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Ballmer Says Microsoft Wasted Time On Vista
Stoobalou writes "In a chat with fellow CEOs at Microsoft's 14th annual CEO Summit, Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer came close to admitting Vista was a dog. 'How do you get your product right? How do you help the customer? How do you be patient?' he asked, as if he knew the answer. What he did know was that Microsoft spent too many years building Windows Vista. 'We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,' he said." You can also watch
video of the speech, but 31 minutes of Ballmer is a lot of Ballmer.
"We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,"
Boy that word sure doesn't mean jackshit when it just gets thrown around and abused like that, huh? Like watching the word 'fuck' get detoothed in Scorsese's Goodfellas, there's this sort of desensitization toward 'innovation' that leaves me confused as to how I should describe people like Tesla, Turing and Shannon. If Ballmer considers all of his workers as 'innovators' and has "thousands of man hours of innovation" at his disposal then surely there must be some new word to apply to the real innovators. I guess there might be something to the theory that innovation diffuses with time but this is downright ridiculous.
Innovation requires risk and not the kind of risks Microsoft took with their Vista debacle. It requires that you do things entirely differently than everyone else. This is not Microsoft. This is not Windows Vista nor Windows 7 nor IE anything.
My work here is dung.
To be fair though, Vista laid the groundwork for Windows 7, which I have (almost) nothing but praise for...so maybe it was worth it. Besides, just like XP, as Vista got on in age it became much better.
Unlike XP, people won't be using it 9 years after its release...
Living With a Nerd
windows 7 is nice, but the cool things now are cell phones and tablets. for that you need a mobile OS with a footprint of under 1GB. Windows Phone 7 is still months away and a few years behind iPhone OS and Android.
Boy that word sure doesn't mean jackshit when it just gets thrown around and abused like that, huh? Like watching the word 'fuck' get detoothed in Scorsese's Goodfellas, there's this sort of desensitization toward 'innovation' that leaves me confused as to how I should describe people like Tesla, Turing and Shannon
"Fucking innovative".
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Way too much Ballmer, I'd say.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
And they only sort of cleaned things up with 7. Keep solidly in mind that 7 is nothing more than what Vista probably ought to have shipped with in the first place. Keep solidly in mind that it's NOT any more secure than XP (if you tell yourself that it is, keep deluding yourself...helps all the botnets...). If Ballmer was honestly interested in "innovation", he should have risked quite a bit more than he did with Vista- for all the issues, etc. they had, they could have gotten further along by taking a *BSD or Linux core and slapping a WINE-like application layer composed of the app framework that everyone calls "Windows" and would have gotten further and better as a result. Strangely, I think it'd taken less time than Vista took as well- but that's just a personal observation, and nothing more...
Innovation requires risk and not the kind of risks Microsoft took with their Vista debacle. It requires that you do things entirely differently than everyone else. This is not Microsoft. This is not Windows Vista nor Windows 7 nor IE anything.
Microsoft took a big risk with Longhorn and tried to write pretty much the whole OS in managed code (entirely different to everyone else) and it didn't pay off. Most of the delay came from throwing most of that work away and starting again back in native code.
Innovation? Part of the big problem was that there weren't killer features worth upgrading for. You could cite Aero, but it was a massive resource hog and is chasing the tail of Mac OS X and Linux. It wasn't innovation.
In so many areas Vista made needless changes that weren't improvments or innovations. It seems like they had no direction and needed to shuffle things around enough to convince people this was a new Windows release.
Windows Repair Install is gone with no apparent reason.
Every major ocnfiguration dialog is moved to another location. You need more clicks to accomplish the same tasks. This was a major usability regression with no apparent reason.
Vista's failure was because Microsoft had no idea what it wanted Vista to be. It is a failing of leadership. Leadership also failed in not reaching out to hardware manufacturers and working closer with them. ATI and NVidia had trouble working with the new Vista driver API (which was a mess). OEMs had trouble figuring out what exactly constituted "Vista capable" hardware.
It isn't because you spent too much innovating. It is because you spent too much time running around in circles.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation
You wasted thousands of man-hours of innovation, but not for the reasons you think. You run a company with a long history and well-known culture of quashing real innovation (because, let's all be honest, Microsoft is big enough with enough smart people working there that real good ideas do see development - they just never seem to see release...). The development teams are so political (with the Office team at the top of the heap, as I understand it) resulting in corporate politics determining what ideas actually make it to market rather than the merits of the actual idea. How many innovative ideas have been canned by internal policy and infighting?
Vista was a dog but let's not blame Vista for lost man-hours of innovation - look at your corporate culture and you'll find the problem.
you havent whored yourselves out to music and media cartels to accommodate them with their draconian DRM wishes and user control schemes maybe ?
Read radical news here
What everyone else knew in minutes
I'm not a Microsoft employee, but Win 7 is hardly based on Vista, and 7 is a success (in the market). So, maybe Vista was not a success on the market, but provided the common base for 7.
To be fair though, Vista laid the groundwork for Windows 7
There were a lot of jokes about Vista being a beta for Windows 7. It turns out that Vista inadvertently filled that role. Windows 7 is much better for having Vista taken the beating it did.
It's amazing how programmed the top brass at Microsoft are to including this word "innovation" in every speech. I've hardly heard a pronouncement over the last ten years, particularly from Ballmer, and before him Bill Gates, that doesn't feature this word prominently.
I think it all kicked off when they were being hauled over the coals by the EU and threatened with anti-trust action in the US. They then decided that they had to give a better image of actually doing something worthwhile.
Of course, as you note, they are (given their R&D resources) about the most un-innovative company you could imagine.
I have wasted a lot of time on Vista as well.
There are many things to like about 7, but it retains all the usability regressions of Vista. Microsoft wasn't willing to admit Vista was a mistake, so they weren't willing to fix these issues.
UAC is still annoying to the point that I disable it completely. It still takes me longer to accomplish the same tasks. Aero is nice, but still a pale imitation of Compiz/Kwin. DirectX 11 has been completely ignored by the game industry.
Windows 7 has barfed on my RAID twice.
Once Microsoft's latest release claims it can now support patching without reboots, but literally every patch Tuesday since the first beta have still required reboots.
I run Windows 7 because it is the latest release, but I wouldn't say I have nothing but praise for it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
How do you be patient?
I can has patience? I had a patience but grammar eated it.
Ok.. that sure was a "waste of time" but microsoft DID get huge loads of money from people buying the SAME software twice!
For lame windows users that was a waste of their money indeed!
Longhorn as it was called during its development scrapped some functionality during its development cycle. (It even got so much redefined that it was renamed from blackcomb to longhorn)
One very noteworthy is that everything was supposed to run on top of winFS, a database instead of a file system. On a lot of tools this was never completed. Also there would be more diversification between server and client versions. But as you know server and client diversification OS versions in vista/server 2008 are the same as XP/server 2003 edition.
But this just seems normal in any development process. In Unbunto you also see software tools that are no longer in the main package after a couple of years. If you knew what would be important in 4 or 5 years you could do optimal development, but the reality is that nobody can see that much in the future.
Faced with ongoing delays and concerns about feature creep, Microsoft announced on August 27, 2004 that it was making significant changes. "Longhorn" development basically started afresh, building on the Windows Server 2003 codebase, and re-incorporating only the features that would be intended for an actual operating system release.
I dont think Windows 7 is any better than Windows Vista. Marginally faster compared to Vista but being faster than Vista is like winning special olympics, youre still a retard.
Microsoft has no connection whatsoever with their users and thats where their real problem lies. Their users wants their OS to run their applications as good as possible and make managing the computer easy. Microsoft wants the OS to be the users primary application. Jumping up and down in your users face screaming for attention when their primary goal is using their apps arent productive.
Until Microsofts leadership realizes their customers are their end users Windows will continue to suck as bad as ever.
HTTP/1.1 400
Really the Vista analogue is Win2k. I think that Win2k:XP and Vista:Win7 are very parallel. I don't think people remember how truly awful Win2k was on day one. I installed it the week it was released and it was incompatible with so much of my hardware I was offline for three weeks until I just went back to 98SE (which I used until XP came out).
I also think that XP was just about MS's best OS out of the gate. Yes, it was vulnerable like swiss cheese, but even before SP1 it was otherwise very stable and polished if you could keep the malware at bay.
Vista was utter crap on an unimagined scale. One update screwed my system so bad that every 24-48 hours it would stop handling HTTP, POP, and IMAP, but IRC would still work, as would ICMP. The computer was also being used as a gateway at that time and HTTP requests would work THROUGH it from other computers, but not FROM it. No amount of releasing/renewing the IP, updating drivers/firmware, or bouncing services around had any effect. It had to be restarted a minimum of every two days. This behavior persisted until SP1 came out. Like I said, utter crap.
I still haven't had a chance to try Win7, though from all the positive feedback I definitely will when I get around to my next system overhaul.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
The reason there are no "thousands of man hours of innovation" within Microsoft is because the culture is not conducive to innovation so the innovators don't show up in the first place. I'd work there if Ballmer could guarantee me cover when innovation actually happens.
However it also did change peoples expectations towards security in Windows, which was an important step. People complained about it first, mainly because of the old poorly designed programs. Now all those programs had time to patch up or new ones came to market, so they finally work with the new security model and people aren't saying that Windows broke their programs.
UAC is still annoying to the point that I disable it completely
Seriously? It's much improved over Vista, and there have been two times where it actually has caught some bad joojoo that otherwise may have caused trouble. I don't mind it at all.
DirectX 11 has been completely ignored by the game industry
Would you consider that Microsoft's fault?
I run Windows 7 because it is the latest release, but I wouldn't say I have nothing but praise for it.
If you noticed in my OP, I said almost :-) It's a great update to XP, and a sizable improvement over Vista.
Living With a Nerd
MS always take two goes to make a new OS - but apparently, this is somehow news
I still haven't had a chance to try Win7, though from all the positive feedback I definitely will when I get around to my next system overhaul.
As stated above, it certainly has some tweaks that could be used, but overall it's a great operating system.
Amongst many other reasons why, it even boots and runs faster and smoother on my Dell Mini 9 than a stripped down version of XP. Seriously.
Living With a Nerd
I refuse to install moonlight to watch Ballmer.
Operating system innovation basically stopped in the 70s. Today, its just a tuning of features and applications outside of the operating system realm. So long as an operating system today can do things like mount industry standard local and remote filesystems (things like iso images, NFS, etc), can get on the internet (preferably w/o the necessity of 3rd party applications to keep your computer working), have a fairly consistent and usable UI and extensibility via scripting and programming, and of course play games!!! Then your OS is ready for 2010.
I've heard that Windows is great at playing games.
I'm not sure I'd classify 2k as the beta for xp. 2000 was definitely the successor to NT 4, and the last version with a distinct workstation variant. I remember being delighted with 2000 server in comparison to NT 4.
Windows ME fills the XP beta position, though. Nearly everyone hated it. It was released after 2000... kind of like how 98 was released after NT 4, which was released after 95. The big difference I see, though, is that it was not NT based. Anyway, people complained about XP for quite a while, too. Not as badly as Vista or ME, though.
Vista worked perfectly - to get people to buy 7, just like New Coke got people to buy Classic Coke.
Disclaimer: I just installed Vista 2 weeks ago after having the free upgrade discs sitting around for years. After 2 days worth of non-stop updating I have to say it works almost as well as the RC 7 I'd been using previsouly.
Through all the marketing hype around Vista, you heard the voice of the few reviewers that MS forgot to buy: Vista? Why bother?
Vista was, next to Win95, the maybe most hyped OS ever. Even Apple, in all its ability to hype and market their products, could not hold a candle to the amount of time and money pumped into advertising Vista. But while the hype of Win95 came from the users, from people who never used or owned a computer but still just "had to have it", and where Apple manages to motivate its die hard users to work as their mouthpiece, Vista's hype was a lonely cry from MS alone. Partly, of course, this is due to MS being held in fairly low esteem by geeks around the globe (compared to Apple, who do have a fair amount of fans in the geek community, especially the very outspoken geek community, who fill blogs and review pages with their experience and joy they have from their latest Apple tool), but mostly it is simply due to Vista not performing well.
First, it did not offer anything really genuinely "new". There was no "wow, look at that! Never seen that before!" part of Vista. Every piece of Apple hard- or software so far always came with something "new". Some trick, some gadget, or maybe just some neat toy that was something to talk about in your review. Even if you never used it again after the novelty factor wore off. But it was something you could talk about. Something you could write about. Something you could review and say "hey, they invented something again". No such thing for Vista. You could basically just say "Well... it looks different ... and some of the menues are different ... oh, and hey, you can now simply search for your program instead of having to look for it in the program manag... oh, wait, no, Apple did that first... Umm.. yeah, but it's new on Windows!"
That doesn't pull people in. That's not attractive. And neither is offering the only eye candy feature (i.e. Aero) only to the upper price segments. Eye candy is what could have convinced Joe Randomuser, but he WILL NOT buy an "Enterprise" or "ultimate" edition! Talking about segmented systems, how many were there? 10 different versions? More? I don't remember, to be honest, but how should anyone but the most interested enthusiast know what version he needs? People, there's a reason why a car manufacturer only offers a handful of models per year and some extras to tack on (just to get a car analogy into the diatribe here). Because people do not want to spend hours trying to figure out what version they wanna buy! It's nice of MS to offer its users that choice, but the users don't even WANT that many choices. Even most Linux distros noticed that by now and offer a standard package that fits most users who don't want to bother sifting through the hundreds of options. Take a standard package, tack a few things you might want additionally to it and off you go!
Vista was more a marketing blunder than a "bad" OS. Ok, granted, it wasn't the best OS or the most "expected" OS MS ever built. No, it was not the worst, that spot is still occupied by ME. If MS should learn anything from Vista, then that it's not enough to pump a few million bucks into the PR and marketing machine to make people want an OS.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You're thinking of invention, or inventiveness.
Something is inventive when it is new and has not been done before, as opposed to something being innovative when it is an improvement over something that previously exists - An incremental upgrade can be innovative, while not inventive, something that is inventive, however, is by definition, also innovative.
It requires that you do things entirely differently than everyone else.
No, that would be inventiveness.
nor IE anything.
I would say that introducing XMLhttpRequest something like 10 years before anyone else (circa IE 4-5), you know the thing that's at the heart of this whole ajax/web2.0 nonsense can be considered inventive.
But hey, very few people are inventive, innovation on the other handf isn't all that uncommon. Then again, there are those non-innovative/non-inventive people who cry bloody murder over how pantens supposedly cripple innovation (by which they usually mean inventiveness) because patents prevent them from using somebody else's idea (you'd think a mechanism which forces someone to conceive a new method for something would actually, by definition, encourage innovation, but I digress).
Yeah, it's fun and trendy to rag on Microsoft, but few in the oss/slashdot/linux circle seem to even know what the word means.
I didn't like Windows Vista because it was bloated and heavy, but I remember (back then)that we had to update our in-house kernel driver because it was so badly written. The driver SDK that came with Vista complained a lot more about bad driver code programming and, I think, helped elevate the drivers quality overall. You also had to have your driver signed on 64 bit editions. I think that's a plus for Vista, and helped pave the road for better drivers (from 3rd party hardware developers) for the release of Windows 7.
Maybe Ballmer should ask Mark Shuttleworth.
Vista was one of the biggest pieces of crap I ever used. The worst part about it is that it was shoved down your throat in all new PC purchases. Thankfully I built my own desktop, but when I purchased a laptop I didnt have a choice and got stuck with Vista. That being said, Windows 7 is a pretty good OS, but I don't know if it forgives Vista.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
UAC annoying? I can't really believe that.
Commonly, you get the UAC dialog when you install a new program - exactly the way it should be.
Some actions require elevated privileges (like seeing all processes in task manager) but that's it. I hardly see the UAC in Windows 7.
I was using Windows 2000 in October 1999, months before it was released. I saw several BSOD, but it was still better than Windows 98SE. After Microsoft released IE 5.5, the BSOD disappeared and for the first time I was able to run Windows for weeks at a time with a reboot or crash. Perhaps Windows NT was more stable, but I never used it.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Longhorn never was a managed code approach, which is still a lofty research goal (and may still be brewing behind the scenes at Microsoft Research through Midori, Barrelfish, and Singularity.)
Longhorn did however try to incorporate a bunch of other research projects right from the get-go, most of which were spun off into individual projects or into existing products. Avalon was supposed to replace winforms, WinFS was supposed to replace NTFS, Palladium was supposed to be incorporated, etc. The development team was spinning their wheels trying to adapt to the latest demand to use the latest research products instead of developing along a stable path. By the time the "reset" came Microsoft had already missed their 3 year OS schedule and it was going to take another 3 to turn Longhorn into a releasable product. While many user applications (Explorer, for example) were partially rewritten in .NET, they represented only a small portion of the total code.
Windows 7 by comparison was released with teams focusing on milestones internally and not releasing or demonstrating any not-done-yet feature. Essentially each feature that a team proposed was a patchset on the Windows build and they would test it but if it did not make the cut, they didn't apply the patch to the milestone build. The Engineering Windows 7 blog goes into great detail about the development process that was vastly improved over Windows Vista's.
You know, I don't know what you do on a daily basis that UAC is an issue.
I like UAC for the simple reason that 99% of the time I'm not doing anything admin related, and like knowing that I'm not executing in a privileged mode. Occasionally, the UAC thing will pop up because Java or something has decided it wants to update itself and I get to choose when it updates and not it. Without it, I suspect that some bits of software would just update themselves whenever they chose.
Day in and day out, using my machine as a normal desktop, I'm not doing anything that I even bump up against UAC. When I do, I tend to think of it as more like a UNIX su -- I can get the permission if I want it, but I'm not running with that perm at all times, so I'm not potentially dangerous. If I see the prompt, either I just explicitly tried to do something, or something else is trying to do an end-run around me and can't do it without me knowing about it.
Different strokes for different folks, but I've never actually gotten why so many people hate the UAC thing so much -- I only see the prompt about once or twice per week.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Semantics
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
To be fair though, Vista laid the groundwork for Windows 7, which I have (almost) nothing but praise for...so maybe it was worth it.
Windows 7 is an abomination. I actually prefer Vista, since with Vista you can turn off the new display crap and go back to the classic theme.
Both Vista and Windows 7 have the annoying activation technology, which I despise.
Waaaay back in 2001, my company bought some software. Since the IT department is a bunch of packrats, they still have the original CD, the original serial number, and the original purchase receipt. The computer that the software was running on died, so we wanted to install on a new PC.
But the software requires activation. Fortunately the company is still around, but refuses to provide an activation code, even though the company also still has the record of my company buying the software. They want us to buy it again for $1500.
I wanted to sue the bastards, but they offered to reactivate for $100, which was less than the hassle of suing them.
So I refuse software that requires activation.
You do realize that Windows 2000 is NT 5.0, and that XP is NT 5.1?
XP is basically 2000 SP5 with a new user interface. That's what makes 2000 the beta run for XP... Windows ME was based on the 9X kernel, meaning that it was really more of a successor to 95/98 than a predecessor to anything that came after it. It can't really be a beta run when it's a completely different UI and kernel...
And like 2000, Vista has gotten a *lot* better with the service packs that've come out since its initial release. It's actually pretty good now, but 7 is significantly better from a user experience/interface standpoint. Just like the 2000/XP difference...
Windows 7 has barfed on my RAID twice.
What in the world are you feeding your RAID?
Rewriting your OS in manage code isn't innovative, it's stupid. And even if it wasn't it would be a novelty, maybe, but still not innovative. Innovation means breaking new ground, not just reapplying what you already knew. Operating System + managed code != innovation.
"Fucking innovative".
You speak as though "innovation" is a bad thing....
Oh wait! When Balmer says it, it usually is.
Nevermind.
So what are you doing wrong with regards to UAC? It does not pop up nearly as much as it did on Vista. in fact, my less tech savvy room mate didn't even notice it was on hardly when he was setting up his gaming rig. Hell, at work we use Windows 7 Enterprise with fairly strict policies and it doesn't get in my way like Vista did. I'm very tempted to believe you haven't actually even used Windows 7 for that statement alone. The fact you've had an issue with your RAID with it reinforces that...
:)
as opposed to "magical", "revolutionary", "great", "awesome", "phenomenal", etc...?
I want to delete a shortcut on MY desktop, which prompts a UAC dialog, which I must address, despite the fact that I'm not changing the desktop for other users. After I confirm that, Windows prompts me yet again, asking if this is something I really want to do.
How can you defend that design?
Unncessary prompts like that just convince people to either turn it off, or just confirm everything.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
UAC is nearly useless. It tells you something is about to do something exceptional, but it doesn't tell you what it is trying to do, or even the exact executable.
/e, "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop" /e, "%userprofile%" /e, "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents" /e, "C:\Documents and Settings\_www_username\My Documents\Downloads" /e, c:\ /e, d:\ /e, e:\ /e, f:\
As for the Windows 7 UI, it doesn't speed things up for me. With XP I can close windows faster (right click on task button press C, in contrast windows 7 requires additional mouse movement to close the appropriate thumbnailed window - this is slower). I can easily set things up to launch programs or tools by creating folders[1] and short cuts in the start menu (and using Windows Classic Mode).
I use both Windows 7 and XP daily, and Windows 7 isn't more stable, it's actually a disappointment (not as big a disappointment as Vista).
The advantages of Windows 7 appear to be:
1) The per app volume control
2) Better alignment on 4K boundaries (but it's not really XP's fault that new hardware has such issues)
3) Better sandboxing (not that useful to me, since I don't use IE that much, and I run multiple browsers and some as different accounts).
4) Going to be supported for more years
5) Supports the latest DirectX stuff and graphics goodies.
The rest of the stuff just gets in the way of an "advanced" user willing to learn about how best to use the system - I haven't seen any features which actually help such users (the "god mode folder" is cool but it's more like a workaround to Window's 7 "sorry you need more clicks to do stuff now" UI)
[1] For example in Windows 95/2K/XP (and Classic Mode):
Create a folder called "1 Explore" in the start menu directory.
Create shortcuts in "1 Explore":
Name = Target
1 Explore Desktop = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
2 Explore Home Directory = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
3 Explore My Documents = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
4 Explore Downloads= %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
C Explore C = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
D Explore D = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
E Explore E = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
F Explore F = %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe ,
etc
Note: _www_username is the name of the user account which my normal browser runs under (this way I already have my own sandboxing) - so even if my browser is pwned the malware cannot access my documents and other stuff.
Once you do this, you can press winkey, 1, 3 to explore My Documents (and you should set up the folder view so that you see the details and not some useless icons, this way you can sort by date, size etc.
winkey, 1, F will start the explorer to explore the F drive
I've also set winkey, 4 to launch the command prompt.
In contrast on Windows 7, winkey+<number> will just launch/foreground the relevant pinned apps or opened apps. That just limits you to just 9 (or 10?) items, there appears no way to set up your windows system to do what I normally do anymore, without resorting to a 3rd party app. Thus Windows 7 is worse for me.
Seriously? It's much improved over Vista, and there have been two times where it actually has caught some bad joojoo that otherwise may have caused trouble. I don't mind it at all.
Seriously? You think that security isn't intrusive? Man, talk about naive. When it comes down to it I will always be far, far more surprised at UAC actually stopping something malicious rather than the fact that users complain about it. That's not to say that UAC might still be the RightThing(tm) but that's a completely different argument.
Some of the beta versions of win2k were really unusable, but i had one of the RC releases and it ran very well on my Thinkpad 600E... When i updated it to the full version, it never seemed to work as well as the RC...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Grind up the video and use it to power 10,000 servers.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
Microsoft took a big risk with Longhorn and tried to write pretty much the whole OS in managed code (entirely different to everyone else) and it didn't pay off. Most of the delay came from throwing most of that work away and starting again back in native code.
Or, perhaps more accurately, of throwing away your whole codebase halfway through and restarting, and still expecting to meet your original deadline. If you expected it to take 4 years (for example), and find out your first year did nothing, you're now trying to complete a 4 year project in 3. Is it any wonder Vista had such difficulty?
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
2000 was supposed to be XP, everyone was supposed to migrate from 9x to 2000...
That didn't happen, so they released ME which seemed like it's sole purpose was to make the 9x series look as terrible as possible in order to convince people to move to 2000 or xp.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
But it was Windows - remember when everyone thought it was just a fad?
I refuse to install moonlight to watch Ballmer.
I find myself needing to "install" some moonshine before I can handle watching Ballmer.
I use it daily, and have been using it since the first beta.
I have a hardware RAID that Windows 7 took a crap on. The RAID couldn't repair itself for some crazy reason, and these were brand new hard drives that I had been using less than a month. This is when I discovered that you couldn't do a repair install anymore. This was in the beta days.
I have a copy of Windows 7 Home and Windows 7 Ultimate at home. I run Ultimate on my gaming desktop, and the RAID took a crap once again, which can't repair for some crazy reason. I've replaced the motherboard, and RMAed the hard drive that was supposedly bad. In Linux the two hard drives look the same.
I'm pretty sure the problem is with Windows loading the RAID driver.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
.
Since when has Microsoft started to innovate? Outside of innovation in pushing the legalities of leveraging its monopoly, that is.
Everytime I read Ballmer talking about Microsoft innovation, I come away with the opinion that he is trying more to convince himself that Microsoft actually innovates (it doesn't), than he is trying to convince others.
The only (and I mean ONLY) time UAC pops up for doing that on 7 is when the shortcut in question is on the All Users desktop.
A lot of installers actually install their desktop icons to the All Users desktop, which is irritating as all fuck. Then you need admin privilege to delete it which invokes UAC. The problem is that the All Users desktop mechanism is opaque to end users, which is just shitty Microsoft standard practice.
Windows 7 is still a bloated pig. Windows 7 only looks "cool" and "sleek" because it was preceded by the hyper-bloated Windows Vista. By any normal comparison, Windows 7 would be called a bloated dog.
much improved? It *IS* vista.
DX11 is indeed MS's fault, because MS is the creator of DX11. However, it's actually not ignored by the industry. If it was, Nvidia and AMD wouldn't make DX11 hardware (and they both do).
It's an improvement over vista and xp, but it could be better.
No, no it doesn't. It doesn't prompt you when you delete something from your desktop, and it most certainly doesn't make you confirm it again. In fact, those double confirmations are a thing from Vista, not 7, which has done away with them for good. But you probably already knew this, so have fun trolling slashdot!
>>>There were a lot of jokes about Vista being a beta for Windows 7. It turns out that Vista inadvertently filled that role.
Vista isn't merely a beta of Windows 7. It's the same product. Win7 is identical to Vista, but with optimized code so it can fit inside 512 megabytes* (like vista was supposed to do in the first place). Vista NT6.0 is to Seven NT6.1 as 98 is to 98SE, or 2000 is to XP, or MAC OS 10.6.0 is to 10.6.1.
*
* I've even seen Seven running on a 256 megabyte machine - Microsoft did an excellent job with their code rework. Too bad they didn't do it three years earlier BEFORE they released Vista. Or as part of a free service park (SP3).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Windows 7 is just Vista with a new theme.
People like you are easily dazzled.
Microsoft wasted time on Vista and Ballmer. The fact that Apple's market cap is so close to Microsoft's now is the ultimate embarrassment. Shareholders shouldn't be happy about the lack of "innovation" through his tenure.
And it affects us all. Even if you don't own MSFT directly, you probably have skin in the game through your 401-k, mutual funds, etc.
He's like that nasty fart in an elevator that you really, truly want to get away from but just can't. Shareholders need to pry the door open and let in some fresh air.
Taking an extra second to click an "OK" box is not my idea of intrusive. If you do think that's intrusive, you are likely the kind of person too lazy to get off the couch because you left the remote next to the TV.
(note: "you" means the general you, not "you, sarkeizen")
With that in mind, There are definitely things that still need to be worked out with Windows 7...but overall, it runs smoothly and has been rock solid on my hardware (copied and pasted from my [H]ard|Forum account:
Display: Asus VH236H | Dell 2005FPW
Foundation: Cooler Master Storm Scout | OCZ ModXStream Pro 700w
System: Gigabyte GA-MA785GM | AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400+ @ 3.2 GHz | Corsair XMS2 4GB DDR2 800 | ATI 4850
Internal Storage: Diamondmax 21 system | WD15EADS archives
External Storage: 1.25TB in a KINGWIN DK-32U-S | WDMER1600TN
Input: Kensington 64325 Expert Mouse | Saitek Eclipse II | M-Audio Axiom 25
Headphones: non-amped Audio Technica ATH-AD700
Living With a Nerd
Not only that, it's like having a software firewall installed for an average user. They just accept everything that pops up. Which user after having to say "yes" for the most basic tasks dozens of times isn't going to just click yes to a uac prompt for something else.
Yes, I do realize this. You do realize that Windows 2000 is a server operating system with a workstation version, that Windows 2003 is a server operating system, as is Windows 2008?
So, to say Windows XP was the direct successor to 2000 isn't 100% accurate. More likely, XP and 2003 were two separate branches that started with 2000. Now, if you were coming from NT4, Windows 2000 seemed like a great improvement, for the most part. I was definitely pleased, that's for sure.
Actually, having actually used Win2K back in the day, it wasn't half bad if you put it into perspective. Win2K wasn't an upgrade to Windows 98. WinME was the upgrade to Windows 98. Win2K was the upgrade to Win NT 4.0.
And, really, I can't think of many things that worked worse in Win2k than on NT, other than the fact that Win2K needed more RAM. And speaking of devices and drivers, it was compatible with almost everything that used to work under NT (though not with anything that used to only work in the DOS part of '98), and it added support for USB that NT lacked completely until a much later patch, it added DirectX support, etc. Heck, it could even make a C: partition that's larger than 4GB, unlike the NT installer. (Note though: NT could install on a larger NTFS partition, if you formatted and partitioned the drive on another computer, it just couldn't make a new C: partition itself that was larger than 4GB.)
All things considered, for the actual product line it was a part of, i.e., as an upgrade to NT not to '98, I'd say Win2K was actually a huge step forward.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yeah, because security is a stupid goal. A proper (and popular) managed OS would be revolutionary. And it's the way we're heading, whether you like it or not.
Microsoft Wasted Time On Vista but.... I and the place I work for, did not.
Now it is up to the desktop support staff to figure out how to get several thousand XP boxes and user data migrated to Win 7 in a timely manner. Poor bastards!
Answer is: You don't try to defend a design like that, but it's not like that anymore in Windows 7. Deleting a shortcut on the desktop doesn't trigger any UAC on any of my computers, and the UAC settings is still by default. so I don't know how you ever got one.
Many tasks that triggered the UAC in Vista now don't ask you to confirm anymore. A great improvement IMHO.
Actually, admitting that of the millions of hours killed into creating Vista only a couple of thousands was "innovation" seems quite right :)
Red Leader Standing By!
He's feeding it Raid of course!
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Insanely great?
ducks...
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
Really? In my personal experience on numerous machines Windows 2000 was the most stable, least crashing version of Windows excepting possibly XP SP2. The jury is still out on 7 in my experience, but it is hugely better than Vista and I've had few problems. While I agree that Win2K had a lot of missing drivers on day 1, that got fixed rapidly and was really the only major problem with 2K whereas missing drivers were only one of Vista's myriad problems. The primary reason that XP was better "out of the gate" was that most (if not all) of the drivers for 2K worked on XP, XP being NT 5.1 and 2000 being NT 5.0.
So from a codebase/versioning perspective I see your point, but in terms of quality and usability I think Vista is more accurately compared to Me.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
If Ballmer considers all of his workers as 'innovators' and has "thousands of man hours of innovation" at his disposal then surely there must be some new word to apply to the real innovators.
Steve Jobs has gone for "magic".
Longhorn never was a managed code approach
Perhaps I exaggerated a little, but there was a big push to try to focus user space as primarily managed code. Singularity et al are doing crazy stuff with managed code in the kernel amongst other things, which is interesting but not what I was alluding to in my original post.
The Engineering Windows 7 blog goes into great detail about the development process that was vastly improved over Windows Vista's.
I'm aware, I followed the blog while it was still active. I particularly found the GDI concurrency post interesting. I wonder if having a similar blog for Vista would have allowed them to realise earlier on that it was going out of control.
I think you're being harsh. I'm hardly a Microsoft fanboi. If anything the more typical charge against me would be Apple fanboi, but I own computers with MacOS, Windows 7, and Ubuntu as their primary OS; and use all three pretty extensively.
UAC is still annoying to the point that I disable it completely.
It's much improved over Vista ("You have moved the mouse Cancel or Allow?"). At this point it's no more annoying than Unbuntu or OSX prompting for a user password before installing software. In some ways it's less annoying, since you don't actually have to type your password, though it's also slightly less secure. On the annoying scale I'd place UAC at "Slightly annoying, and no worse than any other current OS".
It still takes me longer to accomplish the same tasks.
Since you don't give any details here, all I can say is it seems like a work flow issue. Yeah, they moved some stuff around. Finding it all can occasionally be a pain, but generally once I do find it I usually have to admit that it's in a more logical place. Just because we've memorized hundreds of idiosyncratic locations for stuff over 15 years of Windows use, doesn't mean those thing were actually in logical places.
Aero is nice, but still a pale imitation of Compiz/Kwin.
True, but it's a huge improvement over the previous iterations of Windows. You can't say "Windows 7 isn't as nice as Windows XP, because Aero isn't as good as Compiz." in the line of Windows upgrades Aero is a huge improvement. Especially now that it no longer devours resources like a five year old with free candy.
DirectX 11 has been completely ignored by the game industry.
Also true, but largely because so many people are still on XP. Which was Vista's fault, not Windows 7. Give it a few years and things will switch. Though personally I wish the industry would take a page out of Blizzard's book and use OpenGL to ensure easy simultaneous Mac and PC (and theoretically even Linux) releases.
Once Microsoft's latest release claims it can now support patching without reboots, but literally every patch Tuesday since the first beta have still required reboots.
Really? I've also been running it since Beta, and I've noticed no such thing. I'd say about once a month or so at most. Linux and OSX require reboots for patches nearly as often. No OS can patch the kernel (and have the patch actually take effect) without a reboot.
I run Windows 7 because it is the latest release, but I wouldn't say I have nothing but praise for it.
I think OP did say "almost". Windows 7 isn't perfect by any means, but I have to say that it's the first version of Windows in a long time that I'd say was no worse than any of the competition. I still prefer Linux or OSX, but largely for reason of personal opinion and how I personally do things rather than inherent flaws in the current version of Windows.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
So did XP. The difference is XP locked me out after a RAM upgrade, while 7 got the activation screwed up because of file corruption yet it didn't do anything besides annoy me.
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For myself, I would call Win 2k as actually superior to Win XP. While XP does more things and has more whistles and gadgets, Win 2k is good for what id does. The largest problems with Win 2k is that Microsoft has stopped supporting it and has deliberately thrown in a monkey wrench to kick people off of that (now competing for mindshare) OS.
The jump from Win NT 4 and the abomination called Windows ME (better yet, Windows 98) was huge, and it was a clear step in the correct direction. If you say that Windows 2000 was awful on day one, I take it you never tried "Windows 286" (aka Windows version 2). From day one with my experience on Win 2k was substantially increased stability and complete compatibility with NT 4. If it ran on NT 4, it would run on Win 2k and usually do better. There were a few problems with old DOS-era legacy apps and stuff that used obscure (aka "undocumented") API hooks from the Windows 95/98/ME line that failed on Windows 2000, but that should be expected too if you understood the operating system. XP was OK and does some stuff good, but Vista was actually a step backward.
Windows 7 was finally a chance to fix what was wrong and get back on the right track.
Certainly I wouldn't call Windows 2K a failure on day one.
I can say that Windows XP Professional replaced Windows 2000 Professional and that logic holds just fine.
In fact, I can cover the major changes between the release versions of Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP Professional in a few bullet points:
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
the only thing wrong with microsoft's ability to produce quality software, is bad management. As with any organization or even organism, if the head is sick the body is also sick. There have been a couple products from M$ that have been great, Excel is one, and the late great Flight Simulator was another. Ok XP was pretty good after a few years of tweaking and updates.
How about my wasted money on Vista? My laptop (with Vista) would be useless, but for the fact I switched it to Ubuntu. It didn't even work well as an alternate boot option, so now I have a 'pure' Linux machine with regular upgrades for the asking. All W7 did was move the buttons in my opinion, but I'm not a geek.
Cairo ring a bell? Compiz? Enlightenment? Heck, E17 had the look that Mac OS X Tiger was aping for and Vista failing to get YEARS earlier! When Vista came out, you could get Aero effects on SuSE/Red Hat/Debian/et al on a tiny fraction of the CPU and GPU use.
While many user applications (Explorer, for example) were partially rewritten in .NET
... and I'm still waiting for the patch that allows me to hide the "Organize bar" and allows me to turn back on treeview lines, get rid of the "locations" crap and pretty much make it look like it used to.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Windows ME was really MS-DOS v 7.3 (or whatever that would be with the numbering system). It was the final operating system from the DOS legacy that started back in the days when Bill Gates was actually contributing code for the OS. That was ultimately the problem with it, where it had to deal with all of that legacy code base and they tried to make it sort of like Windows 2000, but deliberately crippled it so it wouldn't compete against their other products and introduced a few features that actually backfired as "improvements", notably the registry "preservation" tools that tended to wipe out the registry instead.
Windows 2000 and the Windows NT line that now includes Windows 7 actually started as a sort of fork from VMS, the operating systems used by Digital Equipment on the VAX and similar computers but ported to the x86 architecture. There still is a little bit of legacy VMS code in there, primarily in the thread handling code and some of the really low level kernel parts, which is part of what gave NT its stability. That IBM engineers were involved in some of the early NT development is now a mostly forgotten trivia fact too, but the two lines of operating systems have very different heritages and legacies.
I wouldn't doubt it that there were at least some within Microsoft who wanted to kill that old MS-DOS line for some time but couldn't quite figure out when that should happen.
Don't forget - for some reason Microsoft decided to grey out the 'Copy Profile' button in Windows 7. Can anyone explain why the hell they did that?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Wake me up when anything useful actually *changes* about any Microsoft OS. Last time was back in 2001 (possibly 2004 if you count XP SP2). The interface changes, the "hidden internals" change (i.e. upgrade your drivers to WDM drivers), but the way you use the damn thing doesn't. And each time it gets slower - slower to run, more demanding on resources AND, somehow, slower to navigate and use in everyday life. It also has useful features ripped out, customisability thrown out of the window, old features limited and junk thrown in.
(Why can't I make 7 look like 2000 / XP Classic? Hell, I can move EVERY individual button, widget, dropdown and toolbar on my browser, I can change every hotkey and have it load it up in any number of different configurations at a click. I used to be able to have a good level of similar control over XP's basic interface, and even Office's, but now I can't even get rid of that stupid Start Menu at all, or put the Control Panel back how it used to be, or (now) turn off the stupid Ribbon bar? I don't *CARE* if it's faster, more efficient, etc. for some people - it isn't for me, and I'm the one using this particular computer).
What happened to WinFS, for example? It seemed like a good idea, was the only thing that *really* got people interested in Vista and then failed to make any appearance whatsoever ever since.
Seriously, give me a call around Service Pack 2 of the "next big OS". The one with features that I feel I could use and which would speed up my use of my computer. In the meantime, I think I'll just "struggle" along being able to boot up really quickly, customise heavily and not need a super-machine to run things that have always run fine. Until then, Microsoft's offerings are completely irrelevant to me and have been since 2001/2004.
Huh? How in the heck is that happening to you?
I've never gotten a UAC prompt when adding or deleting ANYTHING on my desktop, and I've been running 7 since the first public beta.
Just now, to try it out, I created a shortcut to \windows\notepad.exe (I purposely picked a file in a system folder even!). No prompt. Then I deleted it. No prompt.
Do you somehow not have ownership of your own \users\xxxxxxx\desktop folder?
Usability regressions? But earlier systems were even more insecure. You can't have both. Not with Microsoft you can't. Get a clue.
..for their products.
Really, ten years ago, vista was a cool word. Reminded you to the phrase "hasta la vista, baby" from a certain great move. Now you just think of a peace of shit.
Also explorer. Half a century ago you associated with Vasco da Gamma and Christopher Columbus. Now only a crappy shell remains.
Not to mention Windows and Word..
They deserve eternal damnation just for these crimes.
Really the Vista analogue is Win2k.
I was thinking that, but I talked myself out of it. Win2k was to the Win95 line like Vista. But I also remember worshiping Win2k. Ever have a laptop running WinNT? You'd have 3rd party applications for the PCMCIA slots and power at an absolute minimum, otherwise they are inoperable (well, power wouldn't be inoperable, but there'd be no savings possible and any of the various low power states would usually fail). Win2k wasn't as good as Win98SE at USB, but it was a vast improvement over NT. Having moved a large number of company machines from NT to 2k, I loved 2k. Best OS jump since 3.11 to 95.
But Windows 98 SE to Windows 2k for a home user who uses lots of USB and games and such? Yeah, that hurt. If you tried it, you didn't pay attention to what was going on out there. Home users should have gone from 98 SE to XP to 7. There was no reason to ever use any OS between those. Work computers had a compelling reason to use Windows 2000. So it was Netware on DOS to NT to 2k to XP (after some service packs) to 7. XP was as bad as Vista at first. Everything XP did was to get home users on it, and it was worse for many business setups then 2000 because the new features were confusing and decreased stability (of course, Microsoft realized this and let you set it up to look like 2000, but it still had issues with stability and you couldn't hide the new features).
Learn to love Alaska
And hardware vendors and driver support! Don't forget that was one of the primary outcries when NT6 first broke on the desktop.
Oh noes, my printer doesn't work. Surely it's Microsofts fault for being innovative and caring about my security!!!
2^3 * 31 * 647
For my mom and dad, UAC is a good thing. For slashdotters, UAC is overkill. C'est la vie.
2^3 * 31 * 647
I still haven't had a chance to try Win7, though from all the positive feedback I definitely will when I get around to my next system overhaul.
As stated above, it certainly has some tweaks that could be used, but overall it's a great operating system.
Amongst many other reasons why, it even boots and runs faster and smoother on my Dell Mini 9 than a stripped down version of XP. Seriously.
true. i'm baffled. it takes about 30 seconds for firefox to start up on xp and only about 5 on 7. on the same system.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Microsoft has no connection whatsoever with their users and thats where their real problem lies.
How can you say that? Windows 7 was MY idea!
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
This all misses the point though because there were a lot of features they spent years working on that never made it into Vista let alone Windows 7. Microsoft aimed too high with Vista and fell short and the process wasted far too much developer time.
In my own opinion (and I've seen others state it, too), Windows 7 is just Windows Vista SP3. Microsoft had to break from the Vista brand because everyone (including the lay user) "knew" that Vista was a broken pile of junk. If they had heard Vista was bad and got a new computer with Vista on it, their mindset was to find all the little nuances that didn't seem just right and complain about it. Granted, there were many legitimate gripes, but even if Microsoft had fixed those, a user would still have the preconceived notion.
/me dons tinfoil hat.
Alternatively, there's this new and improved Windows 7! It's great, it's flashy! It fixes everything Windows Vista was. And so the general user does not have any preconceived ideas and walks in feeling good about their purchase and looks for the good in the OS.
Microsoft probably streamlined a lot of code, background services, and process flow so that the user experience would be improved. Plus, they could fix their underestimated minimum requirement (I think), sell a brand new OS (instead of giving the fixes for free), and improve their brand name.
For myself, I still haven't migrated. Something about DRM running in the background, not wanting to support companies that treat their customers like the criminal, etc.
No... 2000 was set out to completely break away from Win98 and thus it was dubbed as business only (a lot of your precious old games will break!). Once everything was patched and newly created for 2000 too, it was time to release a consumer crap version of 2000 with internal bugfixes and other enhancements made over time.
ME was just a breach-the-gap to NT, code quick and cheap and recycle DOS/Windows and rush it out of the door. NT is proper tech, DOS/Win will do for now...
Here be signatures
They need to do way install Seven who kill their Vista. It was on thew nwes thas morhing that redomnd in made OS msitakes.
No it isn't. UAC just trains them to confirm everything.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
10 developers
40 hours per week
12 weeks (3 months)
= 4,800 man hours
This is like the president of BP saying "thousands of tablespoons of oil were spilled into the Gulf of Mexico."
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I beta tested 98SE, and even at that stage it was so stable I couldn't tell it was beta. 98SE ran very stable on my systems for years, but this is probably as much due to a difference in hardware/drivers as anything.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Really the Vista analogue is Win2k.
Not at all. Win2k was popular, stable, reliable, and remains so today, 10 years later. No activation or DRM crap to deal with. Win2k still has a large corporate market share.
Win2k is one reason IE6 remains popular. Microsoft refused to release IE7 for win2k, so all those users are stuck on IE6.
There is going to be a lot of corporate hand-wringing this summer, when Microsoft stops releasing security patches for win2k.
[...] or MAC OS 10.6.0 is to 10.6.1
No, as 10.5 is to 10.6.
This solar system is wasting time on Ballmer!
Imagine if they used a *BSD core and then adopted Mono. While I personally think Mono is a waste of time in it's current form, making it a first-class Microsoft product along with an OS that runs well and is secure would make MS look pretty good.
I want to delete a shortcut on MY desktop, which prompts a UAC dialog, which I must address, despite the fact that I'm not changing the desktop for other users.
No, it doesn't.
It *does* prompt you if you're deleting an icon off the All Users Desktop which (for obvious reasons) will appear to be on your Desktop.
After I confirm that, Windows prompts me yet again, asking if this is something I really want to do.
The first prompt is to elevate. It's generic ("this task needs elevated privileges, do you want to continue"). The second prompt is whether or not you actually want to delete that file and specific to the action of deleting.
How can you defend that design?
Because it's working exactly how it should, and exactly the same way it does on other systems.
Vista brought many changes to Windows that were very necessary, and a long time coming. It was the medicine needed to drag Windows into the 21st century IMO. Look at the levels of malware when XP first went gold, and the levels it rose to when Vista went gold; the hostilities of the normal user environment from one time to another is unrivalled, partly because of how long Vista was in development; partly because of the XP makeover that the increasing security threats prompted. Vista basically was supposed to be, not the final bullet in the Windows malware problem, but a significant one built from the ground up and such remediations always come at a price.
Security was only part of the rebuild & rethink effort though; there were other sections of the kernel that needed a makeover; networking; graphics; sound all got rebuilt from scratch to address various other problems, to name but a few. All changes were needed to support a core platform for the next-generation IMHO. Not to mention it was the first Windows to seriously do 64-bit.
Nay, the problem with Vista was it was too much all at once; the project did have a terribly unpredictable timeline and the OEMs understandably didn't want to commit to a project with no definitive delivery date; meaning the compatibility problem was magnified exponentially as very few committed to getting 100% compliant with the new OS.
Thankfully that's a problem that's in the past now; the growing pains have finished, and W7 success is testament to the foundation laid out by Vista; meaning it was not, IMO, a waste of time. Lessons learnt; time to move on.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Microsof wasted time, customer wasted money.
Umm, yes it is. (lol slashbots, +5 mod to an obvious untruth just because it bashes MS ...)
UAC, bitlocker / EFS, IE protected mode, enhanced firewall management, ASLR enabled (plus I think they improved it in win7) and Windows Defender installed by default, kernel patch protection, network access protection. Furthermore MS has for some time been carrying out more thorough code review, reducing "attack surface" e.g. removing unnecessary default services and sending coders on secure programming training.
Is it "secure"? Not really, but that's mostly the fault of end users running botnet.exe and ignoring UAC these days. Even in that regard they're trying to do something, Microsoft Security Essentials is free and a pretty good AV by all accounts.
"Keep solidly in mind that it's NOT any more secure than XP (if you tell yourself that it is, keep deluding yourself...helps all the botnets...)"
I think the majority of that comes to market share and social engineering instead of actual system security. If Mac OS was the big king daddy system of choice, there'd be legions of people looking for ways to cheat their way into it, and the social engineering angle of phishing, scamming, clickjacking and all the other tricks and traps used by people to get you to compromise your system integrity would be turned against it. Same with Linux or any other OS you care to name. It's less a case of these systems being more secure and more a case of the people running the botnets playing to their audience. In short, you're not worth trying to rob, when there's legions more users of another OS to target.
A skilled thief breaks into houses. A clever thief gets -invited- into them.
The Engineering Windows 7 blog goes into great detail about the development process that was vastly improved over Windows Vista's.
And yet, by and large, they are more or less identical products.
I know you're an idiot but seriously try searching. It's fast, it works. Thanks, troll harder next time.
Fixed that for you.
XP 64 was a bust and you had to buy it and where not able to use the same key as 32 bit.
Vista lets you use the same key for 32 and 64 so if had a oem system that came with 32 all you need is a 64 bit and you can use the same key.
It's amazing how programmed the top brass at Microsoft are to including this word "innovation" in every speech. I've hardly heard a pronouncement over the last ten years, particularly from Ballmer, and before him Bill Gates, that doesn't feature this word prominently.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it...""
You can thank Superfetch for that. If you have any decent amount of RAM Superfetch will take the unused RAM and load the programs you use the most, and if you use programs at a specific time it will make sure to load them before that time. Really gives it a kick in the pants. If you have a spare flash stick lying around I'd try Readyboost as well, as I've found that can also give a pretty decent speed boost.
The only thing that irritates the shit out of me about W7 is that damned devices and printers. In the old days you could "force" a device with the add new hardware wizard, and you can't really do that anymore. I currently have a netbook that is really pissing me off, an MSI Wind if anybody here has one? Anyway this came loaded with W7 HP, and the camera does NOT show up in device manager OR devices and printers, yet the software for the damned thing works!
The problem is the customer uses MSN Messenger (man I fucking HATE messenger programs!) and apparently messenger will NOT use a webcam that doesn't show up in devices and printers. I can't even figure out what to remove in device manager, as I said the damned thing don't show up there, but when I launch the MSI software...tada! The cam works. I go to their website to hope maybe a driver reinstall will fix and guess what? It uses native drivers! ARRRGH!
If anybody has one of those new MSI Wind netbooks (it is a U230 if it matters) and has run into this problem and knows WTF, please let me know. I've tried every trick I can think of, and short of wiping and reinstalling I'm out of ideas. I hate having to tell a customer his brand new 1.3MP built in webcam won't do the one fucking job he wants it for, but I'm stumped.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Windows 7 is a solid product - Microsoft did something right?
Bill Gates is saving lives - uberdork turns out to be human?
Steve Ballmer sort of admits a mistake - the total tool drops the toolishness for 5 seconds?
Good lord, what's next? Will Apple drop the "magical" bullshit and admit they're only super-cool, and not supernatural?
-- How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
So you either modify everyone's desktop because you don't want that icon on your desktop (providing you have sufficient privileges) or you have to put up with it in case some other user wants it on their desktop?
Why is it an issue? Isn't there a technique called 'white-out' or something to handle this without having to do either of the above? Like.. creating a hidden file with the same name suffixed with "_DELETE" which tells Windows not to show that icon? Or have it part of desktop.ini
UnionFS (and similar) manage to cater for this scenario..
The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
No it isn't. UAC just trains them to confirm everything.
As does any equivalent system. There's not really any way to implement least privilege principles without doing so.
Give me DX 11 to my XP and fuck Windows 7. I don't need any fancy feature.
I installed XP in the 2001 and I still run the very same version, sure it gave me a couple of problems when I have upgraded my motherboard, especially switching from Intel to AMD and back, but I always managed to get it work.
I have every little app the way I want it, and until I need 6GB of ram I don't need to leave 32-bit. Sure it doesn't recognize all the 4GB of RAM I have, but Windows Vista / 7 will eat all the difference anyway.
P.S: I'm using all versions of Windows and Linux at work, but at home XP does all I need.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
UAC will be displayed only if the shortcut on your desktop is shared by several users. eg: an application you installed which places the shortcut for all users.
If you create yourself the shortcut, UAC is not displayed.
If the application force you to install for all users, the blame lies with the application, not the OS.
I love the smell of lithium in the morning
I read it took a team of 30 people over a year to design the start menu and it looks almost identical to XP!
The search was improved and I like it, but that is about the only thing thats better. The tools Vista has to debug the OS are much better too, but I guess they had to add that after producing the code and realising that it didn't work (we need a better debugger in Windows). So they made the Reliability and Perfomance monitor - much better than the old task manager, but can someone please tell me what the svhost is doing :-)
So all the ideas and 'innovation' were removed when they realised they couldn't get the code to work.
MS should try design with less people in each team, and focus on an OO approach where features can be added in a linear fashion.
> I know you're an idiot but seriously try searching. It's fast, it works. Thanks, troll harder next time.
Think I don't use the winkey search? Like I said, I use Windows 7. It's fast but NOT faster than what I have on XP. I have to type more to do the same thing on windows 7. calc = 4 keys to press. In contrast on XP winkey, 2, c = 3 keys. on XP: ssh to Machine #1 = winkey, 7, 1. ssh to machine #5? winkey 7, 5.
As for works: too often with the "start" search thing, I have to type the whole name or first word of the name before the relevant shortcut shows- it doesn't even show till I type the very last letter! I don't know why that happens and what the logic is. This sort of annoying thing makes the search crap too much of a hit or miss for me. At least with my XP setup it works the same all the time.
I tried naming stuff with a number in the start to see if it makes it faster, but I get too many false positives. Perhaps I have to name stuff starting with 111,112,113, and so on, but that's still slower than XP.
You can go ahead and not believe me. And if anyone can prove me wrong and show me a way to make Windows 7 do the stuff I'm talking about faster than XP (third party-addons don't count), I'll be happy. So far it seems that with Windows 7, you're stuck with about 9 or 10 pinned apps to quick launch.
See: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Keyboard-shortcuts
Nothing there that makes it faster. my winkey,1,1 might be slower initially than showing the desktop, but exploring the desktop and being able to sort by size, modified date etc is often much better, plus you can still access other windows doing things my way.
Spamming unncessary prompts is poor design. As is prompting people but not providing them any information.
Instead of just telling me that SOMETHING needs escalation, give me enough information to make an informed decision on whether or not I should escalate.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Well for Apple every product is completely revolutionary. Really a slightly smaller computer revolutionary? One with no peripheral ports and can't even print?
The linux community often gets really excited about small parts of the system: now with scheduler X that is 3% better than the previous one. To that I ask: and how much am I going to notice that on my day to day tasks?
In short: every major company even if all they sell is cow manure but especially a computer firm, wants to make you think that the next version of the product is something that is mind blowing.
Really the Vista analogue is Win2k. I think that Win2k:XP and Vista:Win7 are very parallel. I don't think people remember how truly awful Win2k was on day one. I installed it the week it was released and it was incompatible with so much of my hardware I was offline for three weeks until I just went back to 98SE (which I used until XP came out). ...
I had a very different experience with Windows 2000. I had already jumped from Win9x to Windows NT 4 as my primary desktop operating system. The upgrade to 2000 was easy for me because all my devices already had drivers. To this day I prefer 2000 over XP because of the more streamlined interface, smaller memory footprint, and better stability. Unfortunately, more and more software is coming out that does not support 2000. I think that Microsoft's mistake, with 2000 and then with Vista, was in selling retail and upgrade versions too soon. The hardware incompatibilities you mention with 2000 and that we saw with Vista were due mostly to manufactures not having available drivers. If MS would have only provided OEM licenses for 6 months to a year, there would have been less trouble. Of course, MS made many more mistakes with Vista in regards to hardware requirements. They allowed OEMs to certify machines as Vista Ready or Capable that didn't have enough memory for the OS, they allowed OEMs to turn on Aero Glass on machines with substandard integrated graphics, and they caved to pressure to release a 32bit version of the operating system. These mistakes are what allowed Vista's reputation for slow performance to take root.
Nice, moderate post.
Sorry I've no points to allocate.
Once Microsoft's latest release claims it can now support patching without reboots, but literally every patch Tuesday since the first beta have still required reboots.
Really? I've also been running it since Beta, and I've noticed no such thing. I'd say about once a month or so at most.
Are you sure you know what Patch Tuesday is?
Your going to give me a free upgrade to Windows 7 then right Ballmer? No, I didn't think so. FU Ballmer!
All escalation schemes can be said to do the same thing. Linux asking for SU password, or requiring SUDO just trains people to mash their password, same for OS X's password prompts. The only difference (on the surface) between the security of OS X/Linux and Win7 is the amount of work required to confirm administrative actions.
There really isn't much of a difference between clicking "Allow", and typing your SU password and hitting "Okay".
What rights escalation scheme could be summed up as doing more than "training end users to click okay"?
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
If Ballmer and Gates didnt have their head so far up their asses, maybe they could actually come up with a good operating system.
At this point it's no more annoying than Unbuntu or OSX prompting for a user password before installing software.
UAC is much more annoying than at least Linux in that it will prompt you for elevation to run something that doesn't really need elevation to run, but might need elevation if you choose to do something within the app.
The classic example is running the "Computer Management" from Control Panel. You shouldn't need any extra privs if you are already an admin (but not the admin) just to see what's there (e.g., current config of hardware, etc.). If you want to change some of those settings, yes, you would need to elevate, but not until that point.
So, it's not really a dig at UAC, but rather at the overall security model that requires your privilege level be associated with the EXE you are running. When that EXE can do a whole range of tasks from innocuous to system destroying, it's not really a good design to require full elevation up front.
Huh. I a always thought every Tuesday was patch Tuesday. You lives, you learns; I stand corrected. Realistically I don't see how you can complain about a once a month reboot. MacOS and Linux updates include kernel updates that require reboots probably around that often.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Perhaps Gates was referring to the 8760 man-hours of innovation that were lost. In other words, a whopping man-year. That's pretty much all of Microsoft's innovation for a decade.
Microsoft operating systems can never patch without rebooting,
because in Microsoft file systems, a file cannot exist without a name.
So you can't replace the running copy of a .exe or .lib with a new version,
because you have to delete the old version first to free up its name,
and you can't delete a running executable.
Instead, the new version is staged in a temp area,
the computer reboots,
and the OS replaces the old copy with the new copy early in the boot sequence,
before the old copy starts running.
Microsoft can never fix this problem,
because if they fixed this problem,
(and others like it)
then Windows would become Unix,
and then you might as well run Unix,
and then there wouldn't be any Microsoft.
Create a folder called "1 Explore" in the start menu directory. [...]
That's a lot of work to go through when you could just hit Win+E then click on whichever of those locations you wanted in the left pane (even add whatever specific ones you want to "Favourites").
LOL, are you fucking serious? It prompts you when you delete a desktop shortcut (never mind that it's on the All Users desktop - it's still a freakin desktop shortcut)?
I'm tempted to turn UAC back on for a little bit, just to try it out. Pretty much for the same reasons that people watch horror movies, I'm guessing...
Spamming unncessary prompts is poor design.
They're not unnecessary.
Instead of just telling me that SOMETHING needs escalation, give me enough information to make an informed decision on whether or not I should escalate.
You get the program name, its publisher and the path to the executable. That's more information than 90% of people are even going to consider.
It's not like they're inventing anything.
Remember when innovating actually meant "taking something good, and make it a little bit better?" Not massively better, just a little bit. Now the term innovation gets thrown around to mean everything from re-releasing old software to creating entire new forms of human endeavors.
"Our new human teleporter is an innovation like the world has never seen before."
"What is it innovating on?"
"...Paradigms!"
Clearly, innovating on multimedia superhighways will empower your manpower to leverage crowdsourced intellectual property into killer app development process upgrades. All of the previous words technically have meaning, but you insult the intelligence of your audience by using them.
The ______ Agenda
> because there were a lot of features they spent years working on that never made it into Vista let alone Windows 7
Maybe they outsourced too much stuff to people who kept nodding their heads and saying "Yes, no problem"... And come release time though the code kinda met the spec (if you squinted really hard and stood far enough so you couldn't smell the stench), it was still really too shitty to ship.
Nice try, but security through obscurity has been debunked countless times.
If you noticed in my OP, I said almost :-) It's a great update to XP, and a sizable improvement over Vista.
Alternatively, it's just sizeable over XP. Very, very sizeable.
Since when has Microsoft actually innovated anything ?
Windows is just an apple/atari/amiga clone.
The 'innovative' project natal is a Wii controller clone (with bells on)
Its not like office packages did not exist pre-MS, I remember using Wordworth on the Amiga in the late 80's - and guess what that didn't crash...
OSX and Linux had 3D desktops pre Vista (not really used Macs but Compiz kick the sh*t out of the effects in Vista (and a lot less resource intensive)
Aside from not following standards and creating an illegal monopoly (according to the EU) what have Microsoft ever innovated ?
You will get DirectX11 support in Linux (through Wine) before Windows XP - it already has DX10 support.
Have you listened to top brass of any large company with a large R&D?! They all use nice words.
You are equating R&D with productization. Microsoft Research is much more diverse than you think it is. That includes funding a shitload of basic sciences research which is not even intended to find a place within any product. Maybe taking a look at the research areas and the thousands of published papers would help you understand what Microsoft Research and its R&D resources are about.
Microsoft has been saying this for over a decade. WinFS (and its earlier names) has been tossed around since before Win2K.
The man says "insight". Try this for insight:
"31 minutes of Ballmer is a lot of Ballmer"
Can you imagine having to BE BALLMER for all of your life? Geeez Louise!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
So it's identical only different? What's your address, I have this awesome dictionary I want to send to you.
It is much more secure than xp.
UAC, which allows old application, requiring admin rights under xp, to run under user's account. Firewall, which now can filter outbound connections and offers better configuration capabilities. Protected mode for ie, which mitigates most exploits. Holes in ie are really exploitable only on windows xp.
Address space randomization. SEH is now secure, under xp it was possible to change exception handler's address (if the application itself had an exploitable buffer overflow, of course) and use it to execute code.
Automatic detection of stack overflow, which works in most cases. Driver signing (mandatory on 64 bits), life is much harder for rootkits now. Also PatchGuard, which prevents modification of code in ring0 space.
DNSSEC support.
Session 0 isolation, which mitigates most of the shatter attacks.
Crucial system's binaries are checksumed at startup.
Many more drivers are user space now, this makes the attack vector size smaller. Things like ring0 access via unsecure printer's driver aren't possible now.
Password's hash method was changed from md5 to sha256.
Most of there are present in vista, if not all.
And thats just from my memory. You are obviously horribly ignorant and clueless.
Then why didn't Vista users get it for free.
What you say is somewhat true, but also varies widely between systems and methods of looking at the information. In Red Hat and Ubuntu you have to enter a password (either root's or your own, depending on the system and whether you're in sudoers) to look at the same information if you use the GUI tools. In those cases, the privileges are bound to the "exe" just like in Windows. In a stock system config, you can look at most of the bare text files as a non-privileged user on most versions of Linux, so you have a point there. Though at work we change permissions on as many of those files as we can to prevent people from looking at them. It's a stupid thing to do, but someone somewhere thinks it improves security (obviously lots of files have to be world readable for the system to function).
Macs let you look at pretty much everything by default and only ask you to enter a password to change stuff. So far as I know there's no way to change this behavior, though I've never tried so there might be.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
go down under in the down under. Well, at least taping or photographing it is...
"In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change" --Thich Nhat Hanh
Ummm ... I just created a shortcut on my desktop, and deleted it, and UAC doesn't factor into the process since it's a file that belongs to me.
False dilemma. I'm not defending the example you provide, because as far as I can tell, it's completely fabricated and wrong. So I have no idea of what you're talking about.
Like I said, in my experience, it's truly only prompting me if I'm doing something which affects the system, as opposed to just my stuff. If I'm not installing software, changing settings, or mucking about in system stuff -- it simply doesn't prompt me.
For normal operations restricted to entirely your own files, I stand by my assertion that UAC doesn't really come up. The only times I ever see the UAC is in times I would expect to.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In my own opinion (and I've seen others state it, too), Windows 7 is just Windows Vista SP3. Microsoft had to break from the Vista brand because everyone (including the lay user) "knew" that Vista was a broken pile of junk.
Well that, and because they couldn't get away with charging for an upgrade to SP3.
For myself, I still haven't migrated. Something about DRM running in the background, not wanting to support companies that treat their customers like the criminal, etc. /me dons tinfoil hat.
One of my major gripes is "activation". I've tried Windows 7 and I've tried Office 2010, and they're pretty nice. I might well be willing to buy them, except that I refuse to buy any piece of software that will phone home and decide whether I'm allowed to continue using it. What's more, I don't feel that I can trust a company that thinks it's worthwhile to put their development resources into that kind of phoning-home scheme.
Until Microsoft drops their activation scheme, I'll be sticking with Windows XP and Office 2007, or else migrating away to non-Microsoft products.
Windows 7 is more of a p.r. release.
Except that rule doesn't quite apply for these conditions. Security through obscurity applies mainly when protecting a specific item of value, one that the attackers typically know are there. (Like a visible but WEP protected network)
General wide security attacks are aimed instead at compromising masses of systems, and here the time-effort versus reward ratio for Mac OS and Linux is very poor. This is (according to the same security experts who logically vouch for security through obscurity) due to a combination of the poor install base (you do need very different approaches for tackling the UNIX systems), and on the Linux side much better grasp of Security. Security breaches do happen on Linux systems, but because of a combination of both factors they are rare.
Vista failed as a commercial proyect for two reasons:
- Word of mouth it was bad
- It was bad.
Vista failed as a software proyect for this (and other reasons):
- Microsoft strategy is aganst modular design. This put a ceiling to how complex things can be.
- Microsoft seems to like complex things for the sake of it. This accelerate the rate at we get near the ceiling.
Vista idea was probably good, the implementation not soo much, the people that tried to create it ...very wrong, the culture ..absolutelly atrocious, the company... criminal, and the worth of mouth, very bad.
Windows 7 is a service pack for Vista. Theres positive worth of mouth for it, and does some 2 or 3 things right, so with the almost same code is working. But I don't think is better than Vista for much, maybe a 8%, or 12%. Maybe the bigger error was making the early testers of Vista angry with a few horrible bugs, like that one where video thumbnails where updated while the files where copied, making copying videos or other multimedia stuff very slow.
Windows 7 is still ugly and stupid. But since the desktop is pointless now (we all do the important thing on the web, not on the desktop) is not all that important. In that sense, Microsoft has a free card to sell a very ugly and retard OS. Windows 7 make for a decent Firefox launcher.
-Woof woof woof!
*sarcasm* Are you trying to say Microsoft doesn't innovate every single time they incrementally update Office? Are you trying to say Microsoft doesn't innovate every single time they incrementally update Windows? Are you trying to say Microsoft doesn't innovate every single time they incrementally update SharePoint? Are you trying to say Microsoft doesn't innovate every single time they incrementally update MSSQL? Are you trying to say Microsoft doesn't innovate every single time they incrementally update Visual Studio? */sarcasm* They have something I could only dream of at MS: all they need to do is add a few things, fix a few bugs and increment a version number and they will automatically make droves of money from it. Innovation they do not have. I don't even remember the last time they took a risk and released something totally new. It sure wasn't Office, it sure isn't the *new* Hotmail and I'll bet my life on the fact that it won't be Office 2012.
'We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation'
We're mostly good at copying other peoples inventions and no good at doing any real original work!
Yes, I remember that push... so much of a push to get managed code in the userspace that they had to gag Richard Grimes threatening to remove his MVP status.
Just goes to show how much at Microsoft is about marketing, and how little is technical excellence.
He is talking about himself. Vista does not come until the eleven minute mark. Up to that point he commiserates about the struggles in getting R&D to product. Toward the Vista remarks, he mentions the years and $6-7 billion that it took to get X-Box successful. His revelation, mostly to himself, is that 6-7 years for a new version of Windows was a huge mistake. Of course, he does not go into the details, such as Bill's departure, etc. The point was that it took too long and, therefore, got out of hand. Hardly a confession, but he definitely hints at his failings. The key to successful software is keeping up with your market, and Vista was developed thinking Microsoft defined the market, hugely narcissistic.
Customers tolerate problems and shortcomings as long as they are solved before they become issues. While Microsoft took years to upgrade their OS, the market model went from shrink-wrap product to the cloud. People will not wait for their next software in a box. He seems to get this now, but they clearly haven't figured out how to keep their margins. The rest of the 31 minutes is an equivocation of that ambivalence.
Sounds just like the KDE 4 clusterf**k. Except those morons can't admit it.
>>>>>or MAC OS 10.6.0 is to 10.6.1
>>>
>>>No, as 10.5 is to 10.6.
No I had it right the first time. When Apple jumps from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6, it's truly a new OS, with major changes to the software. When Microsoft jumped from NT 6 to NT 6.1 (vista to seven), it was more akin to Apple's 10.6.0 to 10.6.1 revisions. Or XP-SP2 to XP-SP3.
In all honesty, I think Seven should have been Vista SP3, provided either free or for a nominal fee (say $10). It doesn't deserve to be a whole other OS costing ~$200. It's just Vista cleaned-up.
The next OS should have been NT 7.0 - a full jump, just as we made a full jump from NT4 to NT5 (XP) to NT6 (vista).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
We all do the important thing on the web? On what planet?
Anybody with even a smidgen of common sense can see we didn't get a new OS. Microsoft jumped from NT 4 to NT5 (XP) to NT6 (vista)..... the logical next jump would be NT7, but instead they released a mere bugfix (6.1) and charged full price.
I wonder what they'll call NT7 when they eventually get-around to releasing it? They've already used the "seven" name.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>there were many legitimate gripes, but even if Microsoft had fixed those, a user would still have the preconceived notion.
"Windows Mohave" - Vista with a new paint job. Oh wait. That's what they did with Seven. ;-) If they wanted to be completely honest, they could have named it "NT 6.1" and charged a minor $10 fee for a downloadable upgrade for existing vista users. It would have had the same effect of negating the vista negativity. ----- To charge $200 for what is basically just Vista Bugfixed Version (and mislabel 6.1 as 7.0) is as dishonest as if I had to pay $200 to get XP-SP3.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
2000 is to XP
Yes and no.
In the corporate world, XP was just a very small evolution over 2k, mostly featuring a different skin.
BUT!...
For consumer, XP was the next product which replaced (gasp!) Windows ME (i feel dirty) and put an end on the old DOS-based lineage of windows OSes. It's the messiah which delivered the poor users from one of the worst Microsoft products ever.
Thus XP did see massive uptake among users.
Whereas, the predecessor of Vista, Win XP, is good enough for most people, thus a lot less people have a real incentive to move forward to a newer version. So expect the Vista->7 transition to be even less popular than the 2k+ME->XP.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
No I had it right the first time. When Apple jumps from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6, it's truly a new OS, with major changes to the software.
Rubbish. *OS X itself* isn't a "new OS", it's NeXTSTEP 5 (an update from NeXTSTEP 4 strikingly similar in nearly every way to NT 5.0 -> NT 6.0). Apple's x.1 updates vary in how much they change, but they are on the same scale as Vista to 7 (or Windows 2000 to 2003).
If your benchmark of "truly a new OS" is an OS X.1 update, then you've no business whatsoever calling Windows 7 "Vista SP1".
Apple's next major update (akin to XP -> Vista or NT 4.0 -> NT 5.0) will be OS XI (though it'll be interesting to see if they go with that, since most people call it "OS Ex", not "OS Ten").
When Microsoft jumped from NT 6 to NT 6.1 (vista to seven), it was more akin to Apple's 10.6.0 to 10.6.1 revisions. Or XP-SP2 to XP-SP3.
Not even remotely true. There were numerous non-trivial updates with Windows 7. Vista to Windows 7 is quite comparable to, say, Leopard to Snow Leopard.
The other one you got wrong was "98 is to 98SE". Windows 95 to Windows 98 is the more accurate comparison.
...but that was only because I waited for the driver problem to get sorted out before buying Vista. :P
Longhorn did however try to incorporate a bunch of other research projects right from the get-go, most of which were spun off into individual projects or into existing products. Avalon was supposed to replace winforms
I'm not sure what your sources are, but I dare say they are rather suspect, given that WinForms was never a part of Windows proper (it's a .NET library, which is a fairly straightforward OO wrapper on top of Win32 API, nothing more). It ships with Windows since Vista, in a sense that it comes as a part of .NET, and OS ships with .NET. But it's not something that affects the OS development as such.
Not for me, if the context is microsoft I always think 'fistula' and 'exploder'.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
"...in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation". Yeah, and that's just your company. My test team still has to support that steaming pile, and so every test pass involves firing up VMs just for the off chance that those that aren't still on WinXP didn't jump to Win7. I don't know how many hours we've wasted on Vista (because like any place else, we're not completely automated), but I'd axe Vista from the matrix tomorrow if I thought I could get away with telling sales and marketing, "we don't support Vista".
The internal version number is not an argument for anything. It wasn't made by some independent standards body analyzing against a checklist of what does and does not make a new OS.
Maybe Microsoft should next time make the internal version number 3007, because then you'll see that they skipped three thousand other OSes to bring you one from the future.
"Anybody with a smidgen of common sense". You need to define what a new OS is, in a way that excludes Windows 7 incidentally and not specifically, and then we can debate this definition of new OS. If your criteria is to be the output of the ver command, then we won't get anywhere.
Where are you getting your Universal Standard of what is a Service Pack and what is a new OS?
It's not dishonest. You can dislike it and think it isn't worth $200 and say you think it should have been a Service Pack, but to call it dishonest suggests you have some inviolate and obvious standard of measurement.
Pretty much every OS is previous OS bugfixed version according to some goalposts. Windows 7 is different from Vista; if nothing else you can run a binary diff on the OS files and see a bunch of changes.
Still cant understand why Microsoft just didnt fix XP.
Instead of beeing stuck in Vista/7/8/9.
There's many useful and excellent (truly) innovative 3rd party
software out there that solve several Windows problems. But
they cant solve all because only Microsoft has the access to
actually implement actual(!) fixes and improvements into
Windows itself.
A little wrong there
W2k = 5.0, then XP = 5.1, then Vista = 6, then Windows 7 = 6.1
Not to say Win7 is wonderful. The only feature that makes me want it for home use so far is the "Search programs and files" option on the start bar. There are plenty of things I hate, like not being able to edit things in Default(default user) like their start menu. I also have to change the OS more than XP to make it usable. Then everything takes twice as many clicks.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Took the blog right outta my mouth!
Do you see what I did there?
Just doing a quick Google search and maybe the behavior you're seeing is due to the camera being tied into the state of the camera fkey? The software maybe turns it on for the duration it's running?
Obvious futility is obvious.
It is futile as well.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Oh I remember just how bad XP was on release. It was AWFUL. But somehow people tend to forget that, because somewhere along the line XP matured and became pretty descent, same as Windows 2000 (which didn't start out very good but became one of the most respectable OS's Microsoft has ever released, IMHO).
"intrusive: intruding where one is not welcome or invited"
So no, there's nothing intrinsically lazy about it. It's simply unwanted. Sure "laziness" is a potential cause for not wanting something (say "work") but it's incorrect to categorize most or all people who don't want dialog boxes popping up whatever frequency they do as "lazy".
I'm guessing that workload is the deciding factor. You seem to claim the ratio of popups to "detecting something bad" is pretty good. Me, I get these things about ten to fifteen times a day and you are the very first person I have ever conversed with who has actually positively correlated it with avoiding something malevolent.
So although I don't find it a hassle I can certainly see just about any event which one had to do fifteen times a day for a perceived zero benefit might be annoying to some. Especially when you compare it to other preventative measures they may employ. For example in my social context I've met two orders of magnitude more people who have (or could have) benefited from seat belts than people who have or could have (conclusively) benefited from UAC.
I totally agree. MS has never been a leader in innovation of any kind. They steal other's true innovative ideas late, and then use their marketing muscle and market share to move the product.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Of course, as you note, they are (given their R&D resources) about the most un-innovative company you could imagine.
Absolutely true. The only product I have ever encountered that I would consider even REMOTELY innovative is the ICE program (Image Composite Editor). This is from Microsoft Research. I tried out about 7 or so other panorama maker programs, included FOSS programs. They were really hard to use. The ICE program is like magic. Select the pictues, hit stitch and "viola" instant panorama.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Nope, FKey don't do squat. Sure it'll turn the cam on and off, but it will NOT make it show up in device manager OR devices and printers. Believe me any of the obvious ones I've done tried. Like I said the cam works beautifully somehow it is just the how and getting Windows to see the running bastard that has me stumped.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"We tried too big a task and in the process wound up losing thousands of man hours of innovation,"
This sounds about right. Remember - if you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year (us tech types can only dream of such a light schedule...) you are working 2000 hours a year, i.e. "thousands of man hours".
They way I figure, they hired one guy (probably a contractor) as an "innovator", and ended up wasting his time for a year before they let him go.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
DirectX 11 has been completely ignored by the game industry.
I wouldn't say that. DirectX 11 is still pretty new. Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support
It's not exactly a perfect nor complete solution, but this has sure made win7 a lot more bearable for me.
--- Do you believe in the day?
This post isn't insightful; it makes a stupid argument, not backed-up by any evidence, that isn't even close to original.
LOL, that's a good description of your post.
I have to use Windows 7 at work, give me any other OS (apart from Vista), any day of the week, Linux, Mac OS, android, even Plan 9 has to be better than this stuff.
Every few minutes it pops up a box above the hidden running apps list, and immediately dismisses it. So I have no idea what stupid programs is causing this, and no way to stop it.
The new explorer is rubbish, and a real pain to use. The folder view doesn't automatically expand when you change folder, there is no down folder button,
So many little problems. Luckily I have a quad-core machine with 12gig of ram, so it doesn't run slow.
Sure, I see improvements, but nothing that could not be added to XP, Microsofts last decent OS.
You most of your points are, W7 is better than Vista.
Fuck off, you pathetic loser. I ignore Vista, is it better than XP though. NO. First thing I do in 7 is switch of all the crud, go back to XP mode. It is still shit.
Sorry, working on XP right now, none of those winkey combinations did a thing? On the other hand on the same multimedia keyboards I have at home (win 7) and work (xp) the one Calc key does the trick! So yea, pretty much the same speed.
Look, I get your point: MS had to replace XP with something. But to suggest that they didn't waste a buttload of time rearranging the deck chairs...well, you've obviously never read this post.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
The Engineering Windows 7 blog goes into great detail about the development process that was vastly improved over Windows Vista's.
So it took Microsoft 25 years of regular releasing to figure out how to create an operating system development process? What a load of rubbish.
The truth is that the blogs are another exercise in public relations for a company that has consistently and repeatedly failed. The only difference between any other Microsoft OS and Vista is that people noticed. With Windows 7, the blinkers are back. Microsoft has approached the marketing of version 7 from a new angle and have once again convinced people to shell out money for something that's resource hungry, unstable, over complicated, inconsistent and overpriced... the monopoly continues. The one thing Microsoft is good at is marketing(1), and that's most definitely something to be respected.
(1) See parent post from Microsoft shill
I needed to edit the hosts file and the hostconfig.
To do this I went to the etc folder where these files are found. I tried to edit one of the files in question, couldn't save (despite being logged in as admin). So I went and changed the files permissions - requiring the same password as that which I am logged in with. Still no joy. Next I set the permissions on the ETC folder, requiring password. Great, probably should have done that in the first place - like in windows - folder permission get inherited by the files - right?
Start working on second file, click save - no go. I have to go and change the permissions on the file too.
My point is that Microsoft is not alone in this overkill. I do find that these tasks way more obvious and straight forward to do on Win 7 though.
It's NT 6.0 to NT 6.1 - it's pisspoor to call it "seven" when it's actually six-point-one. IMHO it won't be a truly new OS until we make the jump to NT 7..... as happened when we jumped from 4 to 5 (xp) or 5 to 6 (vista).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Are you stupid or a lousy joker?
I'm not changing my opinion. To me Seven might as well be called "Mohave" - in other words, vista with a new paint job and not worth spending *another* $200 to get. I already bought Vista once - don't feel like buying the same thing twice, but with a fake name.
I wonder what they'll call the TRUE 7.0 when they finally release it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Yeah, like that's fucking likely.
You're insane. The reason you are getting the prompt is because when you installed the associated app, you installed it for all users, the Windows equivalent of installing to /usr/local/bin instead of ~/bin. You're complaining that in order to remove a shortcut which is managed by the system, as opposed to your user account, you have to confirm the permission to do it?
Win 7 is crap. Not as crappy as Vista, but still crap. Put the smiley face glass pitcher down.
The sad truth is that XP64, despite its legion of flaws, is the best desktop OS that Microsoft will ever make. Unless Gates returns, totally cleans house, and they come out with a completely clean sheet job. That might be better, but I ain't holding my breath.
Social Credit would solve everything...
There is nothing incorrect in saying "thousands of..." when the count is in the millions. It's is perfectly valid. I imagine it screws with most anal linux types, but then MS does that to these wannabes without much effort. Look at this story. You hate Ballmer yet here you are, "wasting thousands of man-hours" for sure.
Besides, Ballmer said "thousands of man-years". Idiots! always grasp at straws when the boat is gone, as if that'll help.
It's NT 6.0 to NT 6.1 - it's pisspoor to call it "seven" when it's actually six-point-one.
It's marketing. No different to the one that spawned "Windows Vista" instead of "Windows 2006".
IMHO it won't be a truly new OS until we make the jump to NT 7..... as happened when we jumped from 4 to 5 (xp) or 5 to 6 (vista).
Neither of those were "a truly new OS". Major revisions, to be sure - but not even close to "a truly new OS". Nor are we likely to see "a truly new OS" anytime in the next decade.
I'm sure you can do the same with similar results between Windows XP and any of its service pack releases. Especially what is loaded in the kernel.
Because it's working exactly how it should, and exactly the same way it does on other systems.
BS. If I want to delete an icon from my desktop or dock, I drag it to the recycle bin, or right-click->remove, or shift-delete and it's gone. No dialogs whatsoever.
Same thing with lots of other changes. If I want to change the background image or the resolution of my desktop, it just does, no dialogs.
In general, there are a lot of flaws in Windows' design when using it multi-user, like the All Users Desktop paradigm, that make that it requires unnecessary confirmation or privilege elevation dialogs.
What it should do, is, have a default desktop for new users, which will be copied to new users when their account is created. And from that point on users decide what it looks like and can muck around with their own copy as they please. Nobody else should be able to alter it. New applications that get installed system wide should be added to the list of applications/start menu, but not to people's desktop or whatever. Even adding them to the start menu is debatable as that can also be customized, but Windows doesn't really have a list of installed applications that is easily accessible otherwise.
The basic design is just not well thought out in a multi-user fashion, but the whole thing is a single user OS with some multi-user functions bolted on. That is what makes it need admin privileges so much, even 15 years after NT and Windows for Workgroups and 95 started it on it's path. It's still a kludge that kind-of-works but often is very inconsistent.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
BS. If I want to delete an icon from my desktop or dock, I drag it to the recycle bin, or right-click->remove, or shift-delete and it's gone. No dialogs whatsoever.
And if it is on your Desktop, that's exactly what happens. However, if it's it's not on your desktop, but onthe All Users desktop, then for obvious reasons you will get a UAC prompt.
Same thing with lots of other changes. If I want to change the background image or the resolution of my desktop, it just does, no dialogs.
So, just like Windows then ?
In general, there are a lot of flaws in Windows' design when using it multi-user, like the All Users Desktop paradigm, that make that it requires unnecessary confirmation or privilege elevation dialogs.
How is the All Users desktop a design flaw ? I could certainly see how a UI tweak that overlayed a small icon over the top of anything on the All Users Desktop, but that's an implementation semantic, not a design issue.
What it should do, is, have a default desktop for new users, which will be copied to new users when their account is created. And from that point on users decide what it looks like and can muck around with their own copy as they please. Nobody else should be able to alter it.
This is what already happens. The All Users desktop is then layered over the top (along with the All Users Start Menu), to offer a central point of management for the system.
New applications that get installed system wide should be added to the list of applications/start menu, but not to people's desktop or whatever. Even adding them to the start menu is debatable as that can also be customized, but Windows doesn't really have a list of installed applications that is easily accessible otherwise.
What the installer does is the installer's business, not the OS's. The same is true of every platform.
The basic design is just not well thought out in a multi-user fashion, but the whole thing is a single user OS with some multi-user functions bolted on.
If you can elaborate on how the All Users and individual user Desktops are different in design principle to, say, /etc/profile and ~/.profile, or in any way not something that fits into a multiuser system, I'd be quite interested.
That is what makes it need admin privileges so much, even 15 years after NT and Windows for Workgroups and 95 started it on it's path. It's still a kludge that kind-of-works but often is very inconsistent.
No, it's not. NT was multiuser from day one. The only thing that "needs admin privileges so much" is badly written applications (and the last time a developer had an excuse for releasing one of those was about 1996).
>>>It's marketing.
It's evil (typical of Microsoft that had a mission to kill competitors). The US DOJ and EU Commission didn't drag Microsoft into antitrust lawsuits just for fun. They are a dishonest company. NT 6.1 named "seven" is a lie.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The horror!
It prompts you when you attempt to delete other users' files. I know, it's terribly annoying like that.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
If you bought Vista after a certain date, you do get it for free.
If you bought Vista before that date....well, Microsoft is a business, and businesses like money.
It's evil (typical of Microsoft that had a mission to kill competitors). The US DOJ and EU Commission didn't drag Microsoft into antitrust lawsuits just for fun. They are a dishonest company. NT 6.1 named "seven" is a lie.
Wow. It's kind of hard to do anything but laugh at calling a company "evil" because they have a slightly schizophrenic product naming scheme.
WinFS was supposed to replace NTFS
No it wasn't. WinFS was never a filesystem, it was a database layer sitting on top of a filesystem. The idea has been being bounced around Microsoft since the early '90s.
By Winforms I mean the Windows Forms API for Win32 & the MFC wrapper typically used for it. Sorry if I used the wrong term. My bad!
I wish I were getting paid, but I'm sure I'm way too vocal to be employable by Microsoft!
By Winforms I mean the Windows Forms API for Win32
Yeah, and everything I wrote in my previous post applies to the product called "Windows Forms". There's no such thing as "Windows Forms" in Win32 API. It's only a part of .NET - an assembly called System.Windows.Forms.dll, containing classes in namespace System.Windows.Forms.
The API facet for user interface in Win32 is pretty much nameless, though occasionally you hear it being referred as user32, by the name of the DLL in which most functions reside.
The funny thing is that WPF (Avalon) is supposed to be a replacement for Windows Forms - so that claim is fully correct. It still holds true today - WPF is the recommended UI framework of choice on Windows platform. It's just that it doesn't imply rewriting major portions of Windows.
If Vista is defect and Win7 is SP3 than we should get it for free because it just fixes certain defects of Vista.