyone to be an early adopter and go Vista.

Personally, I've seen Vista and Win7, and it sure looks like MS has gone nuts. They've changed a lot of "tech" UI stuff for no apparent good reason.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[DigitalPasture]

LOL, they branded me as a troll already for talking about the way things are. Thankfully, some people out there have real experience with it. You are correct, UAC is horrible... I disable it on all my machines save for the laptop I cart around. If you haven't checked it out yet (I just start using it 3 days ago), take a look at the Media Center component. With a few plugins and a TV card, I've built the best HTPC I've ever seen. Didn't expect MS to build something like that and not have it on the fore-front. The only lingering issue I have at this point (now that SP2 fixed Bluetooth) is that Peer Guardian still seems off in 64bit. I guess I'll be sticking with VMware a bit longer to emulate XP.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[SterlingSylver]

Your comment matches up with my experience with x64 Vista. Which makes me wonder if there's a significant difference in performance between the 32 bit and 64 bit versions. Maybe the 64 bit doesn't actually carry the Black Plague after all?

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[diskofish]

Vista isn't that bad on a powerful enough computer. I bought a new laptop with Vista 64 reinstalled. I tried XP on this computer (bad luck with Vista in the past), but some drivers weren't even available so the overall stability of the machine suffered. I don't really have any major complaints, and I think the built in search is pretty great for mp3s. It's two years later now, and most computers are finally powerful enough to run Vista.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the best (released) OS I've seen out of MS so far.

you must be kidding me

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[pckl300]

Yes, there's a huge difference. My laptop came with 32-bit preinstalled. and after a few months of usage, I upgraded to 64-bit and immediately noted everything being faster, especially if you have >= 4 GB of RAM.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[mrdoogee]

Add me to the folks who use Vista 64-bit with no complaints. Its as stable as my XP machine ever was.

I just wish more programs would be written in 64 bit code, I run 75% of my applications as x86.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[DigitalPasture]

You'll get no qualms from me. Early adopters get what they deserve. I'm unfortunately put into that position quite a bit... I'm top tier tech support, so I need to learn new OSes when they're released. Haven't had any real issues with 64bit save for the driver issue and PG2 mentioned earlier. That being said, I wouldn't run Vista 64bit on anything less than a C2Duo, 4GBs RAM and a discreet video card. If you don't have that, you'd be best served sticking with XP until Win7 (I've found the beta and RC1 to work well with slightly older hardware).

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Starayo]

I totally agree, I have been using Vista 64bit for over a year now, it has crashed on me twice in that time. My XP machine is far less stable.

Now, I'm not going to argue about Vista's stability, it's the speed and general bloat I have problems with, but seriously, what the fuck are all you people doing to your XP installations?!

I barely maintain my system at all, much to my disdain, but I haven't had it freeze/crash/BSOD/whatever in the past 3 years (well, a few times, but they don't count because it was faulty hardware, not software) and I torture the hell out of this computer!

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, that, and the fact that it's slow as shit. Seriously I bought a PC pre-loaded with Vista, and despite having heard bad things about it, I decided to give it a try. It was *unbearably* slow, on a 2009 PC! I turned off all the fancy graphics, and the indexing, and a bunch of other stuff. It got a lot faster. I installed XP on another partition, and.. well it's unquestionably faster. What I *really* don't get is why certain random things are so much slower - like copying a small file in explorer??

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[DigitalPasture]

No... Not a real notable difference depending on what HW you have. I ran Vista x86 before not having all my RAM started bugging me. A few old school games (the original Homeworld comes to mind) worked better but other than that pretty much the same. I seem to remember the x86 version not using signed drivers, but I may be wrong.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

No he's not since Windows 7 isn't released yet and Vista is heaps ahead of XP.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[KasperMeerts]

And I'm running a whopping 100% of all my programs in 64 bit. Why are people still using Windows again?

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[pcolaman]

Install a half decent graphics card (instead of using the Intel integrated shit) and most of your speed problems will disappear. Unless you got something with a Celeron or Athlon X2, in which case your CPU is too slow to handle Vista effectively, in which case I'd recommend sticking with XP.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Starayo]

And therein lies the problem. I shouldn't need a great computer to run the operating system.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[sdiz]

OSF1 and CP/M?
I wonder what kind of website it is.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[fishthegeek]

SCO_SV 38 0

Sco_SV has 38 users? Why haven't we seen a SCO doubles market share article?

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[DigitalPasture]

Then stick with XP... From 10 years ago. You don't need new features or better handling of HW resources right?

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[CrossChris]

It's the best (released) OS I've seen out of MS so far.

That doesn't say much for Vista, does it? MS have never released any software that works properly.

If it says "Microsoft" on the box, you know it's faulty!

Windows - a poor proprietary client for a Unix world.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[DigitalPasture]

Seconded. It's a graphically accelerated OS. Cannot imagine running Vista on anything but discreet graphics.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[DigitalPasture]

It's like any other OS (including XP). I have to spend a fair amount of time removing stock components and disabling services to get it to where I'm happy. If run stock, I can understand how you'd take a pretty big performance hit.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[tnk1]

I'm using Vista now for the new PC I built for myself at home. All in all, it hasn't caused me to start screaming and running to find a copy of XP.

Having said that, it took three tries to install it, for some reason. It has also decided that it needs 2GB of physical memory to do complicated things like sit in Windows Explorer and do nothing. Happily, I have 6GB on this PC, but I would like to point out that my last PC only had 2GB total and it pretty much ran any application out there on XP.

UAC drove me insane about 10 minutes after I started using Vista. It was rapidly turned off.

By default, Vista pretty much tries to find every image, video, or whatever on your host and make sure that it has an Explorer thumbnail. Now, I do recall that XP did something similar too, before you made the needed performance changes.

It's just that, for some reason, I expected some how, that I could actually not *have* to turn those useless eye candy features off this time. That was not to be the case. With the default settings, on my new Core i7 920 with its 6GB, I was actually treated to opening my D: hard drive and having the window it opened briefly display (Not responding) for about 2 seconds. Any directory with any substantial number of images or even icons, I would just sit there and watch as it ran down them, slowly changing from the generic icon to the icon for the actual application. For a moment I was afraid that I had done something horribly wrong... like I had somehow put my CPU in backwards or that it was using my sound card to render the icons.

In the end, there are things you can do to fix most of the most annoying issues. And as long as you get the worst offenders, like the thumbnail making, you can get the pretty Aero interface to be pretty responsive with almost full effects. But the fact that I have what can only be described as a high end gaming desktop and I am still having these problems out of the box is disturbing.

Vista is not the worst Microsoft OS I have ever used, and it's far from unusable, but it is by far the most disappointing even after a few years of hearing it disparaged. Its not that they failed to get the hard stuff right, its that they made the easy stuff stop working as well as it used to.

And the final thing. There is no "Up a directory" button in the Windows Explorer windows any more. You have to use the stupid breadcrumbs/tree navigation now. Seriously.... why? I mean, I see people post "Just use the damn breadcrumbs and stop complaining!" in forums and I think to myself: "well maybe it is somehow better, don't ask me how, but why would you remove something that people use and are used to for no reason?" Its not like it would have taken a huge amount of development resources to leave it in there. Someone actually made the boneheaded decision to actually remove it and not even provide it as an optional setting to put it back. Right now I am actually running an add-on to get a similar functionality.

So, I bought Vista, I have a gaming machine, I wanted DirectX 10, and I won't buy Windows 7 until SP1 so I really had little choice. Its not the end of the world, but it leaves you wondering if you haven't taken a few steps backwards in places that you had thought were nice and comfortable and settled. At this point, I'm thinking the only real benefit of buying Vista, other than DX10, is that I'll be able to get an upgrade price for Windows 7 when I inevitably upgrade.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[DigitalPasture]

That's why I've always told my client base to wait for at least the first service pack on any new MS OS before purchasing. I see your tag... Never had any problems in *nix with a new release? I have!

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Inda]

You, and others, say UAC is horrible. Is that because it is your PC/Laptop and you are the only user?

I think UAC is great. I get home from work and my daughter says "What's your password because I need to install XYZ" and I smile. I can let her do as she pleases on my laptop and not worry about her install the latest Malware, Crapware (iTunes), etc.

The only time I've grumbled is when Firefox auto-updates while she's using it and it can't finish its upgrade without my password. (great engrish Inda)

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense.
You don't produce media.

ProTools
Lexicon
MBOX2
Sandisk (oh yeah they have drivers, not much good if the TOOLS you use are on the drive you can't access)

Bla Bla Bla bla bla... NONSENSE!!

The only thing insightful here is a mis-spelling, like in incite a riot in your box against hardware.

Sure if you browse the web, email, text edit your vista is fine. If you are trying to do video, audio production with hardware you've paid thousands of dollars for your stupid $300 OS is crap, a hassle, a headache!

Frankly I will not let this lie continue to propagate. So Moderators keep him up at +5 so the truth can be seen below.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Blakey Rat]

There's a difference between "not supported" and "doesn't work."

Not that I'm defending the website's slowness in adapting to change.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[pcolaman]

I didn't install Windows 7 Beta (and haven't had a chance to check out the RC yet) but from what I've heard, nothing has really changed on that front with W7 versus Vista, either. Unless it's a laptop, I have no idea why most people don't have some sort of discreet graphics card now. They are dirt cheap.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[lewiscr]

Everybody said the same thing about XP when it came out.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

I concur that UAC is great. Furthermore, I was able to find the group policy setting that forces you to authenticate instead of merely confirm every action.
As for Firefox auto-updates, that is firefox's fault. I've had goofiness when I hit cancel on the privilidge escalation dialog, but IMHO Firefox should be able to just continue working nomrally if it doesn't update.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

You don't need a "great computer" to run the Vista, you just need a lot of RAM. And by a lot, I mean 1GB, which, by todays standards isn't that much. I'm pretty sure the rest of the RAM usage is just caching or other behind the scenes cleverness. I've run Vista side by side on a 1GB machine a 4GB machine (RAM) and with only 1GB to use, only ~600MB are used, while on the 4GB machine, ~1.8G are used.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Because some of us need 32-bit emulation. WoW64 or whatever it is called works flawlessly out of the box. I assume you were making a snide comment about how some FLOSS operating system/userland is superior. Lets see you run 10 year old 32-bit applications out of box with no tinkering on your fabulous 64-bit system.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently bought a laptop with Vista pre-installed. A 2.4 GHz Core2-duo with 4GB of RAM. Using Acrobat Pro, I created a PDF of about 600 scanned grayscale images (a book). It took nearly 9.5 minutes. I then went to my older laptop with a 1.73 GHz Pentium M and 2 GB of RAM running Windows XP. Same files, same version of Acrobat Pro. It took only 3.5 minutes. I blew away Vista on the new machine and installed XP and tried the same task. The result? 2 min 40 sec. Needless to say, I kept the XP install.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

WorksForMe. I have a laptop with Intel 945GM and it works with Aero. Every once in a while I will get some tearing when I have lots of windows open and I try to to window flip, but its actually not bad. YMMV.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[weicco]

Well, eh, the statement is weird. Allthought you are technically correct but if you want or need multiple cores, heck load of memory, fastest pixel cruncher there is and so on then you need great computer. And you need great operating system to use that computer. So these two goes hand in hand./p>

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[fwarren]

It is simple. O/S 2 had the IBM "Stink of Death" on it which is why Windows 95 won and O/S 2 lost.

Vista has the Microsoft ME "Stink of Death" on it. You can't really change what people think of it now. There is death, there are taxes. There is Vista sucking.

Microsoft screwed the pooch on it. They wasted 3 years working on longhorn and had to scrap it all. They spent 3 more years putting Vista together. Microsoft decided it HAD to release it in 3 years. So ready or not, it hit the market 3 years later.

There were clearly issues with it that needed to be ironed out. The same complaint that Linux had to live with. It runs perfectly for you on hardware YYY but for me on XXX it totally sucks.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the content of your website.

If it deals with making Vista slightly less horrible then you will have Vista users flocking to your site :-)

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[DigitalPasture]

Yes, on the computers I'm complaining about I am the only user. I left UAC alone on the computer I built for my parents for obvious reasons. UAC is probably fine for a standard user, but it drives me crazy... Thankfully it's easy to disable.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Mister Whirly]

Ditto with my experience as well. I think that most people who complain about Vista have never actually used a SP1 or newer version for any amount of time. About the only gripe I can come up with about Vista 64-bit is that getting some of the video/audio codecs installed can be a pain. But really, that is the only issue I have had (well, besides some software not being available for 64-bit version, but that is not the fault of the OS). Other than that is has been rather smooth sailing and I am unsure what all the fuss is about.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[ciggieposeur]

What is "Slurp" such that it has twice as many Win98 users?

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Hal_Porter]

I just wish more programs would be written in 64 bit code, I run 75% of my applications as x86.

I make sure all my Windows stuff builds as 64bit and I test on Vista64, but really for most applications there's no point.

If you need >4GB of address space it would be useful, but most applications can be written not to. Databases are apparently an exception. Still it's a bad idea to assume that you can memory map a huge file into memory, and that's the killer app for 64 bits.

In terms of performance most benchmarks put 64 and 32 bit neck and neck - ±a few percent%. Sure you have more registers, but all x86 chips use caching and register renaming to make that less significant than you'd think. 32 bit code thunks on 64 bit Windows, but the thunking mechanism is very lightweight. I've never checked but I imagine that integers are movzx'd from the stack to a register and pointers are movsx'd. You apparantly need far jump to switch from 32 to 64 bit too. But my guess is that all this stuff was agreed by Microsoft and AMD so that it ends up being efficient.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

God dammit! It's discrete, not discreet!
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/discreet.html

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[CarpetShark]

half of the video streaming sites I use (legitimate, obviously) break with "AMAGAD UR OS IZ NOT ZUPPRORTREAD." messages

Which, of course, are all thanks to Microsoft's monopoly, which you're supporting by still using Windows. Not trying to cause trouble, but there's no point complaining about a problem if you're still part of the problem.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[blacksmith_tb]

Yahoo's spider/bot. Presumably Googlebot was higher, but was manually removed.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[KasperMeerts]

I don't have to. I recompile them or use a newer version.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[DigitalPasture]

Not entirely sure of the legality but give K-Lite Codec pack a shot (search for "Edskes File Download Mirror" in Google). There is some setup required which probably shouldn't be handled by an end-user, but this pack handles most codec needs. For everything it doesn't, VLC.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

you guys can throw numbers at each other all day long, but without context they are meaningless.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Rary]

You don't need a "great computer" to run the Vista, you just need a lot of RAM. And by a lot, I mean 1GB, which, by todays standards isn't that much

Not only is that not much by today's standards, but it's even dirt cheap. One GB of RAM costs less than $15.

And yes, Vista does all kinds of nifty caching and other tricks to make better use of RAM. There's simply no point in having RAM sit there unused.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Anonymous Coward]

The weird thing is that we have more unknown OSs than Vista....

btw, I use Vista and I'm not trolling. :)

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[ITJC68]

I would have to echo these comments. I too run Windows Vista 64 bit for the last year and no problems at all!! XP used to give me issues after 5 to 6 months. Vista 64 bit has been great. I know Linux is a great OS but for the non techie people using PCs Vista 64 bit is a very good OS with the proper hardware and with hardware costs where they are it is not expensive to spec or build your own system that will run it very efficiently. I hate to say it but the whole reason Vista has a bad reputation is not so much the OS itself it was the system requirements. People who run single core CPUs and less than 1 gig of ram should not run Vista or at least run 2 gigs of ram. That makes a huge difference. I haven't tried Windows 7 yet but may look at it soon to see what is coming. My main system will remain on Vista for all my daily computing.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[644bd346996]

How seriously are you actually using Vista x64? I was forced to upgrade from XP because I actually needed a 64-bit OS. (I do scientific computation, but some of my apps are windows-only, like SolidWorks.) When stressed like that, Vista has proven to be slower and less stable for the things that could actually be done within the confines of 32-bit XP. I used to be able to run simulations for at least a week without crashes. On vista, I'm lucky if my computer is still on in the morning when I let things run overnight. And to top it off, it's power management on my laptop is worse than most linux distros (although this is more of a driver situation than a windows problem).

I've no doubt that Vista x64 can be better as a casual desktop system due to the increased headroom of a 64-bit platform, the re-written drivers, and better security, but I've yet to figure out how to tune it for heavy-duty work.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Cramer]

That's not UAC. What you are talking about is the (simple) difference between a user and an administrator. Microsoft has never understood that difference. Which leads us to the BS that is UAC... even with admin rights you still have to confirm every damned thing you do. It's a horrible stupid kludge. If you don't what people doing "admin" things, don't make them an admin. (it's a tough concept in the windows world.)

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[scoot80]

half of the video streaming sites I use (legitimate, obviously) break with "AMAGAD UR OS IZ NOT ZUPPRORTREAD." messages

Which, of course, are all thanks to Microsoft's monopoly, which you're supporting by still using Windows. Not trying to cause trouble, but there's no point complaining about a problem if you're still part of the problem.

And you are supporting terrorism, animal abuse, and global warming by using whatever the hell you are using.. Mac is it?

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[westlake]

And therein lies the problem. I shouldn't need a great computer to run the operating system.

Define "operating system."

Define "great computer."

If raw power is there and raw power is affordable, why shouldn't the operating system make use of it?
   

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[NemoinSpace]

Define "operating system."
anything other than WinMe or Vista.
Define "great computer."
anything but HP.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Tiger_Storms]

As much as I would love to call your website "little" getting over a billion visits, I would like to know the 319ish people still using a Dreamcast to surf the internet with, let alone visit this website with. ... The fact DOS has more site visits thatn Windows 16bit, is just awesome...

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[sapphire wyvern]

Furthermore, I was able to find the group policy setting that forces you to authenticate instead of merely confirm every action.

You can do that for Administration accounts, yes. However, you may not be aware that requesting authentication with a super user's credentials is the normal UAC behaviour for limited users.

Personally, I set up two accounts on my computer: an Administrator account, where I turned off UAC prompting, and a personal limited account that I mostly use. When I log in as the Administrator, it means I plan to do a bunch of admin things and don't want to be nagged - I provide one password when I log in, and that's it. If I find I have a need to do something admin-ey while I'm using my standard account, UAC just prompts me to type in my super user's name & password, and it escalates me for the duration on the operation. Very much like Linux & OSX desktops.

It's only annoying when an app installer is written to create Start Menu/Desktop icons only for the user who's running the installer, and doesn't offer an "all users" option. In those cases I sometimes have to copy the relevant files from the super user's profile to my actual working profile.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Allador]

That's not UAC. What you are talking about is the (simple) difference between a user and an administrator. Microsoft has never understood that difference.

And you clearly dont understand the software you're talking about.

Which leads us to the BS that is UAC... even with admin rights you still have to confirm every damned thing you do. It's a horrible stupid kludge. If you don't what people doing "admin" things, don't make them an admin. (it's a tough concept in the windows world.)

If you dont like UAC in that configuration, why not change how UAC behaves? Turn off admin-approval, and change the UAC behavior so it works more like sudo, or like the XP-style runas.

It seems to me like you didnt take 5 minutes to google how to tweak your UAC config from the grandma & grandpa home-user configuration it ships with to a more suitable one for yourself.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Allador]

If you turn off UAC, how do you elevate to an admin account when you need to install new software or change system settings?

Runas doesnt really work right in Vista, so I'm betting that isnt it.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Allador]

The achilles heel of Vista is drivers. If the drivers have problems, then the whole thing falls over.

As a counter-example to yours, I'm running Vista x64 Business on an HP Compaq 8710w laptop. 2.4C2D, 4GB memory, 7200rpm hdd, and an Nvidia Quadro FX 1600M with 512MB onboard.

This machine shipped from HP as x64 ready, and has been the most flawless laptop I've ever owned. It runs basically until the once a month updates from MS, and I abuse it pretty heavily, running Oracle Enterprise 10g, Eclipse, and Tomcat with a couple big app servers, all a part of normal development. I actually am looking at moving up to 8GB of memory, as the 4 isnt really enough for that kind of use (I have the swappiness set really low).

It literally just keeps going, and keeps going, and keeps going, and never stops. It's also the most reliable Vista machine I've seen in the field, though I think that has more to do with it being a high-end engineering laptop from HP, so the drivers are high quality.

Be careful that many CAD/CAM/CAE apps dont really support 64-bit properly, though I cant speak specifically to SolidWorks. Too many apps in that space have near monopolies, and just never upgrade their software.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Allador]

Actually, I think you'll find that in the corporate space, HP has some of the best kit out there.

In corporate-level laptops (ie, things branded Compaq, not the crap you buy in BestBuy), they're absolutely fantastic. Nearly flawless.

In x86 servers, the ProLiant's are also fantastic.

In particular, the high end HP laptops run x64 Vista quite well. Seems like that class of machine is one of the only ones to have quality drivers.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Allador]

I think the issue is more the drivers.

If your equipment supports x64, then the drivers are either freshly written for Vista, or have gotten quite a bit of work.

I think a big part of the problem before was that alot of low-end, consumer level equipment shipped with drivers that were minimally modified from XP so that they (just barely) worked. But if the equipment was to support x64, they had to put some real resources into developing the drivers.

This leads to another general rule of thumb for vista: You'll do MUCH better if you buy equipment that is officially supported in x86 or x64. Stuff that is NOT supported in x64 seems to be lower quality, and more shoddy in the drivers.

And since Vista is heavily sensitive to bad drivers ...

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[kno3]

I don't think I am stressing my computer as much as you, I am using it as a desktop and occasional gaming computer. I have done some serious re encoding of HD video which meant that I needed to leave it of for a few days straight with all 4 cores maxed out constantly, it handled that fine. I also find that it runs Autodesk AutoDAC, Inventor and Mechanical all very well, AutoCAD and Inventor are 64bit, and load noticeably quicker than in XP 32bit. As Allador said, it may well be that you have a shoddy driver or something that is causing instabilities, with some background checks on your hardware Google could throw some light on it, but you may spend a long time trawling.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[Saint Fnordius]

Relax, I was just trying to turn a troll into a funny. In all honesty I'm of the camp that thinks the OS should be as unobtrusive as possible, meaning it's never used. It's just there and gets out of your way so that you can work (or play games).

Of course, I could also remind you that calling Vista the best OS you've seen out of Microsoft is damning with faint praise...

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[CarpetShark]

Reactionary response. Well done.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[TheLink]

And they were right. XP was crap when it first came out. So it wasn't such a good idea to buy a great computer just to run it.

Today, XP SP3 is a lot better than XP SP1 or XP "The Original Release" in terms of stability and security.

Similarly, why buy a great computer just to run Vista SP1 or Vista "The Original Release"?

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[duguk]

Install a half decent graphics card (instead of using the Intel integrated shit) and most of your speed problems will disappear. Unless you got something with a Celeron or Athlon X2, in which case your CPU is too slow to handle Vista effectively, in which case I'd recommend sticking with XP.

So Vista is just about ok - if you want lots of excessive graphics - but just not for Laptop users?

Sounds about right to me.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[duguk]

You don't need a "great computer" to run the Vista, you just need a lot of RAM. And by a lot, I mean 1GB, which, by todays standards isn't that much. I'm pretty sure the rest of the RAM usage is just caching or other behind the scenes cleverness. I've run Vista side by side on a 1GB machine a 4GB machine (RAM) and with only 1GB to use, only ~600MB are used, while on the 4GB machine, ~1.8G are used.

Whereas Windows XP will run on 64MB of RAM. Your definition of 'a lot' is very different from mine and many of my customers and friends.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Your setup just seems weird to me though. If I had to make a comparison to a linux system I would say that you have created an account named root2 in the administrator (or wheel is it still called) and configured sudo to not require passwords to elevate. Then you do all your work with the oter account.
I was actually aware of the fact you have to type in Administrator credentials for limited accounts, but it just seemed so foolish to have 2 accounts when the administrative account really does run with limited credentials until it needs admin ones. [1] Since I could have the exact same effect, why bother with two accounts.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

I think I was unclear. By run, I mean run well. I've seen XP run on 128 MB of RAM and it was a painful experience. An old pentium 2 machine that theoretically met the minimum specs and started life with Windows 95. Sure, it'll work, but its not terribly useful for anything when it starts swapping the second time you open a program.
My experience is that Vista will hum nicely with 1GB, it may indeed be tolerable with less RAM, I just don't know.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[duguk]

You did say "You don't need a "great computer" to run the Vista" [sic]

Sure, it all depends what you use your Operating System for, but I've seen people use XP with 64mb purely for internet and email with no problems, and without much swapping either.

On Vista, you'd need 16 times that amount of RAM, for any version apart from Home Basic.

Compare that to the amount of benefits you get by moving from XP to Vista. I haven't seen many.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[pcolaman]

Well, just laptops without good graphics cards. I'm working on an FX series Gateway laptop that has an 8800 GT card.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[duguk]

That's most of the bargain laptops out then. Quick check based on some data I have suggests around 136 of the 317 laptops have dedicated graphics.

I know Vista will run on integrated graphics, but it's a bit of a push for Microsoft to go so far on graphics when it's not actually needed for most things. Give me back my 486dx2 and a 2.4 kernel!

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[noc007]

I tried vista on a test box at work and I got it to blue screen quite quickly - just logged in and out a few times, dunno what happened. I seem to have a knack of crashing or hanging stuff. When the first imacs came out (the colourful ones), I went to an apple shop and checked a demo unit out, and for some reason it hung on me. I don't think I did anything really unusual. Just clicked about using stuff. I also crashed a demo unit Atari ST. I've crashed someone's Forth webserver on my first test...

Per that paragraph, I think you might have the Gabriel Effect.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[pcolaman]

Give me back my 486dx2 and a 2.4 kernel!

Nothing's stopping you from doing just that. It's not like someone has a gun to your head saying you have to use Vista.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[duguk]

Nothing's stopping you from doing just that. It's not like someone has a gun to your head saying you have to use Vista.

Only if you try and buy a new laptop! Have you tried to buy a new laptop without Vista? Unless you go with Toshiba, it's pretty difficult!

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[pcolaman]

If it already has Vista and you don't want it, nothing (short of technological ineptitude) will stop you from removing it and installing Linux or an older version of Windows (plenty to be had with some simple searching on EBay).

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[duguk]

If it already has Vista and you don't want it, nothing (short of technological ineptitude) will stop you from removing it and installing Linux or an older version of Windows (plenty to be had with some simple searching on EBay).

Apart from paying for an Operating System I don't want, and won't be able to use?

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[TheLink]

Nah I think I have a built-in "Murphy Field Intensifier".

Because Win XP Pro SP3 works fine for me. No blue screens. Same goes for Ubuntu.

In contrast it probably wouldn't survive the Gabriel Effect/Field.

Oh yeah, if you ever boot up Win98, try pressing the windows key just as/before it reaches the desktop. On the system I tried that on, it kinda caused Win98 to misbehave...

When I was using Win95 I tended to press the winkey ASAP, because I use that to launch stuff on boot up. I set up my start menu so that Winkey-3 = email, Winkey-4 = command prompt, etc. It worked well for me.

That didn't work so good for Win98. So Win98 failed my "Murphy Field Intensifier" test.

I don't think I did anything that exceptional did I? :)

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[pcolaman]

Most online PC makers don't really tend to discount their systems much if you buy them sans Windows nowadays. I've seen some that will rebate the system down if you return the OS and serial codes, but that's become rare. So you won't really save much sans Windows.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[DigitalPasture]

I'm relaxed... I hear BS about Vista all day from my clients of whom 90% probably have never seen it let alone used it. Didn't mean to come off hot if that's how you took it. Vista isn't very obtrusive... Once you turn off stuff like UAC (if you don't want it), Sidebar, etc. Vista, like all other OSes just needs a bit of TLC after install. That being said, I own a Mac and two *nix machines (Fedora and Ubuntu). I use my Vista boxes more than anything else due to the games, the media center functionality (Sage TV is not a viable option compared to VMC) and general surfing.

Re:Doesn't make a difference.

[DigitalPasture]

That's been my experience too. I have Win7 on my lappy (945GM) right now. It runs pretty well but the tearing does get to me... Especially when watching video. Win7 (Beta and later RC1) was originally loaded only as a test for the lower boundaries of Aero. I still haven't reverted to XP and I'm picky.

Like Digging Through People's Trash

[eldavojohn]

I like some of these fixes on this spreadsheet:

• The Fc.exe command does not work correctly in Windows Vista or in Windows Server 2008 when the command compares files that differ at every 128th byte of a character string
• The Fc.exe command does not work correctly in Windows Vista or in Windows Server 2008 when the two files that you are comparing have the TAB or SPACE character around the 128th byte in a character string

I can almost imagine the developer sitting at his desk getting an e-mail from their issue management system that there's a problem with Fc.exe (file compare) ... only to have him realize that his for loop that iterates over the buffer that reads the files should have the while conditions of <= 128 and not simply < 128!

This is forgivable, I code some pretty stupid errors sometimes.

What isn't forgivable is that one of the columns on this bug spreadsheet is "Publicly Available" which implies to me that there is a list I'm not seeing of fixed bugs which would be annoying and probably even non-fixed bugs they purposefully suppress from public knowledge which is alarming!

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Morphine007]

Oh off-by-one errors. I encounter them a whole helluva lot less than I used to (in my own code), but the odd mistake creeps in every now and then. I think anyone who claims they never make them, or that a professional company should never make them, is either lying or deluded. It's far too easy to make them unless you're doing really simplistic coding and only ever working with arrays.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[VGPowerlord]

Been there, done that, also found an off-by-one bug in someone else's code that calculated the number of pages for custom pagination in a webapp.

Granted, this was years ago before the whole "shove all the rows at them then have Javascript turn it into pages" mentality came around...

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[ledow]

"What isn't forgivable is that one of the columns on this bug spreadsheet is "Publicly Available" which implies to me that there is a list I'm not seeing of fixed bugs which would be annoying and probably even non-fixed bugs they purposefully suppress from public knowledge which is alarming!"

Hello. Closed source software. I damn well *expect* there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in Windows until someone "finds" them and posts about them publically, security related or not. I doubt even the militarised versions of Windows have *everything* they know about fixed - it's easier to just say "don't do this" or not include a certain tool/utility/feature than it is to fix it and document it.

Why on Earth would you ever find this alarming, or unforgivable? It's the whole point of closed-source software, so that you *never* know what's going on with the code and (hopefully) never see it.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[D-Cypell]

Much to my amusement, a colleague of mine once suggested that the conversion from polytheism to monotheism was the result of an off-by-one error :)

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[eldavojohn]

Hello. Closed source software. I damn well *expect* there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in Windows until someone "finds" them and posts about them publically, security related or not. I doubt even the militarised versions of Windows have *everything* they know about fixed - it's easier to just say "don't do this" or not include a certain tool/utility/feature than it is to fix it and document it.

Why on Earth would you ever find this alarming, or unforgivable? It's the whole point of closed-source software, so that you *never* know what's going on with the code and (hopefully) never see it.

I disagree.

You could (should) offer a closed source product and still be honest about all the bugs that exist in it to your paying customers. Granted, I'm not distributing my web applications on a scale that Vista is being distributed on but you know seeing these 700 fixes listed out does alarm me. I mean, that really serious bug? The one that puts your Windows 2008 server at risk? Could still be at large without you ever knowing about it.

From Microsoft's end, how do they handle multiple bug reports when users don't have access to a complete list of known bugs so they know to report it?

And maybe it's obvious why they keep them from you--you'd probably flip to a serving solution without that bug. But, as an advocate for transparency, I would expect Microsoft to at least publicize its bugs--especially if they've been fixed in an update. I'm kind of lead to believe that these 700 (on the dot!) bug fixes are only a subset.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[caffeinemessiah]

Expect a whole bunch more to be added to that great spreadsheet in the sky. Then again, I find it pretty funny that DRM, which is quite likely to introduce bug and crippling functionality, is packaged as an "experience update". From TFA (bold mine):

Operating system experience updates

* SP2 improves Windows Media Center (WMC) in the area of content protection for TV.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Unoriginal_Nickname]

It's the whole point of closed-source software, so that you *never* know what's going on with the code and (hopefully) never see it.

The industry rule of thumb for a software developer is about 10 lines of code per hour, on average, over the lifetime of the project. According to Microsoft, Windows XP has about 40 million SLOC.

Without business staff, PMs and SDETs, that's 4 million man-hours. That's 1923 full time man-years. Assuming Microsoft pays their SDEs $80,000 on average, those 40 million lines of code cost them $153,840,000.

Why can't the point of closed-source be to put food on the table? If all software is free, what are software developers going to do for a living? Buy an air nailer and become a roofer?

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[foniksonik]

Just FYI, it's not 'shove all the rows at them', it's 'use ajax to request the rows you need and don't waste time re-rendering the other 95% of the page - and no cacheing doesn't always work'... well at least when I do it that's how it works.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Abcd1234]

It's the whole point of closed-source software, so that you *never* know what's going on with the code

Really? That's the whole point of closed-source software? Gee, and here I thought it was to make money based on the idea that software, like books, movies, and so forth, is property that is owned by the creator and can be controlled and sold at their discretion.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[foniksonik]

Dude, you're forgetting about copy/paste - not everyone like using good OO developing practices damnit... we like to inflate our code quantity by duplicating functions everywhere we can.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[readthemall]

Everybody who plays (free)Civilization knows that switching to monotheism from polytheism is a good thing.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[iainl]

Well, without knowing the detail of that, it might well be a good thing. Most obviously, if it's fixing one of the bugs where your TV path is failing the content protection checks when it really shouldn't.

Yes, DRM is evil, bad and wrong. But stopping it from going off when it shouldn't has to be good, right?

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

So Atheism is the result of a divide by zero error? The result as done by hand makes sense: DNE, "Does Not Exist"

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[maxume]

That's almost certainly low. Looking at it, they take in more than $1 billion a month just on operating systems sales (look under client):

http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar08/10k_fr_dis.html

That figure is probably going to be higher for 2008 than for 2009, but it will still be healthy in 2009. The discussion there implies that they spent $115 million more on Vista in fiscal 2008 than the prior year (that figure is separate from a $150 million increase in marketing costs), so they actually increased spending, in one year, by most of your entire estimate.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[morgan_greywolf]

I doubt even the militarised versions of Windows have *everything* they know about fixed

Hahahahah! Now that's funny!

There are no militarized versions of Windows. The military uses the same version of Windows everyone else uses, though they tend to use "locked-down" configurations, which is not surprising.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[damien_kane]

So Atheism is the result of a divide by zero error? The result as done by hand makes sense: DNE, "Does Not Exist"

No, athiests are just like monotheists; they just believe in one less god.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Yes, DRM is evil, bad and wrong. But stopping it from going off when it shouldn't has to be good, right?

No. The more "false positives" that Joe User gets, the more he'll complain.

Remember Lotus 1-2-3 2.01 and copy protection!

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Just Some Guy]

Why can't the point of closed-source be to put food on the table? If all software is free, what are software developers going to do for a living? Buy an air nailer and become a roofer?

It can be, but we can still laugh at them for screwing it up and write it off as a Bad Idea. Look, you can make it your living to craft underwater potpourri, but you can't seriously be surprised to find that the market for that isn't exactly growing.

Besides, the huge majority of programmers work on in-house custom software. If Windows ceased to exist tomorrow, I'd still have my job as a web app developer. In reality, there just aren't that many people who make their living from selling closed source software.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[dave420]

If you look at it like that, sure it's bad. If you look at it like a way of getting more content that you'd have got before, it's definitely an experience update. Remember that DRM allows people too scared to release their stuff entirely release to people willing to use DRM. So the choice isn't "DRM & less content / No DRM & more content" but "DRM & more content / No DRM & less content". DRM, when employed as Vista does, doesn't stop watchable content from being watched, but allows the watching of normally-unwatchable content. Don't be pissy with people providing software that supports DRM, be pissy with the people who only release DRM'd content.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[DrXym]

What isn't forgivable is that one of the columns on this bug spreadsheet is "Publicly Available" which implies to me that there is a list I'm not seeing of fixed bugs which would be annoying and probably even non-fixed bugs they purposefully suppress from public knowledge which is alarming! The chances are that any non-visible bugs are security related. Why are you surprised that Microsoft may choose to hide bug fixes for security issues when the percentage of people who have applied SP2 stands around 0% at the moment? Most major open source projects hide security bugs too by flagging the bug private or only discussing it in invite-only mailing lists until a solution is found. For example Firefox usually only throws open security bugs after they're fixed and an update is released. Will Microsoft disclose info about the bug after the patch is applied? I wish they would, but its totally understandable why they don't beforehand.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

If all software is free, what are software developers going to do for a living?

Surely you know by now that most work on large serious free software applications is done by paid developers at IBM, Novell, Sun/Oracle?

This issue comes up so often though, I can't believe you are ignorant of this, so you must be trolling.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

It will probably pay the same and you get excercise, a tan, and get to holler at ugly chicks

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[citylivin]

"Why can't the point of closed-source be to put food on the table? If all software is free, what are software developers going to do for a living? Buy an air nailer and become a roofer?"

You do realize that most software developers work for companies designing custom solutions right? Most software developers do not work on for profit apps, but rather build apps, or tools, to enhance a companies business processes and generate money or sales. The point here is that the software is not, by itself, earning most companies revenue. Even if you are buying commercial software, more often than not you are paying for updates and support. If all software was open source, then everyone could use the tools however they see fit. Some would require support, and some would not. The major positive side effect though is that some, a very small percentage to be sure, but some users would themselves be developers and be able to contribute code as well. Then everyone has a better tool in the end.

Secondly, I have given 20-40 dollars to some open source projects that have saved me hundreds of hours of time (filezilla and vnc come to mind). Sure that may not put food on the table for more than a few days, but i would submit that you are missing the point of open source software if you are focusing on "but how do i get mine!" instead of "how do i build better tools". Thats what software development, imho as an end user (arent we all?), should be about.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[ArcCoyote]

Look before you FUD. I know WMC-fu, have contributed to DVRMSToolbox, and follow WMC stuff pretty closely.

The content protection thing actually IS an improvement. It's not more DRM, it's less, or rather, it fixes what's there. While it doesn't remove DRM completely, it does fix where WMC would copy protect when CGMS-A flags (Macrovision analog output protection, like for cable PPV) are accidentally encoded into DTV signals. That buggy behavior, on the part of Microsoft and the broadcasters, was why American Gladiators got flagged as protected months ago. There was a big stink about it, although I can't really understand why anyone would care about "pituitary retards banging their F#@$ing skulls together and congratulating YOU on living in the land of freedom!"

I believe legacy code for the broadcast flag was also removed, so ATSC/ClearQAM can't possibly be set as protected now.

Unrelated, but a DRM relaxation is coming for CableCARD, in that non-premium digital cable will no longer be protected. HOWEVER:
  - This is a Windows 7 thing, and requires a firmware update to the tuner, an installed copy of Duke Nukem Forever, and who knows what else?
  - It's totally up to the cableco to decide what is and isn't "premium", so chances are stuff like Discovery HD/SciFi HD/ESPN HD will stay locked down. Only the stuff that is already on ClearQAM will be opened up.

Not that CableCARD was ever worthwhile. For what you can and can't do with it, you might as well rent a DVR from the cableco if you really need that much TV.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm kind of lead to believe that these 700 (on the dot!) bug fixes are only a subset.

But there were 701 bugs.

The same guy that worked on fc.exe also was in the dev team for their bug tracking software.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

Range-based for-loops (like those in C++0x) are free of off-by-one errors, no delusion whatsoever.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

That average is low, according to glassdoor:
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/Microsoft-Salaries-E1651.htm

Not including bonuses, benefits, or all the other perks, SDEs here (yes, I'm at MS) earn, on average, about $91,000. However, on a good team, there is one SDET per programmer, earning an average of $84,000 a year (which is only $4k more than the current starting salary). Additionally, there are PMs that manage features, managers of each area, and managers above those that drive cross-team collaboration (moving all the way up). It's not simply "throw 4 million man hours per line of code" - there's a much larger process.

Include on top of that buildings, supplemental costs (janitors, computers, et cetera), and you can see that there is a big cost. Your last sentence sums it up nicely - we have to earn a living, too. Part of that means that, eventually, a product needs to be shipped. With 40M SLOC, there are inevitably bugs. The question as a company full of people with families to support is, when is the product "good enough?"

I think a lot of slashdotters miss that: a product isn't "done" when it's perfect, but when it's "good enough to sell." Some bugs remain in the product by choice - a certain amount of code churn inevitably introduces new bugs - either behavior that is unexpected/changed or regressions in the code. Waiting for perfection leads to a product that's never released, and a bunch of laid off engineers/contingent staff.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

What are developers going to do for living?

Code the software of course!

Sell services and support for clients who wants your software.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Remember mods, [DisagreeWithOpinion -ne Troll]

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[levicivita]

Dear Sir, Thank you so dearly for sharing your thoughts with us. Your point is well taken. Bugs are a part of life. People have the right to be paid for their work. Spot on. The problem you have Sir is that there are other people out there putting forth products that are as good and often better, FOR FREE.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Swanktastic]

Satan worshippers believe in -1 gods.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[noidentity]

Why can't the point of closed-source be to put food on the table? If all software is free, what are software developers going to do for a living? Buy an air nailer and become a roofer?

What about the extra costs that users encounter due to using said closed-source software? They have to work extra to pay these. So it partly comes down to having one group of people dig holes, and another fill them in.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Morphine007]

Great! Tell me how I can use a range-based for-loop to generate multiple tree structures and cross-breed them through "snipping" them at various points and exchanging the subtrees, in a manner that is completely free of the possibility of encountering an off-by-one error which either causes snipping at an unintended place or has the potential to introduce a segfault.

I'll be running into that situation quite a bit in the coding that I'll be doing for my PhD, so you'll be saving me potentially countless hours of debugging time.

Thanks again! =)

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[DigitalSorceress]

Wish I had mod points... great response.

I immediately bit into the FUD hook, line, and sinker, assuming that it was another case of "oh, look, they're adding yet more DRM" instead of "they fixed some broken DRM"

Thank You.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

If all software is free, what are software developers going to do for a living? Buy an air nailer and become a roofer?

Gem-of-a-statement !! All you open-source fanatics, see how spectacularly this RedHat company failed and went bankrupt... and all its developers are now working for MicroSoft !!

Oh wait........

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[CodeBuster]

If you work for Microsoft then perhaps you can answer me this: Why do Visual Studio licenses have to be so darned expensive? Yes, I know about the express editions, but they are lacking in critical features that are sorely needed for serious development work. Why can't Microsoft offer the core IDE free of charge or for nominal charge (i.e. less than $100), call it supporting the platform if you want, while charging for high end add-ons like Team System instead of making those high end features a whole separate version of the IDE? There are too many different versions of what is essentially 80%+ the same product in Visual Studio. Firefox and other open source projects have shown the way with the core + add-on approach and after the Vista debacle (which had what, 8 different versions?) the message should be clear. This would also allow them to roll out important updates to the core product more quickly and easily while allowing even greater language and compiler choices in the core IDE via the add-on system. Visual Studio is nice, but it costs too damn much and it could be so much better. Does Microsoft even realize that the main thing keeping most of their technical users, and especially developers, on Windows instead of fleeing for Mac or Linux is .NET and Visual Studio? Why not press that advantage even more by making the full-featured core IDE cheaper or even free? The marketing people at Microsoft are screwing it all up (as usual) and preventing the really good ideas and smart developers from realizing the full potential and benefit of their ideas and work.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[ichigo 2.0]

Actually, they believe in the same god as the christians. They just worship one of its fallen angels.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't the point of closed-source be to put food on the table? If all software is free, what are software developers going to do for a living? Buy an air nailer and become a roofer?

How on Earth does uninformed nonsense like this get to +5?

If software were Free, we wouldn't have to waste our time re-implementing features that others have already created. We can simply take their work, incorporate it into our own, and create a new, better product with features from all of the best software. How could you not want this?

Your argument against Free software is that there would be fewer jobs for programmers. Perhaps, perhaps not. However, and this is important, the job that programmers are hired to do would fundamentally change. Companies would pay programmers to implement new features. The new features are then contributed back to the community, improving the state of software in the world. Someone still needs to write software. Programmers would still have jobs. But instead of being locked in due to copyrights, patents, and so forth, programmers are free to create whatever high quality software they want (or are hired to) without restrictions.

There are problems with this business model. Two come immediately to mind: Why should Company A foot the bill for Feature X if Companies A, B, C, and D all benefit equally from having Feature X? What about entertainment software? Who pays for that? These are problems that I don't know the answer to. Perhaps someone more familiar with the Free software movement can clarify. In any case, I'd consider the "software utopia" described above to be worth finding appropriate solutions.

In a GNU world, where all software is required (through whatever means) to be freely available and open source, programmers get paid to program instead of for having programmed. It's a fundamental difference, and one you need to understand before you spout more misinformation.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Sir_Lewk]

Why on Earth would you ever find this alarming, or unforgivable?

I find closed source software in general to be alarming and unforgivable. Why? Because I damn'd well want too.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[dudpixel]

see this is where it gets confusing.

If heaven is basically space (everything thats not "earth"), then how/where does an angel fall?

Where is hell then? the centre of the earth? does every planet have a "hell"?

(As an aside, the "lucifer" referred to in Isaiah has nothing to do with angels, and bears no connection to Revelation (which also, is not talking about literal angels falling out of heaven) - the word translated "angel" simply means "messenger" - it CAN mean angel, but it can also mean a person - however I digress - this is not the point here...)

I just dont get the whole concept of heaven vs hell. I understand the heaven bit - thats easy...but if you "fell" out of heaven, which direction would you fall in? towards the nearest largest object that has the most gravitational pull? if this were the case, who knows where this satan is hiding? who ever said it had to be earth?

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[dudpixel]

But what if I'm Joe User and all I want to do is watch TV?

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Amazing Quantum Man]

I don't know... use something like.... a TV set?

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll ignore your trolling sibling and reply to you, since I think you might listen.

You (and the rest of Slashdot, it seems) think that Microsoft is one big entity all acting towards the same ends. That each team works with every other team directly, that we control product direction, et cetera. This is far from true, and I cannot answer why upper management steers various products in different directions. Personally, I'm involved in Windows 7 development. I have no bearing whatsoever on Vista service packs (except those fixes that we deem needing backports to Vista), Visual Studio, Office, Zune, et cetera. To me, they are loosely coupled under a larger brand name, but might as well be different companies.

I do, however, know that your complaint is either wrong or completely misses the boat. For one, Visual studio is add on based. This fact you could have gleaned from a five second wikipedia glance. Your complaint about Team System is also unfounded, as it is available as an add in for VS 2005/2008, and it functions as a standalone browser if you don't have the IDE. The SERVER, however, is a different product than the IDE. Complaining about that is similar to asking why Mozilla doesn't ship release Apache, that's how loosely coupled MS feels.

Moreover, you miss the business side of the equation. One hundred dollars may seem a large amount to you, but it's trivial for any company that produces and sells professional-level software. The fact is that many of those companies use Visual Studio because, whole-package, it is best in class. If the same tool can compile one or one billion copies of software to be sold, it has immense long term value to the person who owns it. Speaking economically, it makes sense to try to maximize the value to our business while not exceeding the value-utility equilibrium that would lead to an alternative being a better choice. Hence, a price higher than $100. Moreover, this ignores the other options for professional teams - MSDN subscriptions that provide not only software, but operating systems, tools, et cetera, at minimum marginal costs.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

use a more appropriate data structure? learn object oriented design? ah, think of the possibilities!

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[iainl]

Microsoft don't want Joe User locked out of his content when he shouldn't be. Joe User obviously doesn't want to be locked out either, that's why he would complain.

So they're both happy about the fix. The only people unhappy are those sitting on the sidelines cheering on the fact that others are suffering. I'm not particularly sure I _want_ this outside set of people happy, if that's their attitude.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Morphine007]

teach me obiwan codeobi - it's a genetic programming application. So using something other than a tree structure isn't really in the cards.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[CodeBuster]

For one, Visual studio is add on based.

Yes, I know that, but in order to get a really usable set of core features AND the ability to have add-ons (which are NOT allowed in the express additions, which TestDriven.net learned in their dispute with Microsoft's attorneys) one really has to shell out for the "professional" edition of visual studio which is priced at ~$650 dollars or so. I simply stated that in my opinion, the same combination of features should be available for a lower price. In fact, I would probably be enough if Microsoft changed their policy on add-ons for the Express editions.

Your complaint about Team System is also unfounded, as it is available as an add in for VS 2005/2008, and it functions as a standalone browser if you don't have the IDE.

That is fair enough. I have not used team system nor have I seen it being used in the relatively small companies where I have worked. My experience has been with NAnt, Subversion, and CruiseControl.NET for those types of needs. However, I was under the impression that if one wanted the team system functionality then it was necessary to purchase the "team system development edition" of Visual Studio, but I guess that is wrong? Again it seems that much time must be spent on MSDN digging through all of the whitepapers and product descriptions to find out what actually needs to be downloaded or purchased whereas I rarely seem to have that problem with open source projects.

The SERVER, however, is a different product than the IDE. Complaining about that is similar to asking why Mozilla doesn't ship release Apache, that's how loosely coupled MS feels.

There has always been a clear separation, both conceptually and through project naming, between the Apache and Mozilla projects or at least that is how I have perceived it. As you have said, people tend to treat Microsoft as a single entity even though there are many separate groups within Microsoft, but really can you blame them for being on the outside looking in? It also seems that Microsoft uses marketing to deliberately create confusion concerning the products of their competitors and even their own products. MS may feel loosely coupled if you are working there, but that is not how it seems to us outsiders.

One hundred dollars may seem a large amount to you, but it's trivial for any company that produces and sells professional-level software

What about individuals and independent developers? Most people in the United States, and that includes developers, don't work for large companies like Microsoft. We work in small shops and companies where there may be less than 100 total headcount and I can assure you that $100 is certainly not trivial to small companies and especially not now with the economy in the tank.

Moreover, this ignores the other options for professional teams - MSDN subscriptions that provide not only software, but operating systems, tools, et cetera, at minimum marginal costs.

Again, that is fine for larger companies, but what about small shops and independent developers who do not enjoy those economies of scale? Should the independent developer be compelled shell out $1,600 for an MSDN subscription? Also, consider this: most software developers are NOT engaged in producing packaged software for re-sale, but rather custom development work designed to reduce costs over the long run. If there are large upfront costs, then it makes development projects less feasible and more risky for many small companies who may then choose not to do them, even though they desperately need the sorts of benefits that software and automation can provide. This is true whether they write something from scratch or customize existing software to meet their needs.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[ichigo 2.0]

I don't think they mean falling literally, but more like falling from grace and turning to the dark side.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why the express editions exist, though. Those editions provide enough ability to write any tool such a small company could need. You're right in that it doesn't provide as fully featured an environment, but it's there, it's free, and it works enough to determine if you would need/could use the more extensive tools available in the professional version.

I've worked at other companies with much smaller teams. You'd be hard-pressed to tell me that the cost of visual studio is excessive. At only $16.25 an hour, it's a week's pay. Considering you can get $20/hour collecting carts in the parking lot at Costco, that price is nowhere near crazy. If you're trying to reduce costs long run, and have the ability to repeatedly use the same programming tools towards that (perpetual use license), even $1,600 per developer is a pittance, especially if the developer is earning a more standard wage than $16.25/hour (often 2-4 times that). A week's pay for the development team is not (well, should not be) a burning hole in any company's budget.

If you're an independent developer, use the free tools until you can afford the better ones. However, complaining about the price of the professional tools doesn't hold weight when put in terms of cost-benefit.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[CodeBuster]

Thanks for staying with me on this thread and putting up with me btw, I really do appreciate it.

I should put you up against a certain bean counter(s) that I know. If I was an independent dev with clients then I probably would pay for the tools out of pocket, but it is often the case at a small company (of say 10 devs or less) that asking for anything, whether it be a few hundred or few thousand dollars, takes so many steps and has to be approved by the head bean counter (who is in the habit of denying IT purchase requests simply because he doesn't understand them and thinks IT is just a massive cost center) that many devs prefer to find open source or freebies instead since it allows them to cut through the red tape surrounding purchasing.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

it's in the same link you've posted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_genetic_programming/ or use a tree oriented language as Lisp (even that is in the link you posted). Tree problem solved.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[Anonymous Coward]

Trick with the bean counters is to put it in terms they understand. Opportunity cost, lost productivity/wasted wages, and dollar efficiency speak to them. If it's really a tool you feel is needed or would enhance productivity and/or make your daily work less likely to end up on the daily wtf, it's probably worth it. I can't speak for your company in terms of its worth. However, I know that it helps me with efficiency. Within a couple months, I could save a week's worth of work given an upgrade from vim + makefiles or eclipse + svn/git, etc... A lot of that is because I'm most familiar with Visual Studio (now, 4 years ago I knew Eclipse/NetBeans better). If you think that you could, even within a year, save greater than a week's worth of time (gain a week of productivity) or more, you should present the case as such. Simply work out the number ("At $x per hour that I make, the added productivity will pay for the product in y time. The benefit beyond that is that the company retains the license and tools, even if I leave, and those efficiency gains continue to save the company $(x * efficiency boost per year) every year.") and present the case as such.

I think the problem most techies encounter when dealing with cost centers/accounting(/HR :D) is that they expect the benefit to be obvious to the other party. Putting it in clear terms (e.g. "not buying this product costs the company $1,000 per year per dev in productive output") makes the case much clearer to someone who sees in terms of dollar signs.

Again, I can't say if this suits your needs. I think it depends on the company's products, the platform you're developing for, etc.

Re:Like Digging Through People's Trash

[VGPowerlord]

Just FYI, it's not 'shove all the rows at them', it's 'use ajax to request the rows you need and don't waste time re-rendering the other 95% of the page - and no cacheing doesn't always work'... well at least when I do it that's how it works.

Hey, can you give this speech to one of my coworkers? He seems to think "pull back all the rows in several tables via Ajax calls and filter them on the client" is the correct way to do Ajax.

The best service pack for Vista

[Dystopian Rebel]

is Windows 7 RC1.

Re:The best service pack for Vista

[Hurricane78]

What's the difference? I thought they would be the same...

Oh, and: I don't get that versioning...

Vista = 6.0
Vista SP1 = 6.0
Vista SP2 = 6.0 = Win 7
Makes no sense either way. ^^

Re:The best service pack for Vista

[jonbryce]

Windows 7 has a MacOS style dock bar, whereas Vista SP2 has the Windows 95 style task bar.

Re:The best service pack for Vista

[Tsuki_no_Hikari]

The version numbers in the background are the actual versions of the Windows NT kernel itself.

Windows 2000 was kernel 5.0.
Windows XP was kernel 5.1.
Windows 2003 was 5.2.(This was also Windows XP 64-bit Edition)
Windows Vista is 6.0.
Windows "7" is kernel 6.1. It was supposed to be a wild change from Vista for the better, but is very similar and not a real shift in kernel, so it's just 6.1.

There you have it.

Re:The best service pack for Vista

[Hurricane78]

Moderators lost their humor *again*?

Do I always have to clean up your droppings after you?

You are grounded on 4chan for one whole week, young sir! ^^

So close to SP3?

[hansamurai]

Isn't that coming out in October?

UTC Timestamp?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone please elaborate what this UTC timestamp thing is? With some googling I can just assume it means UNIX timestamp. Can we please not invent new names for everything?

Re:UTC Timestamp?

[Thornburg]

UTC is a time format, and specifies GMT.

With UTC timestamps, two files written simultaneously in Germany and Canada would have the same timestamp. In Windows, without UTC timestamps, they would have two completely different timestamps, because they would (most likely) use local time.

If you want a more informed source, try Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

Re:UTC Timestamp?

[VGPowerlord]

Er... except that UTC timestamp only specifies the timezone, not how it's actually stored.

It's up to libc to know how it's stored and convert it to unixtime as appropriate.

Re:UTC Timestamp?

[Minwee]

Can someone please elaborate what this UTC timestamp thing is? With some googling I can just assume it means UNIX timestamp. Can we please not invent new names for everything?

"New names"? The entire world has been using UTC as an international standard for timekeeping since before you were born and were calling it UT or GMT for a hundred years before that. Can we please try to learn about something instead of just whinging about it?

Re:UTC Timestamp?

[TheLink]

Strictly speaking UTC isn't GMT.

As per your link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#Rationale

As usual, once you get into the details it gets messier :).

Re:UTC Timestamp?

[jonbryce]

It's not quite the same as GMT. There can be a few seconds difference between the two. GMT is based on the position of the sun at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. UTC uses an atomic clock to count the seconds and has leap seconds added to the end of the year from time to time to bring it back into alignment with GMT.

Re:UTC Timestamp?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Wikipedia is now considered an informed source? When did this happen? Why was I not informed.

Re:UTC Timestamp?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice and all, but what do you want to bet Microsoft's implementation of UTC is identical to GMT? :-)

(I've worked at Microsoft, so I've seen how they think. I definitely wouldn't put it past them to ignore a few seconds out of convenience.)

Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Nefron]

SP2 removes the limit of 10 half open outbound TCP connections. By default, SP2 has no limit on the number of half open outbound TCP connections.

I can't believe MS finally (almost) admitted they made a mistake. It may have taken almost as long, in technological terms, as it took the Catholic Church to admit it's mistakes with Galileo, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Jugalator]

Before this change, I could "torrent from Windows" at over 10 Mbps on my connection. You must have been doing it wrong. :S

This is only *half open* outbound TCP connection. At *worst', it will cause a torrent to pick up speed slightly slower, but it won't cap the maximum speed or anything.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Rik Sweeney]

as it took the Catholic Church to admit it's mistakes with Galileo

Obviously someone watched Angels and Demons last night...

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[anss123]

A limit on TCP connections is actually a bit of a good thing as many home routers crap out if you open too many. Hopefully it's less of a problem today then when I bought my router 3-4 years back.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Before this change, I could "torrent from Windows" at over 10 Mbps on my connection. You must have been doing it wrong. :S.

I think he's one of those self-proclaimed 'Power Users' who disables QoS because he still believes that it reserves 20% of his bandwidth.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Krneki]

It was implemented for security reasons, as a way to limit the DoS attack made by compromised PC.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[RulerOf]

home routers crap out if you open too many. Hopefully it's less of a problem today

I tell you sir, it's still a problem. The $30 NAT routers of today are just as big of a hunk of crap as they were 4 years ago, they just increased the profit margins with the lower manufacturing costs that economy of scale has brought to the industry.

Personally, I threw a second NIC in my server, installed VMWare Server, and now run Smoothwall as a guest, routing for my network. I probably would have done this years ago but it took a lot for me to break my love/hate relationship with DD-WRT and it's GPL violating "author," and I finally gave up trying to find good support for UPnP on a Windows-based solution.

Give it a try if you like to torrent stuff, especially while gaming.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[TheLink]

It also makes it easier to swap from smoothwall to something else :).

I do something like that, but I don't use smoothwall. FWIW tc's HTB does work quite well in controlling bandwidth.

The main disadvantage I find is, my PC server+modem+etc uses about 100 watts. Whereas an el-cheapo NAT router will use a lot less.

Oh well...

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical Microsoft. Don't address the disease, just treat the symptoms.

"Hey, our OS is easily pwned, so let's hobble the network connectivity so pwned machines can't do too much damage."

Great idea, you fucking tards. Here's better one: throw out your piece of shit operating system and start totally fresh. This time, try designing the security in from the start instead of trying to bolt it on as an afterthought years later. And provide a compatibility environment via VM for legacy apps for a few years until devs can catch up.

The one fucking thing Apple did that you won't shamelessly copy, is the thing you should copy the most!

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[RulerOf]

PC server+modem+etc uses about 100 watts.

That was a barrier for me too, but having discovered I really do want to leave the server on 100% of the time, after discovering that running a VM didn't tank the box down (1.75G Ram 2.8GHz P4 Box with Server 2008) and got good performance, which I didn't think would happen (heh), it made sense.

Until I can run everything I need 100% of the time on something like a Sheeva plug, or get a really cheap but capable laptop that'll make a good server (and won't tempt me to use as a laptop), reasonably low-power SFF x86 hardware will have to suffice.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Anonymous Coward]

How long did it take for the Catholic church to admit it is (has?) mistakes with Galileo?

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[rwyoder]

I can't believe MS finally (almost) admitted they made a mistake. It may have taken almost as long, in technological terms, as it took the Catholic Church to admit it's mistakes with Galileo, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

I can't believe you would compare MS to the Catholic Church!
One is a marketing company, and the other is a religion...oh wait...nevermind. :-(

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[L4t3r4lu5]

The biggest issue with that movie is that you cannot un-watch it.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, SYN Floods should be good now

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[wolrahnaes]

Unfortunately it's not and it has to an extent gotten worse. Both AT&T and Verizon have this bad idea of building their bundled services such as video and phone to require their branded router, which is in both cases an utter shitbox which can handle very few connections (I think in the case of FiOS it was something absurdly low too)

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? That's the only way the GP could have known about Galileo's run-in with the Catholic Church?

I learned about that bit of info in astronomy class well before I even heard about The DaVinci Code, let alone Angels and Demons.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Hopefully it's less of a problem today then when I bought my router 3-4 years back

It's not. I recently gave up on hardware routers because of this - whenever I torrent something, my new routers (tried a linksys and a netgear with up-to-date firmware) would start refusing all traffic within an hour. I installed a second NIC on my home server, configured an ubuntu virtual server using Shorewall via a bridged connection to the new NIC, and have had absolutely no problems since.

Even better, it's now a matter of editing a simple config file to change routing and forwarding rules, followed by a config reload - no clunky web interface that requires me to reboot the router for every small change. Also no more artificial limits on things like # of ports forwarded, lack of good port range support , etc.

And in the rare event of a hang or lockup (once in the last six months), I don't have to trot down to my basement to physically reset hardware... I just restart the VM over ssh to the host.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[clarkn0va]

After running a fire-breathing Celeron 2.5GHz as router/fileserver/torrentbox/freepbx for a few months, I finally bit the bullet and picked up a soekris net5501 and installed pfsense and freeswitch on it. My firewalling and phones run right at well under 20 watts.

Of course that leaves me without fileserver or torrentbox, but an inexpensive alix or fit pc running freenas will fill that role nicely.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[gid]

FWIW, I used to use a Linux box as a router until the hardware started flaking out. I looked into a hardware based router, the Linksys WRT54GL. It has more ram and is meant to run Linux on it, replaced the firmware with DD-WRT, switched to Tomato over a year back. It has never one failed on me with any torrents traffic, gaming traffic etc that I've thrown at it, even with QoS setup.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Ralish]

I'm not sure it was a mistake, at least not in Microsoft's view, once you consider the reason why it was implemented and the (probable) reason why they've removed the limitation.

The reason why it was implemented according to various sources was to limit the damage of all those infected Windows machines spamming networks looking for new vulnerable hosts to infect, and also, slow down the rate at which they would cause bedlam. By enforcing such a limit, the aim was to impede an infected machines ability to propogate the infection; of course, we're primarily talking the nasty to catastrophic Windows worms we've seen in the past from gaping truck-sized security holes in critical system components.

However, if you look at Vista, you'll note that contrary to what some people would like you to believe, the exploitability of the OS has gone down drastically versus XP, in particular, with regards to worms. This is of course due to several reasons: better OS security architecture, defence-in-depth (DEP/ASLR/etc...), properly enforced user permissions, the list goes on. Take the most recent Conficker worm as an example. Vista infections will almost certainly be a lot lower, for one, the exploit path that uses the MS08-067 vulnerability that forms its primary exploit vector can not be exploited anonymously on Vista and newer machines. The vulnerable code is still present unless patched, but it requires valid user credentials.

At a guess, I'd say Microsoft came to the conclusion that the TCP limit was no longer necessary on Vista, as the improved security of the OS made the need for such connection limitations redundant. On the other hand, I'll be surprised if they ever remove it on XP, because no matter how much you patch it, it is fundamentally more insecure by its architecture than Vista. And if they don't remove the limitation on XP, I'd argue that's quite telling as to the motivation and reasoning behind removing it on Vista only.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Blakey Rat]

What was preventing your from torrenting from Vista before? Seeing as that bug only applies to *half-open* TCP connections. Oh, right, you're just making up shit to bash Microsoft for no reason.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Not yet, torrents are a bit slow today.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[PitaBred]

That's the official reason. The real reason is that they didn't want people using their desktop OS's as servers. They wanted to sell people the much more expensive server version to do that.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[mzs]

I second this. I have one of the early WRT54G models that predated the less hardware vxworks models. I initially used thiobor and have since then moved to tomato. I have the exact saem experiences as you. I use QoS and torrent in addition to everything else including gaming, ssh, streaming video, CUPS, and typical HTTP/IMAP type stuff for up to five people at home. I have to reset the box maybe twice a year, cheap hardware and linux ain't perfect but darned close I guess.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Anonymous Coward]

My ASUS WL-500g Premium is perfect.

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[Splintax]

But it's fairly trivial to remove the limit. Surely anybody tech-savvy enough to run a server could work this out?

Re:Finally, I can torrent from windows

[TheLink]

Wasn't a barrier for me, just an acceptable disadvantage. It'll be nice if it could use less but it's nothing in the big picture.

Airconditioning will cost far more (one airconditioner = 1500W). 2 hours x 1 airconditioner > 24 hours of my PC. If more than one room uses airconditioning...

Then there's the fridge, washing machine, oven, etc. So no biggie.

Windows Search 4.0?!

[TheRealMindChild]

Windows Search 4.0?! I HATE that POS. I've made a very deliberate attempt to NOT download this off of windows update, and now if I want to be up to date with my system, I HAVE to install it? Assholes.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[GF678]

The thing is, you don't actually notice any real difference in how the indexing works with WS4, it's all back-end. It's suppose to be more efficient that the search/indexing code that came with Vista. I know it can be annoying when installed in XP, but since its predecessor was already integrated into Vista it should be an improvement.

If you still hate it, disable the Indexing service.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[icepick72]

I dunno, in any previous version of Windows search it seems I cannot find anything. For example by the default settings it won't see files in directories that aren't indexed. And even when Advanced search is told to search all files on disk and subfolders despite index, it still can't seem to match a simple filename half of the time.
Having said that I haven't tried Search 4.0 yet, am hoping it's better but maybe it's worse.
So I thought they were assholes before Search 4.0 to be specific.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[drinkypoo]

The thing is, you don't actually notice any real difference in how the indexing works with WS4, it's all back-end.

I can't speak to what it's like on Vista, but on XP two things are true:

1. Indexing beats your system up, and the indexer is NOT good about letting you have it back.
2. Search can find files with a filesystem search, OR it can find indexed files, but NOT both at once. So if you have a directory which is not yet indexed, you MUST leave your computer idle for a time if you want to be able to search it.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[je ne sais quoi]

I can't speak to what it's like on Vista, but on XP two things are true: Indexing beats your system up, and the indexer is NOT good about letting you have it back.

I have Vista SP1 installed for playing games the hard drive was thrashing so much it was actually causing stutter in my fps games sometimes until I turned the indexer and the superfetch services off (I actually had to turn off superfetch twice as it ignored me the first time). I don't seem to remember ever having to deal with that sort of issue on XP, so my guess is vista is probably worse for this sort of thing. It would be nice if SP2 alleviated this, but I'm not holding my breath. Incidentally, I find it sort of funny and sort of annoying that there are so many Vista defenders out there, when my own experience is that, yeah it runs well enough, but only after turn off all the crap like this and the graphical effects, and even then it's a little slow for a brand new OS on a brand new computer. On the other hand, with any fresh linux install I also go around removing a lot of the default desktop packages that I don't want, only it seems a lot easier and more transparent in linux, but maybe I'm just used to the linux way and not the windows way.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[domatic]

Do "custom updates" then tick the box that says ignore this update.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[an00bis]

I agree Windows Search sucks and can't find anything. Windows GREP is superior in every way: http://www.wingrep.com/

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[Necroman]

I actually love it for work. The amount I search email and documents, it does a great job. You have to remember that it isn't just a plain txt file search, but it indexes doc and your outlook information. Being able to type in my last name and get a list of 68000 items in 1-2 seconds is pretty sweet.

I've tried Google Desktop as well, but just wasn't as much of a fan. I had a harder time getting it to index properly and do what I wanted. WS4 gives you some pretty fine grain control over what and where it indexes.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[Sandbags]

I run Vista. index is enabled by default, but one of the first tweaks i did was switch it off, and Windows Search can be uninstalled/hidden.

The indexer runs as a "background" serivce, which is a new type and is supposed only get CPU cycles when the machine is idle. unfortunately, this only works for the FIRST instance of a background process, and there are many cases where more than one can conflict under Vista, and then indexing begins chewing up resources. I had it kick off in the middle of playing games when the CPU was over 80%.

WS4 will NOT be enabled on my machine. I keep the index service, pre-fetch, and several other services forcibally disabled on my machine. When I'm looking for something, it;s either an e-mail, which google or xobni instantly find for me without M$'s help, or it's a file I've properly store and can find myself in 3-4 clicks, or it;s a media item already indexed by iTunes... I don't search my personal machine for random crap, and anything I've ever needed to find on my own machine was ALREADY indexed by somethiung else.... It's a complete waste of resources, a waste of disk space for the index database, and every time you run a major patch, it fucking re-indexes, which for my 400+GB of stuff, takes as long as defragging.

This is not to mention that is also searches inside files, and stores that data in a database in a predetermined location. I have data in docs on my system I'd just as much prefer NOT be in a non--encrypted central repository... contacts, SSNs, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, all go in that database that is VERY easy for a hacker to lift...

If there's a way to uninstall WS4 after SP2, not just disabling it, I will.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Windows Search 4.0 can be turned off. This on the other hand cannot:

SP2 improves Windows Media Center (WMC) in the area of content protection for TV.

And that, my friends, is why I never use MS' built in media players. Ever.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[QuantumRiff]

One thing we found, was a reg hack that will only load WS4.0 when outlook 2007 is open, and it will only index your mailbox. Our user complaints have dropped to a small fraction since we implemented that fix system wide. Basically, we only use it on our XP machines to do the instant search in outlook, nothing else. Give it a try..

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[anss123]

IME I've had better luck searching from the command prompt. Not tried Search 4.0 yet either though.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[MadKeithV]

Incidentally, I find it sort of funny and sort of annoying that there are so many Vista defenders out there, when my own experience is that, yeah it runs well enough, but only after turn off all the crap like this and the graphical effects, and even then it's a little slow for a brand new OS on a brand new computer.

Vista Home Basic 64 is a pre-configured Vista with all the crap turned off.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[jackharrer]

Total Commander and Alt+F7. It even works on Linux (wine), sadly except Samba shares browsing ;(
It's a best file management tool I've ever used.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[Colonel Korn]

I can't speak to what it's like on Vista, but on XP two things are true:

Indexing beats your system up, and the indexer is NOT good about letting you have it back.

I have Vista SP1 installed for playing games the hard drive was thrashing so much it was actually causing stutter in my fps games sometimes until I turned the indexer and the superfetch services off (I actually had to turn off superfetch twice as it ignored me the first time). I don't seem to remember ever having to deal with that sort of issue on XP, so my guess is vista is probably worse for this sort of thing. It would be nice if SP2 alleviated this, but I'm not holding my breath. Incidentally, I find it sort of funny and sort of annoying that there are so many Vista defenders out there, when my own experience is that, yeah it runs well enough, but only after turn off all the crap like this and the graphical effects, and even then it's a little slow for a brand new OS on a brand new computer. On the other hand, with any fresh linux install I also go around removing a lot of the default desktop packages that I don't want, only it seems a lot easier and more transparent in linux, but maybe I'm just used to the linux way and not the windows way.

The funny thing is that Vista is slow on a fresh install, but the hard drive thrashing stops after you've used it for a day and it's populated superfetch and the index. It's fine to turn it off if you don't want to do indexed searches and don't want instant load on a few programs at the expense of a day of slowness, but it's also fine to leave them on, because they absolutely stop slowing anything down after that time.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[RulerOf]

If there's a way to uninstall WS4 after SP2, not just disabling it, I will.

FWIW, there's no real advantage to going Rambo on system services that you feel have wronged you in the past.... Disabling them really is enough ;)

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[rsmith-mac]

XP suffers greatly from the lack of I/O prioritization. Indexing under Vista (and later) doesn't have the same wallop, since the indexer is a low-priority item that properly yields to other applications attempting to use a hard drive.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[twidarkling]

because they absolutely stop slowing anything down after that time.

Pretty much, yep. The indexing/superfetch is pretty good about only running while your system's idle, once it's finished the initial build.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Link Please??????

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[DrWatson333]

Another fun indexing "feature" I experienced is uTorrent would stop downloading files at about 2-5% and complain that the files were in use by another application. When I turned off the indexing service this went away.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I run Vista. index is enabled by default, but one of the first tweaks i did was switch it off

You managed to write a utterly useless opinion piece after stating your own solution! You ought to write for an OP-E..*cough* the newspapers! Or better yet, host your own cable news show!

Step 3 can finally be realized; I can see it now...

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[je ne sais quoi]

You're right that is was slower before I turned all that stuff off, but before I did that, it was slow to the point of being unusable -- now, it's just sort of slow. Case in point: why is it that it takes a second or two to load up all the icons on the control panel on Vista 64 bit on a core duo 2 at 3.24 GHz with 4 GB of ram? Are you really trying to tell me that an OS that takes a second to load 20 or so icons on brand new hardware is fast? Really???

One could make the argument that by refusing to acknowledge what nearly every average user can tell after using Vista for a few days, i.e., that it's sub-par, you expert windows users could be dooming yourselves to mediocre software for the foreseeable future because MS will never learn its lesson and write better software. My only complaint is that I have to use it with you when necessary. But then again, MS seems to have realized that users are reluctant to buy slow software and are trying to speed things up with Windows 7 so maybe there's hope yet. This is not a troll, this is a fact, MS is losing usage share and has been doing so ever since Vista was released. This should be telling you something, and it's not just marketing or a bad rap: most people really aren't all that happy with Vista.

Re:Windows Search 4.0?!

[nateb]

You can index the directory or what have you at any time from the system management console.

Wireless streaming

[Saba]

I wonder if they have fixed the throttling bug where if you're streaming media over a wireless link, Vista throttles the connection down so much that it causes buffer underruns and severe clipping. I can't listen to FLACs in VLC unless I set buffering to at least 20 seconds.

Re:Wireless streaming

[jpmorgan]

There's no throttling bug, you just have spotty wifi.

Re:Wireless streaming

[Blakey Rat]

What makes you think that's a bug in the OS, and not just typical wifi packet loss issues? Streaming multimedia is *not* one of the things that wifi is good for-- if you're really having troubles with this, I'd recommend running cable.

Or at the very least trying it with a different OS to determine whether it's Vista or your wifi link at fault. Of course that would involve critical thinking instead of just knee-jerking every single computer problem to be Microsoft's fault...

Enterprise Vista Deployments

[Vandil X]

I used to work at a company that had a glacial workstation OS upgrade cycle. It took them nearly 4 years into XP's lifecycle to consider XP (they were still deploying Win2K), and XPSP2 changed so many of the inner workings of the OS that the deployment was delayed until mid-2006.

I just wonder if the changes in Vista SP2 will sideline similarly glacial Vista deployments or be a blessing, allowing people to skip Vista for Windows 7.

Re:Enterprise Vista Deployments

[Lumpy]

Many companies do this on purpose. Comcast did not go to XP until 2005/2006 simply because of problems with the custom and vertical apps. And Many of the important servers that generate $10,000 an hour by inserting Advertisements into channels eve still run NT4.

Honestly, when your gear makes you a lot of money, it's ragingly stupid to upgrade the OS until you know it's not going to cost you money with downtime or errors. Like a client of mine that HAD TO HAVE Vista on everything when it came out. We upgraded him and all the CNC machines quit working. He did not understand that Upgrading to vista, even though we told him 5 times, and had the CNC machine maker tell him not to, that it would hose his entire operation. It did. He was down for 3 days. Luckily I had imaged everything so restoring the Drive image saved him a LOT of money.

Some people think the new shiny is better, 99% of the time it is not and staying with the dull old OS is a better solution.

And no Windows 2000 is not more "dangerous" than the new OS. In a firewalled and proper network even windows 95 is 100% safe.

Re:Enterprise Vista Deployments

[Tsunayoshi]

The government agency I am contracted to is just now in the final testing phases for rolling out Windows XP to the desktop.

Yes, XP. They had a Vista pilot last year but due to legacy app issues decided to scrap it and start the process over again with XP.

Re:Enterprise Vista Deployments

[swb]

You just tipped your hand. "Government agency".

SP2 in A.U.

[l3v1]

SP2 isn't included in Automatic Update yet

Well, maybe it isn't, but my Vista Home Premium at work "complained" this morning it had a new update, which was SP2, I let it download and play with it, now it's installed and it seems to work ok up to now.

Re:SP2 in A.U.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same with me. I noticed the update icon waiting for me this morning before I even got to Slashdot.

Re:SP2 in A.U.

[Sandbags]

It's being "phased" out. Your machine was one of the lucky 1% that got the update now. My home machine did not have it automatically, but doing a "check for updates now" populated it. I'm waiting a few days to install it however until 1)I get around to making another image backup and 2) other people try it and fail first...

Re:SP2 in A.U.

[NuGeo]

I, too, use automatic updates and installed SP2 that way. I do have automatic updates set to the "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them" option, though, if that makes any kind of difference.

The funny thing is, when windows update prompted me about a new "important update", it didn't say at all what it was. Just that it was a 300+ something megabyte file, to which I immediately thought "holy shit, wtf could that be". I figured it must have been a service pack, but I didn't expect it to come out of the blue like it did. I saw no mention of it on the news sites. I guess I was expecting some kind of fanfare before its release. Anyway, once it finished downloading and started the install process, it finally identified itself that it was indeed Vista SP2.

Re:SP2 in A.U.

[Cigarra]

Same to me. While all the articles everywhere mention it's "standalone download only, not yet in Automatic updates", it appeared yesterday in the update notifications window. Since I have it set to "notify only", I manually downloaded and installed it. I wonder if it wouldn't be alredy automatically installed if it was configured that way.

BTW, everything seems to be still working :-)

Re:SP2 in A.U.

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Vista, sir? Please give back your geek credentials NOW!

And stop with this "don't tase me bro"!

Re:SP2 in A.U.

[sridharo]

I got the update yesterday around 24 hrs back.But its heavy. But again...

Not in automatic updates, really?

[Greymist]

So uhh, what was the 300MB+ item in Windows Updates this morning that I installed? I'm sure it said service pack 2.

Re:Not in automatic updates, really?

[richy freeway]

But did it install automatically? No, you had to do it yourself. Read the words, they're important.

Renumber Windows 7 then

[jollyreaper]

This will make 7 Vista SP3, then.

Re:Renumber Windows 7 then

[Anonymous Coward]

That's both funny and original! lollolololoooooooooool

Windows 2nd SP is the 1st releaseable version.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The service pack contains about 800 hotfixes."

Windows versions become usable after the 2nd service pack, in my experience.

minor correction

[drinkypoo]

Sorry, I forgot some words: to the statement you MUST leave your computer idle for a time if you want to be able to search it please append "without having to initiate a separate, file-based search". Thank you.

What? Windows 7 is already out?

[Hurricane78]

I thought it would still take another RC...

Vista SP2

[mandark1967]

I'm hoping that SP2 doesn't break the functionality of my HTPC like Windows 7 did. I tried Windows 7 x64 RC on my HTPC for about a week or so, but my sound card (X-Fi Extreme Audio PCI-Express x1 slot) developed some major problems that caused MCE to crash and WMP to crash.

I went back to Vista on it. I'm happy enough with the Media Center in Vista that I doubt I'll use Windows 7 on this box in the future, even though the UI of Windows 7 Media Center seems to be a little less "cluttered". My biggest complaint about Vista is the format of the recordings you make. I cannot seem to easily manipulate the resulting recordings very well at all, and I have to rely on MCEBuddy to convert the recorded shows to a format (H264) I can then use on other systems and OSes. ( I know, I know...DRM can suck my salty balls)

From a usability standpoint though, Windows 7 seems superior to Vista in the installation process, as well as the Desktop UI. I am surprised that they don't just convert the installed Vista base to Windows 7 for the simplicity of support. (well maybe not "surprised". it "is" MS, afterall)

Re:Vista SP2

[DavidD_CA]

I hope you took a moment to report the issue with your HTPC back to Microsoft.

Re:Vista SP2

[mandark1967]

I've been active on Tech Net for a few years now, so I made sure to report the issue on the Windows 7 section of the forums.

sp2 on auto updates

[GooDieZ]

i just booted vista on my dual boot laptop, and instantly i got prompted to install sp2 from auto-update...

dont care about vista, or any windows, i just never bothered to remove it completley... sigh... damn vendors with preinstalled win$shit

Re:sp2 on auto updates

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did you boot it?
Why haven't you cleared the partition for extra space in your os of choice?
Why is it still in your bootloader?

Re:sp2 on auto updates

[GooDieZ]

It is Legit copy, my wife and kids play games on it from time to time, there are 2 250GB disks so i just didnt want to waste time to make all win games run under wine.

Earlier Version Not So Good

[anomalous cohort]

I don't use Vista myself but I know someone who does. He had to back out SP2 because it reduced Powerpoint to a crawl. It looked to me like there was excessive HD activity.

I Just Installed Vista SP2

[CyberSlammer]

I rebooted, typed in Winver at the search bar, and this is what I got....

http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/1687/vistasp2g.jpg

LIARS!!!!

FYI, Windows Server 2008 SP2 too

[Culture20]

Apparently Server 2008 shipped with its SP1 built-in. 2008 SP2 auto-downloaded yesterday.

Re:FYI, Windows Server 2008 SP2 too

[VGPowerlord]

Microsoft decided to have unified service packs for OSes using the same core.

That is to say, for Vista and Server 2008. This also means that, yes, Windows Server 2008 was SP1 at launch.

Indexing Service

[RulerOf]

The Indexing Service and Windows Search are not the same thing. I never used Windows Search under XP because I had gone out of my way to learn how to configure the Indexing Service (which is a huge pain in the ass) so that Start > Search would give me indexed results. I never experienced the Indexing Service pwning my machine as you say, though, and I indexed 3+ TB worth of stuff with it.

You have to do heavy configuration in Vista with Windows Search to have it search outside your profile, but once you do, the searches are much faster than XP was, compared to Indexing Service or WDS based searches.

Also, on XP, if you did configure the built-in Indexer to index your stuff, Start > Search would give you results from both in and out of the index, from what I recall. It might be folder-based as to whether or not something not in the index that was supposed to be was included (but was newly created for example, and hadn't been indexed yet), but I can't really remember anymore... been using Vista for too long now :P

Re:Indexing Service

[drinkypoo]

The Indexing Service and Windows Search are not the same thing.

That's true, but that truth does nothing to contradict anything I said.

Windows Search 4.0 is an indexed search. It must index your system to provide search results. And one thing it does not let you do is search for anything non-indexed. The process to perform a non-indexed search from the GUI in XP after Windows Search 4.0 is installed includes clicking a link in the Windows Search sidebar, which brings up the classic Search Companion (or the classic/advanced search, if you have so configured Windows) in a new window.

I have certainly had the Indexing Service "pwn" my machine. It is terrible at detecting when the system is actually idle, and it will often decide that it is doing nothing when you are playing a fullscreen game. Thus, gamers typically disable it. However, Windows Search 4.0 is far, far worse.

I don't run Windows right on my system any more (for some possibly transient value of "any more") so it's a non-issue for me; I disabled that stuff in my VM.

Hyper-V limited to one guest with SP1?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now on Windows Server 2008 Standard I've got 3 VMs running on Hyper-V no problem. According to the release documentation I'm now going to be limited to one guest? I can't even find pricing for additional seats. Way to go Microsoft.

Re:Hyper-V limited to one guest with SP1?

[VGPowerlord]

Microsoft decided to have unified service packs for OSes using the same core.

That is to say, for Vista and Server 2008. This also means that, yes, Windows Server 2008 was SP1 at launch.

Re:Hyper-V limited to one guest with SP1?

[VGPowerlord]

and I apparently hit the wrong Reply button. Whoops.

Keeps getting better!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I've been using this Windows Mojave for a while now... it's SO much better than Vista!

Hello. Open source software, too.

[Animaether]

"I damn well *expect* there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in Windows until someone "finds" them and posts about them publically, security related or not"

Hell, I expect there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in open source software, until somebody -other than those actually responsible for the code- submit a patch.
I'm looking at you, silly little Thunderbird bug #92165 from 2001/Jul/24.

Re:Hello. Open source software, too.

[Achromatic1978]

Wow. What a clusterfuck that bug is. The simplest of problems, but "no", it's closed as "wontfix", then opened, and then "eh. there are workarounds. rename the folder on disk, making sure you don't break any filters or prefs, while the app is closed" is presented as a viable solution, even after someone points out "things like this are what separates professional software from amateur"

In case you're wondering what the bug is, in TB, say you create a folder "mozilla", and decide you want to call it "Mozilla". Nope. You have to rename it to something else, then rename it back to what it should be. Eww.

Re:Hello. Open source software, too.

[westlake]

Hell, I expect there to be thousands, if not more, bugs that are not and will never be fixed in open source software, until somebody -other than those actually responsible for the code- submit a patch.

When you look at a project like Firefox, what you see is a soundly financed and internally disciplined operation - that probably isn't all that different from the inner workings of Microsoft.

Re:Hello. Open source software, too.

[rastos1]

> I'm looking at you, silly little Thunderbird bug #92165 from 2001/Jul/24.
(Renaming folder to same name but different case not allowed)

Isn't this caused by the possibility that the folder name may correspond to a directory name on a filesystem that is not case-sensitive?

Re:Hello. Open source software, too.

[Corporate Troll]

That was my first reaction too, but since I'm on Debian with ext3, I tried it to be sure. The bug report is correct (IceDove 2.0.0.19). What this is most likely is (I don't know for sure), is a check added to accomodate those non-case sensitive filesystems, but it does so silently and it should at least report an error. Try doing the described behaviour manually on Windows in explorer (the file explorer) and it will give you an error (well, that's what I remember, I can't test it right now).

I'm not really sure if the developers can find out if the underlying file system[1] is or is not case sensitive, so the behaviour is understandable. However, what should be done is a clear error or at least disable the "Ok" button. (Or do the described workaround if you detect this, quite exotic case)

[1] What I can tell is that you can't rely on the operating system. The Thunderbird profile may reside on an NFS share an the software runs on Windows accessing the profile. Which could thus mean that Windows has access to a case-insensitive file system. The inverse is perfectly imaginable too.

Sad thing is

[Shivetya]

I think the same about my OS X updates.... though it is getting to more than x.x.2 now.

Vista is native to Blu-Ray, gawd I hope this kicks Apple in the pants.

It Just Works

[bigdady92]

TLDR: I hated Vista. Loved XP. Use Linux. Installed 64bit Vista. Vista Crashed and burned. Reinstalled with SP2. It just Works.

I've been a longtime XP user. I use Ubuntu and RHEL at work. I use linux and unix. I hated Vista with a passion, thought it was a PIA and had so much config problems. I then bought a new PC (quad core 6GB ram, blah blah) so I figured I'd put Vista on it. First time worked ok. I updated my bios, it blew away my Raid 1. Got irritated and stopped screwing with it. Then SP2 came along in the last few weeks and I reinstalled my OS and installed SP2 over it.

It just works. Works perfectly. So simple to install Vista and simple to install the SP2. 2 reboots and I had everything working. Fixed the RAID issue, fixed the bluetooth issue, fixed some other quirks that drove me batshiz crazy.

I gotta say that I used to hate vista with the passion of a 1000 firey suns. Now I'm like "Well it's not too bad, what's the problem with it again?"

Re:It Just Works

[Anonymous Coward]

What's it like working at Microsoft? Are they hiring?

Re:It Just Works

[levicivita]

Oh that is easy my friend. A price tag of $320 is a problem. Vista for free is a close call vs. Ubuntu, and Ubuntu probably only makes real sense for users with specific high performance needs (I would still use it, but for most users Windows would be a solid choice too). At $320 MSFT can dispatch its programmers to wipe windshields at rural intersections for all I care.

Re:It Just Works

[citylivin]

Thats the exact same shit people said about XP. Its unbelievable how much people forget. Win2k was the best OS ever when XP dropped. Everyone _EVERYONE_ swore up and down that they would never install XP and its "cartoon" interface. 7 years later and I'm the only one still running win2k. I just upgraded my home PC to XP last year.

My point is that its always the same. People will eventually have to upgrade to vista for one reason or another. This does not mean that the initial problems are solved necessarily, or that the old version of windows is inferior. Your comment of "what was the problem with it again?" illustrates this perfectly.

Re:It Just Works

[Chees0rz]

try Windows 7.

I installed Vista and thought- eh whatever. It's prettier than XP, a little slower, and keeps making me put in my password... it wasn't terrible.

I went to Windows 7 and thought- OK- this is a slightly prettier Vista with a more consistent UI.

Then I sat back down at a Vista machine and thought - "what a POS"

Re:It Just Works

[mgblst]

Yeah, I know, that is fucking amazing. You installed it and it worked like it is supposed to work. Bloody brilliant. It like whenever I but a sandwich and it doesn't kill me, that is damn amazing as well. And when I get a coffee and they don't accidentally put boiling hot lava in it, that is absolutely brilliant as well.

Re:It Just Works

[mgblst]

I hate hearing this shit, nobody said this about XP, because XP was just windows 2000 with a few updates. Maybe your know a few people that said this, but that doesn't make it right for a couple of idiots to bring this up everytime someone has something bad to say about Vista, which is a major update compared to XP. And Windows 7, is not a major update to Vista, notice you haven't seen SO MANY PEOPLE complaining about going from Vista to W7??? Except for the voices in your head, of course.

Wait just a minute there...

[Phu5ion]

I thought Windows 7 was being released later this year?

Re:Wait just a minute there...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot for even thinking that Windows 7 is similar to Vista at all. So many things are different it's not even funny.

'Features' in service packs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Search 4.0, Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack, the ability to record data on to Blu-Ray media natively in Vista...

In a service pack? So much for the Microsoft that said they will keep new 'features' out of service packs. If I want a Bluetooth Feature Pack, I would download it! If I want Windows Search, I would download it! I DON'T WANT IT and now you'll force it on me?

I tell Windows Update CONSTANTLY that I don't want Silverlight. I've told it not to show me this update at least 20 times!!!! I suppose they'll just include it in a service pack and I'll get it anyway!

Re:'Features' in service packs?

[Anonymous Coward]

When Microsoft ships a feature pack, they need to maintain both the mainline code and the feature pack code, which could potentially have a significantly different codebase in terms of functionality and bugs/bug fixes. Doing this is expensive for their support and product organizations. For feature packs that modify the OS itself, it makes sense to include those modifications in a service pack. This reduces cost, improves product reliability and, with some exceptions, makes people happier.

No one is forcing you to install SP2.

Re:'Features' in service packs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista RTM and Vista SP1 both have Bluetooth support. If you don't like it don't use it.

Automatic Update

[RevRagnarok]

My laptop had it available last night...?

Oh, and of course, I unchecked the "critical" update of IE8.

How's the performance

[stbill79]

Of course, the rest of us who've downgraded to XP, but still have the license/restore partition with Vista are wondering about the performance. Stick with XP on my laptop with only 2G of ram or do we upgrade, yet?

Windows 7 RC got a lot of updates today as well

[revjtanton]

The available language packs went from 4 to like 30 and there were I think 4 critical updates and 1 to IE8 in Windows 7 RC. I installed the updates (not the languages) and restarted...only to have boot problems. As someone who never bought or got into Vista I imagine that frustration (boot FAIL) is what Vista users have felt this whole time...my condolences.

Vista in the enterprise

[mu51c10rd]

I am sure Vista is fine with the latest software, and for personal use. However, have you tried deploying Vista in an enterprise environment (or use older software for that matter)? Here is a small list of issues that have caused us to stop looking at Vista for a rollout:

1. Group Policy management (the move to admx files has caused numerous backwards compatibility issues)
2. The ever-growing winsxs folder. There is no way to shrink or compress it.
3. Try creating images with default software for imaging workstations due to #2.
4. In-house applications need to be recoded.
5. Minimum requirements for Vista would require a major purchase of machines to be able to run it.
6. Activation process fails ~1/3 of the time, even when trying to use an in-house key server.
7. Random core dumps on Dell Latitude laptop line (have had 8 of them do this), even with the latest drivers and firmware.

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[DigitalPasture]

Hahaha... No, have not and likely will not implement Vista in the office. Though I love it for home use, XP works fine at the office and we'll be skipping over this product cycle at least. More from the standpoint that we don't need to upgrade and I'm lazy more than anything else.

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[Tawnos]

For 3, I would point out that it's become a LOT better with Vista and Win7 to create software images.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Imaging_Format

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[Achromatic1978]

4. In-house applications need to be recoded.

So your programmers wrote shitty code that failed to follow standards. Other people can write software which runs on Windows 95 through Windows 7 - the fact that your programmers didn't/couldn't is hardly a failing of Vista.

6. Activation process fails ~1/3 of the time, even when trying to use an in-house key server.

One third of the time? I've watched Vista computers take memory, graphics cards, CPU upgrades and activate and reactivate without issue. If activation was failing 33% of the time on any kind of scale, there would be outrage (of the real kind, not the angry-geek-at-Slashdot kind). "Using your in-house key server" points a bit differently, too. My guess? You're doing something the wrong way. Very much the wrong way.

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I hate to tell you this, but if you're getting core dumps then you are running some kind of Unix. That might be why your Windows Vista activation is failing.

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[VGPowerlord]

I'm wondering why you have a problem with the winsxs folder in Vista, but not in XP.

Windows Side by Side support was introduced in Windows XP. It's for loading multiple versions of DLLs. Installing various versions of .NET or Visual Studio tends to bloat this directory up regardless of which OS version you're using.

If you have Visual Studio 2008 installed, you'll even have versions of DLLs for different architectures than you're currently running: x86, x64, and Itanium stuff are all installed as I recall.

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[mu51c10rd]

Yes, the process is better. Our issues are more the size of the images. Vista does not compress into a wim file very well. Create a wim file of Vista with no applications loaded...it will still be ~5GB.

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[mu51c10rd]

Good point, it was introduced in WinXP. However, Microsoft did something that made it very unwieldy in Vista. For instance, a default install of Vista with no applications, results in a 10GB install. I have found that 5-6GB of that is just the winsxs folder. The folder then grows as you install applications. I think I recall MS mentioning that the winsxs is handled better in Win7, but I admittedly have not checked that out in RC1 yet.

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[Johnno74]

I can't believe I'm sticking up for vista, but.....

2. winsxs folder. This is actually a folder full of hard links. Its isn't _really_ 10gb. some info here

4. I've had maybe half a dozen compatibility issues with vista since I started using it over two years ago. In my current job there is a crapload of dodgy activeX web apps and VB6 apps, none have a problem. The ODBC drivers we use for connections to an informix database works _fine_ in vista, and the dates on those binaries is 1996. Infact, they work better in vista than in XP or anything else. Certain types of connections with these drivers never worked at all in applications deployed with ClickOnce on XP.... but in vista they work fine.

7. I got vista preinstalled 2+ years ago on a Dell Latitude D820. At that stage I had a lot of bluescreens etc caused by the USB stack, video drivers etc etc but since SP1 came out it has been rock solid. I use suspend/resume and I only ever reboot my machine if there is an update I want to install. I guess it probably gets rebooted on average every 6 weeks or so. I don't think I've had a bluescreen in at least 12 months.

You may well be right on your other points, I don't know. Vista still has issues and feels very bloated compared to 7, but IMHO it is a shame it has struggled to throw off the bad reputation it gained when it launched.

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[mgblst]

This has nothing to do with following standards, way to go showing your ignorance. It was never a standard on Windows 95 to save the BX register, but when NT came out it was a standard for NT. And when the two merged in Windows 2000/XP, the NT standard was carried across, so anything that didn't save the BX register failed.

So do fuck yourself, the standards keep changing with every release.

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Just installed SP 2. It deactivated my legit copy of Vista. When I click on the activate button it tells me it cannot activate and I need to re-install. When I click on chnag eproduct key, it refuses to accept the original key it was intalled with. Office Outlook also now hangs during start up. Failing to activate 33% of the time? Totally believable. I wish I were that lucky. Nice work Microsoft!!!

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

2. The ever-growing winsxs folder. There is no way to shrink or compress it.

That's the folder where all "windows sucks" posts go to, there is no way to shrink it.

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[Tiger_Storms]

Two things I see here are problems, First one is the fact you should have just gone open source with your Group Policy management, and second was the fact you were using dell laptops, I've owned 1 dell computer that I've purchased (never to be done again) and have used more than 20 of them in a work environment. I'm sorry their laptops are made with crap on the inside and aren't worth any amount of money you'd be putting in to them. so the fact you have them do Random core dumps, was because of the brand name "dell" on it, not because of the OS.... okay... well maybe the OS is little to blame, but still!

Re:Vista in the enterprise

[Allador]

1. Group Policy management (the move to admx files has caused numerous backwards compatibility issues)

This is a pretty minor issue.

2. The ever-growing winsxs folder. There is no way to shrink or compress it.

Who cares? If you're trying to rollout Vista on machines with 20GB hard drives, then you made a bad choice to do so. Your equipment isnt ready for Vista, and there's no big rush, so why are you trying to move when you're not ready?

3. Try creating images with default software for imaging workstations due to #2.

I dont understand what #2 had to do with this. Creating images with default software works just fine. The size of the winsxs folder is irrelevant to that task.

4. In-house applications need to be recoded.

This means in-house apps were done wrong in the first place, and need to be fixed. This isnt a Vista problem, this is a lazy/incompetent/badly-managed in-house apps group problem. Thats like blaming your ISP because you have some users that are bottlenecking your internet connection with bittorrent.

5. Minimum requirements for Vista would require a major purchase of machines to be able to run it.

Then dont do it.

6. Activation process fails ~1/3 of the time, even when trying to use an in-house key server.

This is not the normal experience.

7. Random core dumps on Dell Latitude laptop line (have had 8 of them do this), even with the latest drivers and firmware.

Is this on the Dell Latitude E-series? If so, this is about Dell's problem, not Vista. There are BIG hardware problems with some of the E-lines, just do a quick google. It's all over the news.

How do I slipstream this or where are good iso 64

[Joe The Dragon]

How do I slipstream this or where are good iso's for vista 64 that are not on a pay site as Why should I pay to download a copy that I have payed for.

You Joke, but...

[Jim_Callahan]

... I've been seriously freaked out a few times by Vista anticipating what I wanted done and popping up with a dialogue box offering to do it automatically. I don't have quite the faith to actually let it do it yet, but that's the same impulse that has me driving a manual, i.e. it's not rational. If windows is planning to impress me, I think developing psychic powers is a good way to go about it.

(For reference, I use Ubuntu for tooling around on the internet at home, Vista for gaming, XP on my office machine so the department tech won't hate me, and 95 on my equipment machinery because of god knows what compatibility issues with the X-ray control software.)

(Side note - Never try to get 95 to support USB, no matter how modern the hardware is and how much you hate juggling floppy disks full of plain-text data. It's not worth the emotional anguish.)

Re:You Joke, but...

[c0p0n]

Actually there are many good reasons to drive a manual car. Total control on performance, fuel consumption, and generally not being a lazy geezer.

Re:You Joke, but...

[lukas84]

It depends on where you drive.

My private car is manual - it's fun to drive fast with it. My company car has an automatic transmission - great when you're driving through traffic or through cities in general. My motorcycle is (as almost all) manual - and it's great to drive fast with it.

Re:You Joke, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Few cars get better fuel consumption as compared to a modern (last 7 years) automatic transmission. The technology has surpassed your abilities... and often has more gears now... and even has continuous shifting in some models.

Performance is a hard statement to make as well. There are many cars now where the automatic model is better performing than the manual, e.g. mustangs and camaros and their ilk. And, there is a very long list of cars where unless you're truly an amazing driver you're not going to beat the automatic version.

Cost to maintain is probably the best practical argument, but the hydraulic clutch crowd made that one slightly debatable.

All that said, they're still a fuckload more fun to drive.

Re:You Joke, but...

[mgblst]

...and generally not being a lazy geezer.

This is hilarious, so driving a manual car is not being a lazy geezer, other than actually getting of your arse and walking or cycling somewhere? Bloody genius!

Re:You Joke, but...

[toddestan]

One of the reasons for the fuel economy difference that the highest gear in many automatics has a lower ratio than the highest gear available for the manual. I noticed this when I drove the manual version of the car I own - on the freeway I kept on wanting to shift to the next gear because the engine was running at a higher RPM than I was used to. Not only did this hurt the economy of the manual version, it also meant the car was noticably more noisy. I'm not sure why they do this - do they think that people can't downshift to pass on the freeway?

Re:You Joke, but...

[Necroloth]

I thought the reason why fuel consumption in auto's are never better than manuals is because of the torque converter.

Re:You Joke, but...

[c0p0n]

It's not that difficult to know how to drive to save fuel, or to go fast, it's harder to excel at it though as you already know. I've driven a number of automatic cars over the past 5 years, most of them with sequential shifting so I could either go manual or automatic on the same car, and I've beaten the automatic transmission every time on fuel consumption. Acceleration wise, is hard to tell as it's quite subjective and frankly I never carried any measurements.

This said, automatic cars are not as commonplace in Europe as they are in the US, so I would expect some refinements in american cars we may not have in here.

is this that different from open source?

[YesIAmAScript]

Didn't you see the OpenSSH article go through over a week ago? Disclosing significant security issues that existed in OpenSSH since its existence and weren't even announced until months after they were found and fixed?

Open source also has lots of bugs in it. And many of them aren't fixed until they are posted about in a public forum.

You have an actual point here about open source. It's just Stallman's point restated, but still, it's valid. But you do a really rotten job of stating it and explaining how open source (or free software) is different.

The real value of open source (in terms of bugs) is that if you would like, you can inspect the code and then hopefully find latent bugs. And if you find them, you can fix them. For example, if your business depends very critically on a section of code being secure, you can hire someone to code review it. You can't do this with closed source. You won't necessarily find any existing problems, but at least you have some more control over your destiny.

From what MS and the military say, the militarized versions of Windows don't have different code in them, they just are configured differently to have more security features (which were already available) turned on. So the militarized versions certainly don't have everything they know about fixed. The same is true of open source/free software, many projects have enormous bug databases with lists of open (known about) bugs which are not fixed. Again, the big different with open source is that if one of those bugs is a deal-breaker for you, you can fix it yourself and not wait for the project maintainers to do it.

Re:is this that different from open source?

[cdrguru]

This "value" is non-existant to 99% of the "users" in the world and I seriously wish it would stop being touted as some advantage to open source.

Fact is, for anything "open source" to escape the dungen of nerddom, it has to be being used by a lot of people that do not read code, are not programmers and have no hope of ever looking at the source. And, more importantly, no desire to ever do so. They want something that "just works". Period.

Paying someone to look at the source for you isn't really a viable option. If they are familar with the project then maybe they can be useful to both the project and to someone paying them to look at it. However, give someone not familiar with the project anything larger than the source for cat and they are likely to spend a lot of time learning about it. And someone is going to be paying for that time. Or do you think someone should just spend hundreds of hours of their time learning something like gawk or Apache for the fun of it? I suppose they should in the open source universe where nobody has to pay rent or grocery bills.

Software today has grown quite a bit past the point where you can pull some contractor off the street, sit them down at an unfamiliar code base and have them be productive. Some commercial software development has this as a goal, a future objective. Yet to be achieved. I've never seen an open source project that has even attempted the level of self-documentation required for that. Heck, I see lots of K&R style C code without any function prototypes and I would put function prototypes at the beginning of a long list of requirements for self-documenting code. And all of this ignores the real user need.

What users need is for stuff to work. They put in a CD and install Ubuntu and it works. Period. If they need something else, they can install it in a few minutes without digging around for prerequisite libraries. We're not there yet with Linux, but it is closer than it was. Windows is pretty much there in terms of overall usability and OSX has been there for a while.

Bugs? Of course there are known but not disclosed bugs. Often these are things that were discovered by developers that stand zero chance of ever being encountered by a user. Politically, you aren't going to get these disclosed because (a) they aren't important to users and (b) it feeds the idea that there are endless bugs in software. Of course there are endless bugs when you have a code base of millions of lines of code. But nobody wants to advertise it, especially those bugs that have an extremely low chance (or zero chance) of being encoutered.

Re:is this that different from open source?

[YesIAmAScript]

I agree with your points. Which is why I had to go to a somewhat strained example (hiring code reviewers for a section of code that your business depends on) to show how open source has a real value. And it does to some, but as you say, to many others it does not.

Even if they could fix BIND or whatever in their system, they don't want to even go through the trouble of building it, replacing the stock one and then dealing with how their distro update system screws up when it tries to download the authorized patch over it later.

Re:is this that different from open source?

[ledow]

The "value" is not non-existent. It's just further down the food chain.

The users *themselves* don't have to be doing code-reviews. It's probably impossible for them to do so properly. I put my trust in a vast majority of the code I use every day to do the job it's supposed to. But I still prefer OS code, because I know that *someone* can look at it without bias and that there *are* people looking at it, looking for security holes and other problems. I can't find weaknesses in SSH or SSL code - bloody hell, that can get ridiculously deep and mathematical and I *have* a Maths/Computing degree. But *someone* can, someone who knows better than me and can find the problem. The fact that *I* can look at the code too is purely incidental. I have, in the past, modified the code of my kernel in order to do something that *I* needed to do there and then. That's beyond the value of any operating system that I can't modify.

For everyone else, the value comes from the fact that *someone* could do it. It's like TomTom map sharing - 99.99% of individuals will NEVER make a change to their maps and those that do won't necessarily upload it. But if they do, everyone can (potentially) benefit - if they choose to accept those changes. If the facility *wasn't* available, though, nobody would benefit.

The value comes from the ability of "an unbiased third-party user" (not any particular one, or even every one) being able to contribute back and improve the quality of the code/data. You don't WANT every user contributing back (you will get far too many conflicts and arguments and crap code), but you need the *potential* for them to do so, in order for the tiny minority that do want to and can contribute to improve the codebase for everyone.

What users need, and what the OS crowd are delivering are two entirely different concepts and THIS is the part that everybody fails to recognise. The OS crowd are interested in open code, interesting code, useful code, code that people can play with and learn from. The fact that it happens to make a damn good operating system / web browser too is just a bonus.

Please stop making the classic mistake that OS has to have a business case, become dominant on the desktop, cater to commercial needs, be used by Grandma's etc. It's a falsehood propogated by companies and individuals that make a lot of money by packaging up OS software in a convenient business-oriented way and selling it. There's a simple test for this - try and get a piece of code (properly licensed) that enables a new device into Linux without a proper code audit... you won't do it, or at best you'll get sidelined into an extremely experimental section and never enabled by default (and removed if the code isn't "fixed"). The purity of the code wins over the "business case" of having that device work at all. It doesn't stop certain companies bundling that code in a pre-compiled kernel or similar, but you've strayed out of the OS-arena long before you get that far.

Open Source is an academic pursuit to, in a way, prove that an OS, or a web browser, or a web server, or an email client can be fast, modern, more secure and still have understandable code while running on the same systems as the expensive, proprietry, insecure, slow systems that we see people buy every day.

As a percentage, less than 0.1% of people using OS code will *EVER* even see a line of code. Probably only about 25% actually even see the compilation process. And the number of people understanding, contributing, reviewing a particular piece of code will be literally in single digits for anything not world-wide. It doesn't matter, though, we *all* know that and we're not asking *anyone* to dig out a C manual, or learn gawk (what a way to carry an argument to absurdity). That's not the point. The point is that people can if they want things to change. And having *one* user want to change things benefits everyone, even if they never actually manage to make any changes - just questioning the code is useful. Past that,

Re:is this that different from open source?

[tiggertaebo]

I have to say that is hands-down the single best post I've ever read on open source.

In related news....

[motherpusbucket]

Simoniz has introduced a new compound that will actually allow you to polish a turd to a showroom shine.

Re:In related news....

[gid]

Mythbusters proved that it is indeed possible to polish a turd.

Re:In related news....

[jo42]

...after processing it very heavily.

Re:How do I slipstream this or where are good iso

[Anonymous Coward]

Slipstream it with vlite. Use the Windows DVD that you received when you paid for it.

Thats all great and all....

[Immostlyharmless]

But when are they going to release the fix that allows me to install something when I click on it, as opposed to some unspecified time in the future that may range from 30 seconds to 20 minutes and at speeds approaching XP?

Applications that take 5 seconds to install under XP sometimes took as long as 2 minutes under Vista, never understood it.

I'll stick with XP until they refuse to support it anymore. Hopefully by that time, some flavor of Unix will have matured to the point where I never have to use the command line *if* I don't care to, as opposed to having to use the command line at least once for damned near everything.

Re:Thats all great and all....

[xenolion]

Pre-SP1 Vista took some time loading things due to UAC, it got better with SP1 hope they got it right with SP2, maybe then I'll use it. Right now Im running Windows 7 RC1 and I have to say I'm really liking it, due to the fact that some of my hardware wont work right on XP, Id recommend taking a look at it sometime.

check your drivers too

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently found this annoying thing that Intel GigE drivers do. They throttle you down to 10Mbps when they think the computer is idle.

The Difference...

[Anonymous Coward]

You see the difference between Microsoft and Apple is that Microsoft releases these updates for free. Apple on the other hand charges you for them. Oh and gives them pretty animal names.

Not quite

[Nefron]

Obviously someone watched Angels and Demons last night...

Actually I'm the son of a minister that had an interest in astronomy as a child. It was the first comparison that sprang to mind.
Not that it matters, but I haven't read or watched any of Dan Brown's works.

Autorun?

[anotherslashfan]

I heard rumor that they will be disabling autorun in one of their future releases of Vista. Since it's not mentioned for SP2, I guess we'll be waiting for another update for Vista? http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2009/04/28/changes-in-windows-to-meet-changes-in-threat-landscape.aspx

BitDefender A/V Treats Vista SP2 Files Trojans

[Anonymous Coward]

Several users on the BitDefender forums are complaining that the BitDefender Anti-virus software is treating certain Vista SP2 files as trojans and quarantining them during installation causing the "Black Screen of Death."

http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=13819

Windows Search 4.0

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope there will be a way to avoid having to install the crapware M$ call "Windows Search 4.0" that SP2 includes!

SP2 broke my static ip settings

[Anonymous Coward]

After installation SP2 proceeded to break/forget my static ip NIC's default gateway IP after using WOL once.

Ironically, this bug is an old one and was originally fixed in SP1. Looks like SP2 un-fixed it.

In that case....

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Gates should call Adam and Jamie to start working on SP3.

When the joke's on you

[westlake]

Then again, I find it pretty funny that DRM, which is quite likely to introduce bug and crippling functionality, is packaged as an "experience update". From TFA (bold mine)

It's funny only until your neighbor's kids put on their NVIDIA glasses to watch - or play - "Monsters vs Aliens 2" on their family's 3D-Ready HDTV.

They are having a great time.

There isn't a monitor, HDTV, sound system or cable to be found anywhere on the market that doesn't support the protected path.

The low-res download for portable media play is part of the deal.

The geek will continue ranting on about DRM - and Microsoft will continue to rack up sales for Win 7 and the next generation XBOX.

 

This tells me nothing.

[westlake]

Numbers of page view per platform on the last 12 month of a little european website

Unless I know the target audience of your website how am I to know what these stats really mean?

Re:This tells me nothing.

[Anonymous Coward]

The website is europa.eu

UTC ~= GMT

[kybred]

It's not quite the same as GMT. There can be a few seconds difference between the two.

"... a few seconds ...." ? According to the link you reference:

For most common and legal-trade purposes, the fractional second difference between UTC and UT (GMT) is inconsequentially small, so UTC is often called GMT, for example by the BBC, although that usage is ambiguous.

You might be thinking of GPS time.

The GPS navigation message includes the difference between GPS time and UTC, which as of 2009 is 15 seconds due to the leap second added to UTC December 31 2008.

Re:UTC ~= GMT

[kybred]

s/you reference/referenced above/

Re:How do I slipstream this or where are good iso

[ksemlerK]

Bittorrent is your friend. MiniNova, PirateBay, TorrentZ, etc. Since you stated you already posses a license to use such software, I have no qualms about providing you pre-integrated sources. If they aren't available today, they will be within the next week.

The real question...

[drik00]

Will it still use THREE TIMES the RAM that my Ubuntu desktop uses (same functional apps running)?

J

XP Power User + Run As = UAC for XP

[Anonymous Coward]

I think UAC is great. I get home from work and my daughter says "What's your password because I need to install XYZ" and I smile. I can let her do as she pleases on my laptop and not worry about her install the latest Malware, Crapware (iTunes), etc.

How is that different from your daughter having a power user or limited account on WinXP?

I have run as a Power User on winxp for years now. If I need to install something, I just right-click and "Run As..." an administrator. It's XP UAC and, since a power user doesn't have full access to the filesystem, it works great for hiding porn!

FWIW - Windows Explorer

[Animaether]

For what it's worth - you can actually rename "hello" to "Hello" in Windows Explorer just fine - using either the in-place renaming facility with F2, or right-click, choose properties, and change the name in the folder's properties pane.

I'm guessing the entire distinction is what was explained in two posts in that thread...
one guy says that you can't do this in windows itself, giving the example: "mv hello Hello"
to which another guy says that he's silly for using a move command when trying to -rename- an entry, and gives the working example: "ren hello Hello"

I'm not a filesystem expert, so I can't say whether or not case sensitivity would be an issue (I'm just imagining that if you already have a directory called "Hello", and you're trying to rename (not move, rename) "hello" to "Hello", it will tell you the folder already exists, same as would happen if you renamed "foo" to "Hello"; but, again, not an expert).

Regardless.. everything in any other app I know of lets you rename folders and files to the same name with a different case, so I'm just surprised that in ThunderBird, one cannot. If I knew C++ -and- had enough knowledge of where my changes might affect things, I'd write a patch myself. But I don't, sadly.

SP2=Blue Screen of Death

[free2create]

I installed this on my wife computer no problem Vista Home. When I tried installing it on my Vista Ultimate machine Toshiba U205 I received the Blue Screen of Death during the reboot. I came up in safe mode, rolled back the change. Then started up in safe mode, shutdown unnecessary services, then installed SP2 and it installed fine.